The Dead Media Notebook (12 page)

“The state airmail was occasionally employed for more lighthearted purposes. Aziz, the caliph of North Africa between AD 975 and 976, one day had a craving for the tasty cherries grown at Baalbek, in Lebanon. His vizier arranged for six hundred pigeons to be dispatched from Baalbek, each with a small silk bag containing a cherry attached to its leg. The cherries were safely delivered to Cairo, the first recorded example of parcel post by airmail in history.

“The Arab pigeon-post system was adopted by the Turkish conquerors of the Near East. Sultan Baybars, ruler of Egypt and Syria (AD 1266-1277), established a well-organized pigeon post throughout his domains. Royal pigeons had a distinguishing mark, and nobody but the Sultan was allowed to touch them. Training pigeons for postal work became an industry in itself, and a pair of well-trained birds could bring as much as a thousand gold pieces. The royal pigeon post was also invaluable as an advance warning system during the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. When Timur the Mongol conquered Iraq in AD 1400, he tried to eradicate the pigeon post along with the rest of the Islamic communications network.

“The Chinese seem to have learned the art of pigeon training from the Arabs. Strangely, for a civilization with such a well-organized bureaucracy, the state never established an intelligence network using carrier pigeons, which were generally used only for commercial purposes. The Arabs also reintroduced the skill to medieval Europe, where it had lapsed after the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD. After the collapse of the Roman light telegraph system, the pigeon post was left as the fastest means of communication in the world. And so it remained unto the perfection of the electric telegraph (by Samuel Morse in 1844) and radio (by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895).

“It was normal practice, even well into this century, for navies, military installations and even businessmen to have pigeons on the payroll. The range of tasks for which pigeons have been employed has changed little since ancient times.”

Source: Ancient Inventions by Peter James and Nick Thorpe Ballantine Books 1994 $29.95 ISBN 0-345-36476-7

Since discovering this privately printed work, I’ve come to suspect that the strange story of the pigeon post during the seige of Paris is the sine qua non of dead media. In the 1870s the pigeon post was a hobbyist’s niche medium. Under the intense conditions of warfare between major industrial powers, this medium mutated and grew explosively.

With the energy of a whole nation diverted into a desperate need to communicate with the capital, there emerged a sudden technical nexus of hot-air balloons, magic lanterns, and photography (all of these were experimental technologies, all of them pioneered by the French).

Unknown entrepreneurs suddenly became the linchpin of a seamless national communications system, combining pigeons, balloons, telegraphy, trains, messenger boys, magic lanterns, typesetting, handwriting and microphotography.

There was explosive, repeated growth in bandwidth, until the message-space within one gram of weight suddenly became too cheap to meter (though it was still metered). Large-scale currency transfers took place through pigeons (via microdot mail-orders). Encoded, compressed post- cards were invented (the depeches responses). Cryptography was used (by and for the government). There was hacking by the system administrator (when Dagron the microfilmist and war profiteer suddenly became the de facto postmaster of Paris, he discovered that he had many friends who didn’t care to bother with normal allocation of channels).

And last but not least, information warfare took place, practiced by the besieging Prussians, who used forged messages sent through captured pigeons. It was all over in 6 months, a skyrocketing arc of development followed by near-total media extinction, commemorated with medals, folklore and bronze pigeon statuary, but never to be repeated on such a scale again.

John Douglas Hayhurst, O.B.E., would appear to be (or have been) primarily a postal historian and philatelist. His slender 45-page history is a real treasure
”As had been expected, the normal channels of communication into and out of Paris were interrupted during the four and a half months of the siege, and, indeed, it was not until the middle of February 1871 that the Prussians relaxed their control of the postal and telegraph services. With the encirclement of the city on 18
^th
September, the last overhead telegraph wires were cut on the morning of 19
^th
September, and the secret telegraph cable in the bed of the Seine was located and cut on 27
^th
September.

Although a number of postmen suceeded in passing through the Prussian lines in the earliest days of the seige, others were captured and shot, and there is no proof of any post, certainly after October, reaching Paris from the outside, apart from private letters carried by unofficial individuals.

“Five sheep dogs experienced in driving cattle into Paris were flown out by balloon with the intention of their returning carrying mail; after release they were never again seen. [So much for “Sheepdog Post,” a truly abortive medium.]

Equally a failure was the use of zinc balls (the boules de Moulins) filled with letters and floating down the Seine; not one of those balls was recovered during the seige.
[A pity for enthusiasts of floating zinc-ball media.]

“Millions of letters were carried outward from Paris by balloon but free balloons could not offer a reliable means of inward communication since they were at the mercy of the wind and could not be directed to a predetermined destination. The only balloon which made even a start of a return flight to Paris was the Jean Bart 1 which left Rouen on 7
^th
November but, after a first hop which took it 20 km towards Paris, the wind changed and further attempts were abandoned. During January 1871, a fleet of free balloons was being assembled at Lille but the armistice prevented it from being put into operation. Self- propelled dirigible balloons were then in their infancy and whilst, on 9
^th
January, the Duquesne, fitted with two propellers, left Paris bound for Besancon and Switzerland, it got only as far as Reims.

For an assured communication into Paris, the only successful method was by the time-honored carrier pigeon, and thousands of messages, official and private, were thus taken into the besieged city. “

“Savelon has deduced the monthly statistics as:

September & October 1870 : 105 released, 22 arrived
November 1870: 83 released, 19 arrived
December 1870: 49 released, 12 arrived
January 1871: 43 released, 3 arrived
February 1871: 22 released, 3 arrived

“The weather was not the only hazard facing the pigeons: there were their natural enemies the hawks and there were countrymen with their shotguns seeking food for their families.
The best pigeons would have been the first to be used and as time passed the birds would have been less trained and so less likely to return safely to Paris. It was therefore no mean achievement that, on 59 occasions, they did succeed in getting back to their lofts. Their achievement was commemorated in the monument by Bartholdi and Rubin at the Porte des Ternes in Paris which was unveiled on 28
^th
January 1906 and melted down by the Germans in 1944; around the central representation of a balloon were four pedestals each bearing a pair of bronze pigeons. “

Source: The Pigeon Post into Paris 1870-1871 by John Douglas Hayhurst Published by the author at 65, Ford Bridge Road, Ashford Middlesex 1970 Dewey: 383.144 H331p University of Texas Library

“The service was formally terminated on 1
^st
February 1871

The successful operations must have been performed by about 50 birds only. These 50 pigeons served France well; they carried official despatches of great importance as well as an estimated 95,000 private messages which went far to keep up the morale of the besieged Parisians.

“The very last pigeon to complete its return to Paris must, if La Perre de Roo can be believed, have been one from Niepce captured in in November 1870 by the Prussians and which was presented to Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia, the commander of the Second Army. He sent it home to his mother Princess Charles of Prussia who placed it on the royal pigeon cote. Two years later, tired of its Prussian lodging, it escaped and flew back to Paris.

“The photographic reproduction of messages “The first pigeons each carried a single despatch which was tightly rolled and tied with a thread, and then attached to a tail feather of the pigeon, care being taken to avoid old feathers which the bird might lose when in molt. From 19
^th
October, the despatch was protected by being inserted in the quill of a goose or crow, and it was the quill which was attached to the tail feather. Although a pigeon could have carried more, the maximum weight it was asked to carry was about 1 gm, and, as the service developed, the aim was to get the greatest possible number of messages inside this weight. Initially, the messages were written out by hand in small characters on very thin paper

“A great step forward was taken in early October from the idea of Barreswil (or Barreswill) a chemist of Tours who had been the co-author in 1854 with Davanne of La chimie photographique. He proposed the application of photographic methods with prints of a much reduced size and of which an unlimited number of copies could be taken. His death in late November robbed him of the satisfaction of seeing his proposal accepted and extensively applied.

“The messages were written, still by hand, but in big characters on large sheets of card which were pinned side by side and photographically reduced.
A further improvement occurred when Blaise succeeded in printing messages on both sides of the photographic paper.

“Yet another improvement was the introduction of letter-press as a partial replacement of manuscript.”

[Hayhurst’s tale continues and the highly intriguing figure known only as “Dagron” makes his appearance on the dead media stage.]

“At the Exposition Universelle of 1867 in Paris, a photographer, Dagron, had demonstrated a remarkable standard of microphotography which he had described in “Traite de Photographie Microscopique” published in Paris in 1864.
Arrangements were made for him to leave Paris by balloon, accompanied by two colleagues, Fernique and Poisot, the latter being his son-in-law. For making the journey by balloon, Dagron was to receive 25,000 francs (to be paid by the delegation at Tours) and Fernique 15,000 francs (to be paid before he left Paris). In the event of their deaths during the journey, their widows would each have an annual pension of 3,000 francs for life.

“They departed on 12
^th
November in the appropriately named balloons Niepce and Daguerre, but the latter, with the equipment and pigeons in it, was shot down, fell within the Prussian lines and was lost. The Niepce was also shot down and landed in Prussian-held territory, but Dagron and his companions just escaped capture, losing still more of their equipment and becoming separated.

“Shorn of his equipment and finding unsatisfactory replacements at Tours, Dagron failed to achieve what he had promised by way of.. images ‘prenant le nom du point,’ in other words, microdots. Dagron had sought to reproduce a page of the Moniteur in 1 sq mm

Dagron finally attained success on 11
^th
December. Thereafter, all the despatches were on microfilm, with a reduction of rather more than forty diameters, a performance that even today evokes admiration and yet he was achieving it a century ago. These later microfilms weighed about 0.05 gm and a pigeon would carry up to 20 of them.

“The introduction of the Dagron microfilms eased any problems there might have been in claims for transport since their volumetric requirements were very small. For example: one tube sent during January contained 21 microfilms, of which 6 were official despatches and 15 were private

“In order to improve the chances of the despatches successfully reaching Paris, the same despatch was sent by several pigeons; one official despatch was repeated 35 times and the later private despatches were repeated on average 22 times.
The practice was the send off the despatches not only by pigeons of the same release but also of successive releases until Paris signalled the arrival of those despatches.

“When the pigeon reached its particular loft in Paris, its arrival was announced by a bell in the trap in the loft. Immediately, a watchman relieved it of its tube which was taken to the Central Telegraph Office where the content was carefully unpacked and placed between two thin sheets of glass. The photographs are said to have been projected by magic lantern on to a screen where the enlargement could be easily read and written down by a team of clerks. This should certainly be true for the microfilms but the earlier despatches on photographic paper were read through microscopes.

“The transcribed messages were written out on forms (telegraph forms for private messages, with or without the special annotation ‘pigeon’ ) and so delivered.
The first private messages got to their destinations fairly quickly, but with the increasing volume of traffic during and after November and the deterioration of the weather from mid-December, from handing in to delivery could easily span two months.
”

“The despatches “The content of nearly every despatch, official and private, which was photographed is known today. As has already been said, the letterpress of each set of private despatches was used to provide a permanent printed record and a total of 580 pages were bound together in six volumes, a set of which is in the Musee Postal.

“The official despatches were in a mixture of numerical cypher and clear language. The greater part of all the official despatches was in manuscript; messages in manuscript could be produced more quickly than in letterpress.

“Before leaving the official despatches , it is appropriate to mention two bogus official despatches sent by the Prussians. When the Daguerre fell within enemy lines on 12
^th
November, 6 pigeons were saved from the Prussians and used to notify Paris of the loss of the balloon. The remaining pigeons were caught by the Prussians who later released 6 of them with messages calculated to dismay Paris. One message was: ‘Rouen 7 decembre. A gouvernement Paris—Rouen occupe par Prussians, qui marchent sur Cherbourg. Population rural les acclame; deliberez. Orleans repris par ces diables. Bourges et Tours menaces. Armee de la Loure completement defaite. Resistance n’offre plus plus aucune chance de salut, A Lavertujon’