March 01, 2005
Stupid buildings
It might come as a surprise, but this isn’t a telephone:
However, it could easily be mistaken for one. “Ah!”, you say, “but isn’t it a bit, well, too building-shaped to be a telephone?”. Nope.
It’s actually the rebuilt Grenade Hall signal station here in Barbados. This is one of half a dozen signal stations built after the 1816 slave rebellion, when news of the uprising took several hours to cross the island. The powers that be decided they needed something better, that could get the messages delivered quicker in times of need.
Note that it wasn’t the bandwidth that was the problem; just the latency. A messenger could carry a long message at much higher bandwidth than the signal stations. It just took a darned long time through the hills and cane fields. (Can you believe that even now it took us over an hour to cross an island that’s only 22 by 14 miles!)
Our little madam (pictured) distracted me during the crucial seconds of the automated commentary saying how they actually signalled (flags, I think). But it was the IP of its day, sending a bitstream over a simple routed network.
Why isn’t this building a phone? Well, it was a stupid building forming part of a stupid network. Phones are a smart network, dedicated to one application, voice calls. Once slavery was abolished in 1834, the signal station didn’t fall into immediate disuse. It hadn’t been built in a way that could only accommodate civil unrest messages to Bridgetown. Stupidity meant it could support other applications. For instance, the towers would be used to spot incoming ships (capture all those broadcast photons!) and relay their arrival onto waiting merchants. Ship-presence-multicast!
Indeed, Grenade Hall continued to be used right up into the early days of the telephone, with an antique model actually on display. However, the telephone is what killed it off. Lines were laid around the island, and being high up became a nuisance, not an advantage. The building fell into ruin, before being restored in the early 1990s.
You could argue that the telephone, despite its inflexibility (all messages have to encoded as “talk”), defeated flag signals on three key points: distribution, latency and bandwidth. It had more end points, you could relay messages quicker, and get more messages through. Plus it came with the “meta message” of the speaker’s voice and intonation. So it’s not a surprise that’s it’s taken a century of progress to come up with a compelling alternative. But I suspect few will see the irony the first day someone stands up on the tower and makes a wireless VoIP call from a device that can no longer be called a telephone.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 01:36 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Totally unrelated to the posting (other than you got the history right :) - picture of home, yay yay yay! Haven't seen home for 6+ years now.
Posted by: at March 1, 2005 06:04 PMAh Martin - the always-on network! ;-) Flag this - U. R. O.N. V.A.C.A.T.I.O.N. ;-)
Posted by: at March 1, 2005 07:48 PM