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Subject: Dead Media Working Notes 06.2
Dead medium: the pigeon post
From: bruces_AT_well.com (Bruce Sterling)
Source: OLD POST BAGS: The Story of the Sending of a
Letter in Ancient and Modern Times by Alvin F. Harlow
D Appleton and Company, New York 1928
383 H227o University of Texas
(((Harlow's charmingly dated work takes an extensive
interest in the pigeon post.)))
page 447
"(..) it is said that during the siege of Acre by Lion-
Hearted Richard of England, the town kept up communication
with Saladin, the Saracen leader, by pigeon. Another
good story is that during the siege of Ptolemais the
crusaders captured a pigeon carrying to the city news that
the sultan was bringing an army to its relief, and would
arrive in three days. The captors substituted a forged
letter in which the sultan was made to say that he could
do nothing at the moment, and released the bird again; and
by this the town was so much discouraged that it promptly
surrendered. When the sultan arrived three days later he
found the stronghold in the hands of the Christians.
"(...) it seems probable that they were used by the
Venetian Admiral Dandolo in the siege of Candia in 1204,
at the siege of Haarlem by Frederick of Toledo in 1572 and
of Leyden by the Spaniards in 1575, and coming down to a
later day, at the seige of Antwerp by the French in 1832.
"Early in the nineteenth century, when the lottery
craze was in full blast, pigeons were sometimes used to
hasten the announcement of the winning number, especially
by shrewd tricksters. This was common between Paris, a
great lottery center, and Brussels, a large consumer of
lottery tickets. One operator, by means of very swift
pigeons, gave his Belgian confederates the winning
numbers, which they proceeded to buy up, if possible,
before the official news arrived. In this manner the
schemer acquired a considerable fortune; but his device
was finally discovered, and being somehow construed as
fraudulent, he spent the rest of his life at hard labor in
the galleys of Toulon.
"Nathan Meyer Rothschild, head of the London branch of
his family's banking business, was one of the earliest of
modern financiers to use pigeons to bring the latest
market news from other capitals of Europe. He spent
considerable sums on his pigeon cotes, and was always
ready to buy birds noted for unusual speed. There is a
story that he received by pigeon the new of the French
defeat at Waterloo, which he at first pretended had been a
British defeat, and thus made a killing on the Stock
Exchange. (...)
"Pigeons were thereafter used by stock brokers,
especially in England and France (where they were called
*pigeons de la Bourse*) until the invention of the
electric telegraph. They usually flew between London and
the French coast in an hour and a half. (...)
"Julius Reuter, founder of the great press-dispatch
service bearing his name, used pigeons in his first press
line. (...) there were telegraph lines from Paris to
Brussels, and from Berlin to Aix-le-Chapelle; and to hook
these two together he established a pigeon line between
Brussels and Aix. (...)
"Probably the most famous pigeon messenger service in
all history was that which was carried on during the
German siege of Paris in 1870-1871. (...)
"One by one the great city's communications with the
outer world were severed. A telegraph line cunningly
hidden in the bed of the Seine was discovered by the
Germans and cut. The Director-General of Posts and
Telegraphs caused light copper balls to be made, in which
letters were floated down the Seine by night; but the
enemy soon discovered the trick, stretched a net across
and gathered them all in.
(...) "Parisian balloons continued to land in various
parts of Europe, sometimes just where they should not be.
One travelled all the way to Norway and landed eight
hundred and forty miles from Paris. Another fell into the
North Sea and the aeronaut was drowned, but his letters
were saved. The Germans devised anti-aircraft guns, but
did not hit any of the mail carriers. One aeronaut told
of seeing cannon balls come almost to his basket, then
fall back. Some balloonists fell in or near the German
lines and underwent heroic adventures.
"The Parisian balloons were made of thin cotton
cloth, covered with two or three coats of a varnish
composed of linseed oil and oxide of lead, and were
inflated with the illuminating gas used to light the
streets. From Metz, during its seige, smaller balloons
made of various materials were sent out without human
occupants. The correspondent of the *Manchester Guardian*
planned the first one, which was made of strong white
paper and inflated by means of a wisp of lighted straw
under it, the stock of coal in the city being too small to
permit the use of gas. It carried eight thousand letters
in a rubber cloth wrapper, accompanied by a note promising
one hundred francs reward to anyone who found the package
and took it to the nearest postmaster or the mayor of the
commune and got a receipt for it. Others sent out later
were made of thin paper lined with muslin, or of varnished
cotton cloth, inflated with atmospheric air by means of a
rotary fan.
(...) "After this modern demonstration of the value of
pigeons, they were taken up by nearly all the European
armies, and special attention given to their breeding and
training. During the recent Great War in Europe they were
extensively used. The First and Second American Armies in
France had one thousand birds each, and the Third Army six
hundred and forty. Counting the instruction and breeding
sections, we had over five thousand three hundred pigeons
in France.
"In the Meuse-Argonne offensive, 442 American pigeons
were used, and 403 important messages delivered by them.
One bird delivered fifty messages. The pigeons were
carried from their automobile 'lofts' to the trenches in
baskets slung on soldiers' backs. There were gas-proof
bags for the baskets in case of a gas attack. But a
pigeon might be liberated during such an attack and come
through safely, presumably because it rose above the gas.
The pigeon-veterans' home at Fort Monmouth still houses
many veterans of the Great War, some of them bearing
honorable scars. 'Cher Ami,' who lost a leg on the Verdun
front, frequently delivered messages over a thirty-
kilometer front in twenty-four minutes. 'The Mocker' had
an eye shot out. 'President Wilson' was liberated with an
important message on November 5, 1918, during an intense
machine gun and artillery fire, and reached his loft at
Rampont, forty kilometers distant, in twenty-five minutes.
On the way one leg had been shot off and his breast
pierced by a bullet. The message was still hanging to the
ligaments of the torn leg. A few months ago President
Wilson was still alive at Fort Monmouth."
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