Chapter 271： Chapp "Telegram"

"Mr. Burns, Betty, I need you to refine such a feasible plan for me."

In the lord's office, Paul talked eloquently to a picture hanging on the wall. Also sitting in the room were Guy Burns, Betty Dias, Ladi Setia and others.

The content of the picture hanging on the wall is a stone tower, which looks like a guard tower, but what is strange is that there is a strange device standing on the top of the tower.

That one is a wooden frame with two bent "arms" extending out from the wooden frame.

Guy Burns asked with great interest: "What's your new invention?"

"Oh! It's a marvelous thing, or rather a marvelous system."

"I call him—[emergency station], or [rocker signal system], which is used to transmit emergency information."

"Lord Earl, if I'm not mistaken, you are going to use the two [arms] on the wooden frame to make different shapes, so as to convey different messages."

"Aha! Burns, you are my bosom friend! Yes, this invention is inspired by the beacon, but you know, the amount of information that the beacon can transmit is too limited, so I thought of the semaphore, a little This is what it looks like after improvement. You see, each shape represents a letter or a number, and then they are combined to form a complete sentence or a complete sentence."

Paul introduced his "invention" without blushing and heartbeat: "We build such emergency reporting stations at certain distances, called [base stations], and special personnel are stationed on them waiting to receive signals from other emergency reporting operations. .From the first station, the information is passed on from station to station like a baton until it reaches the final station.”

"In the past, it was a bit unrealistic to build such a system because of the limited vision of human eyes, but with the telescope, it is completely feasible. We only need to build a few emergency reporting stations to cause a long Information transfer over distance."

Burns exclaimed: "This is really a remarkable invention."

Did Paul invent this? Of course not, the real inventor of this [optical telegraph] is the Frenchman Claude Chap.

In northern France in 1791, Claude Chap and his brothers designed a "telegraph" system for long-distance optical transmission of information. They successfully transmitted a sentence to 16 kilometers in 4 minutes, which was faster than that used at that time. The stage horses and ships are much faster.

This is a system that is completely operated manually. The signalmen stationed inside fiddle with the indicator arm according to specific rules. Every time the indicator arm of the signal tower makes a shape, it means that a signal has been sent. Play Solitaire, and the news gets out.

Compared with the real telegraph, the efficiency of information transmission is very "touching", and a skilled operator can output up to 3 signals per minute. According to statistics, a complete message at that time consisted of 36 signals on average, which means that even if the system uses the best operators across the board, the system can only transmit 0.083 messages per minute. If it catches up with wind and rain or the operator is in a bad mood, whether the message can be sent is still a matter of fate.

However, even with this urgent signal transmission system, the efficiency of information transmission is enough to beat the contemporary human flesh transmission.

It developed into an industry and served government enterprises in peacetime. As of 1840, France had built a 5,000-kilometer communication network and 356 base stations, and a total of thousands of such "telegraph" towers had been built throughout Europe, which can be regarded as the first generation of information superhighway. up.

In the novel "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas, Mr. Earl bribed the telegrapher and sent out wrong information, which caused Danglar to lose money in speculation, and then withdrew all the money he had deposited in Danglar Bank. Earl was unable to pay and eventually went bankrupt.

Paul is very fortunate that the language system of this world is an alphabetic script similar to Latin. If it is like cuneiform, then it is really urgent.

"Burns, I need you to set up an operating device so that the operator can easily swing the rocker into different shapes."

Burns stood up and bowed to Paul: "I am honored to be able to participate in your great invention."

"Haha, it's our great invention."

Paul corrected him with a smile, and then he turned to Betty, the director of education: "As for you, master of linguistics, I need you to devise a coding system - what shape represents what letter or number. Ladi, you are also a knowledgeable scholar, I hope You can help."

Ladi nodded and said, "Yes, Lord Graeman!"

Betty pursed her lips and said nothing. With her appearance, the current appearance was quite special.

Her reaction made Paul very strange, he didn't seem to offend her much recently.

The business is important, Paul continued to instruct: "There are still some important aspects, such as how to judge the start and end of a piece of information, and how to verify the integrity of a piece of information. The other is [congestion control], to use a metaphor, when an intersection There are horse-drawn carriages coming from different directions on the road, how should we make them all pass smoothly."

"In addition, we call ordinary encoding [plaintext], which can be used to transmit some insensitive information that does not involve confidentiality, but sensitive information needs to be encoded twice on the basis of plaintext, or encrypted. I don't want The enemy's spies don't need to do anything They can find out what confidential information we are passing by by staying around our base station every day."

Seeing that the lady in charge still didn't respond, Paul said doubtfully:

"Uh...I said Betty, Burns is mainly responsible for the design of the operating device, and his focus is still on the development of new textile machines, so I want you to be in charge of the overall construction of the system. Do you think the construction of a road from Hufu How long does it take for the route from Langang to Huxin Town and then to Butuya?"

Betty, or Irene, finally frowned, and replied after a little thought: "This requires experimentation, Lord Earl, first determine the optimal distance between the two [base stations] through experiments, and then determine the number, choose The route, the estimated cost...and also the training of the personnel, also takes time.”

"I will immediately greet the Ford manager and make the construction of the emergency station system the first priority of expenditure!"

After the salt riots happened a few days ago, Paul felt that the speed of news spread was too slow. After the rocker signal system is completed, Huxin Town will be able to sense the turmoil in the territory in a relatively timely manner, and the orders issued by the Lord's Mansion can also be quickly delivered to the local area.

The means of information transmission is related to whether a regime can effectively control the territory under its rule.

"I am eager to have the complete system running through Arda, Bairding and north of Emden within half a year."

Irene raised her eyebrows and said: "I will work hard towards this goal, but the Earl, the premise is that the affairs officers of the Government Affairs Council will not treat me as a female supervisor, if everyone treats me like nothing, things will be difficult. It can't be done."

what! Paul knew why the education director lost his temper. The feeling was that she was not notified to attend the emergency meeting held after the riot.