How the first ever telecoms scam worked
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- Опубліковано 30 вер 2018
- In the 1830s, two French brothers, François and Joseph Blanc, pulled off the first telecoms scam in history. The optical telegraph, a line of semaphore towers stretching from hilltop to hilltop, was for government use only: but something as simple as the law wasn't going to get in their way.
Thanks to Victoria Harrison for all her research and translation skills! Pictures of the original documents are uploaded here: drive.google.com/drive/folder...
CG effects by Mat Hill: mat-hill.xyz/
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Quick tip if you ever go to France: don't let the rental car company give you a free upgrade to an SUV. SUVs do not fit well on tiny rural French roads.
Good to know.
This will be handy
Thank you Tom
Noted.
with the increased fuel consumption I don't see, why it would be free anyway … ;-)
"I hired a French translator to read the original source to me." You, sir, are backbone of integraty in journalism.
Integrity*
thats REAL journalism, not muckraking and always talking about sex, sexuality or racism
@@Brianz99 glad to see you dont care about anything but tabloids
Plot twist: it’s a French patron supporter that got a coupon for Ikea.
@@lucbloom 🤣🤣🤣
Other UA-camrs: Make video about thing you found online and spent half an hour googling for research.
Tom Scott: Film on location, in two different countries, and hire a researcher to check original sources in an archive.
And this is why we love Tom
Tom doesn't travel to produce UA-cam content. His channel is a way to fund him travelling. We're all in on the scam and I can't say I even care.
Wait this isn’t a green screen?
Nope. Tom is actually fully computer generated. But do not tell anyone! >_>
UA-cam demonetizes both.
I mean *technically* they transmitted at the speed of light. The lag was just caused by the individual nodes' switching speeds.
incorrect. the speed of the message is calculated by dividing the distance between point of origin and point of reception by the time it took from the message being sent to the message being delivered.
@@AppleGameification No u.
I love this xx
I think you're confusing total latency with the medium latency.
haha nice thought, but that would also mean literally everything moves at the speed of light when you look at it like that, nice thought though
"The beacon fires from Gondor have been lit! Will Rohan ride to her aid?"
Or will Theoden short trade a major monetary deal with the dwarves of the Iron Hills?- check back next week for part 2 of The Monetary Scams of Middle Earth...
The _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus begins with a watchman seeing a beacon fire signalling the fall of Troy. It's not a new idea.
I'd read that book.
They are not all accounted for, the lost seeing stones. We do not know who else may be watching. Don't say another word about the price of pipe-weed.
Written by George R. R. Martin.
LOLOL thats a good one!
I never know what to expect with any of these videos, I just know I'm going to learn something really cool on a random subject.
Yes
The kiwi approves.
Didnt expect to see you here
@@payasoartwork5906 does somebody need a hug?
@@SkillsWithPhil hi Phil
Alexandre Dumas' _The Count of Monte Cristo_ includes an episode where the count ruins one of his adversaries by sending a false message about the stock market through the telegraph system. Published in 1844 it was about a decade after the escapade by the brothers Blanc. No doubt Dumas was inspired by the story when it came out.
Aha, I commented just now before reading the comments about vaguely remembering something like this. Thanks for clarifying!
Except that, in Dumas' story, The Count doesn't think about that guy at Tours and the flaw is discovered a lot quicker
That's a bit of a stretch. A false message is entirely different matter than true information sent at higher speed. Thanks for trying to make "great" literature trivia sound relevant, though!
Not to mention Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld and the use of the Clacks clearly moduled on this.
@@Michael_Lederman I was thinking of Going Postal throughout this video!
Tom Scott isn't just a professional youtuber he's a professional professional youtuber.
homo sapiens sapiens
From this channel I've learned so much that I didn't know that I wanted to know.
Squiggs 【Glitches - ROM Hacks - Speedruns】 hi!
WOAH! Hi friend!!
How strange to see you here!
Hahah, this is crazy!
Things You Might Not Know But You Also Don't Know How Much You Would Want To Know Them If You Knew Them is just not as snappy a title
Squiggs 【Glitches - ROM Hacks - Speedruns】 I was happy not knowing the things I knew I didn’t know. 😀
@@DerMannInDerWand "Things"
so much work for a 5 minute video, Tom is so great. What did we do to deserve him?
Without wanting to take away anything from Tom's work, that's quite often how good film making works. Wildlife photographers and filmers regularly spend days or even weeks for the perfect shot or perfect sequence. And in some cases they even have to try it again and again for years (e.g. for rare and short mating rituals or for the young leaving the nest as that only happens once a year)
@@ArminGrewe but those people are professionals. tom is a random guy on youtube
@@PebsBeans who makes money and is therefore a professional.
@@PebsBeans Tom is absolutely a professional.
the ba dum tiss video getting as popular as it did
This was happening even before. When the Dutch just started trading stocks in Indian charter company boats you had spotters looking at ships off the coast of Portugal to then rush back to Amsterdam selling the information that certain ships made it past the dangerous parts of the journey and were likely to arrive in some weeks time.
wow!
sorry, I didn't understand a word. Could you please use points and commas?
How is that a telecoms scam?? And spotters were a common thing back then!
How did the spotters make it back to Amsterdam faster than those ships? Did they just have faster ships?
@@EriniusTThey went on horseback. Pony express style. They had the added benefit that they could go in a straighter line.
The idea of banning private semaphore towers, without providing any public alternatives, probably made perfect sense in the 19th century; nobody knew what that sort of rapid communication network could do for the civilian sector that would be worth anything. (Of course, the low bandwidth limits what could be done with it, but there were absolutely still possibilities.) To someone in the 21st century, that idea sounds ludicrous; we've built so much on a publically-available high-speed communication system that we can't imagine anyone being so foolish as to throw all that aside.
Timothy McLean Or at least some of us think so...
because there's only so much to go around
I think your critique of anti-net neutrality is a bit too subtle, but well-played!
Low bandwidth limits? It was the backbone of its day.
This guy uses like bots.
“Semaphore message incoming. They want to know about your car’s extended warranty.”
“What the hell is a car?”
Did you know Steve Jobs died of Ligma?
I believe they had cars in 19th century
@@MarlenNurmakov Karl Benz's _Motorwagen_ only came along in the 1880s, whereas the Blanc Brothers did all their scamming in the 1830s or thereabouts. I think it's more likely they would've understood "car" to mean either "carriage" or "train car" depending on exactly what year it was. (The word "car" is attested from the Middle Ages and originally just meant any wheeled vehicle like a wagon, carriage, cart, or chariot, from the Latin _carrus_ meaning "wagon".)
@@yetanother9127 I meant exactly carriages and wagons.
So this is basically a real life equivalent to the "Clacks Towers" from the late Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld series? Wow! I had no idea such a concept had ever been used for real, even if this is a different form of the idea, using hinged arms instead of shuttered lamps. Thanks so much for sharing this with us, Tom! My creative mind is flowing.
If you read all the discworld books the firat time the clacks shows up (i think in Night Watch) it's using semaphore rather than lights and shutters.
GNU Terry Pratchett
I was hoping someon else would think about the clack towers as well. :D And the shenanigans they pulled with it. :D
@@Zeuseus6609 I've read that and don't remember that. Clearly I need to read it again. Any excuse to read Pratchett 😁
The earlier story that used the towers for its plot was Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas.
Sounds like the Clacks! GNU Sir Terry Pratchett.
Definitely a Smoking GNU.
Definitely. I came to the comments to say "the Clacks was real‽"
Hell yeah! Was just about to comment this.
Yea, it's amazing
Where do you think Pratchet got the idea?
so you're telling me there had to be loads of unfortunate telecom operators watching their neighbour's tower 8 hours a day? imagine one of them needing to go to the toilet, the entire line would stand still.
I wonder if they had more than one person at each tower? Or would the potential delay be acceptable?
Given that the whole point was to be the fastest thing going, I'd assume there were at least two blokes in every shack so that they could take turns staring at a tower.
2 guys in a tower, and a tower every 15km/8mi... This system was using a lot of manpower.
@@telemachin Not that many. Paris to Bordeaux is ~600 km, so fewer than a 100, with your numbers.
I think a toilet incident would have simply resulted in a lot of 'packet loss', unless tower operators were tasked to watch BOTH preceding and succeeding towers and specially 'handshakes with the one after them (not very likely).
When you find out Terry Pratchett wasnt making this stuff up.
GNU Terry Pratchett
Liked for the audio/visual synch clap being left in~
He's sending a signal to someone ;)
When?
NVM, It's at 0:43
yeah. considering his level of editing, idk how it got left in...
Luke Fletcher intentionally.
In Dumas "The count of Monte Christo", the count bribes a semaphore worker to send faulty messages down the line which manipulates the bond market and quickly destroys a large portion of Danglars' fortune.
Huh, I didn't know The Clacks from the Discworld was based on a real thing, though I probably should have guessed.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
Adam Carter-Groves My thoughts too.
Of course
GNU Terry Pratchett
GNU Terry Pratchett
I just love Tom’s dedication to giving the absolute best information he can, he always goes the extra mile to make sure the things he shares are reliable, and is so willing to be honest when he can’t give a 100%. No lies, no overhyping anything, just accessible, trustworthy information.
Hey Tom Scott. It has to be said.. just on this random video. You make awesome stuff. You didn't change all that much, and I mean that in a good way. A lot of channels I followed have changed to a point that I no longer van enjoy them. But you didn't. Keep sharing (also your fanbase/community ofc!). Cheers
My favorite channel for learning things that I'll probably never need to know.
For anybody wondering this is the Tour Chappe in Marcy, near Lyon. It has nothing to do with the Paris-Bordeaux line he's talking as it is located on the Paris-Lyon line. But it's one of the few towers that has been restored and is now fonctional. You can even visit it!
Hey tom just wanted to say good on you for getting a proper source re translated instead of relying on translations around the web.
At one time, Boy Scout troops taught semaphore using square flags, one in each hand. Navies had a similar system as a backup to the radio. Very well known traditional tech.
While not required now, one current merit badge that a scout can earn does include learning flag code.
I'm impressed you paid a translator. It adds a lot of credibility to your story, and the fact that you care enough to seek out the more definite source encourages me greatly to keep watching your content. Thanks for all your hard work!
Technically, those towers transmitted at the speed of light
Yeah, dial up connections via old modems would technically also transmit at the speed of light (or the equivalent of electrons within copper, which should be around 2/3 of c, or something like this). Doesn't mean, they are fast! :-D
The latency was a bit of a bugger, though.
the ping was in days
300,000,000 m/s
I love the idea of an e-gamer bribing a semaphore operator to get faster ping
when the son of the deposed king of Nigeria calls you directly, asking for help, you help! His father ran the freaking country! Ok?
The son of the deposed monarch of Nigeria is Prince Charles. These scammers obviously aren't counting on their marks being able to Google stuff. How stupid do they think we are?
anonUK precisely because you can google it, you are not the mark they are looking for. It’s not crappy because they are bad at it, it’s that crappy scams get the right type of naive fools
For those who don't know, the original comment was quoting michael scott from the office
I think I love you Tom. You have a found your purpose on earth with these videos.
Ghgh
As mentioned by others...an amazing amount of work, to give me a 5 min. history lesson, that I found very interesting.
I'll bet most of the people who eventually read this, had no idea this exsited.
So much history is lost, because at the time it was just regular stuff everybody knew about.
This particular invention got a mention in a couple of popular books, _Going Postal_ among them. Not to forget Dumas's _The Count of Monte Cristo._ I suspect it's in no danger of being forgotten any time soon. ;)
@@tibfulv Thank you. I didn't know Going Postal was a book. In the US it's a phrase descriping a person freaking out in the work place. The network news used the phrase, I thought they made it up. As for "The Count...' I could never get into that particular Dumas. But I do enjoy historical fiction. Time to try again.
10/10 Content as always
"I hired a French researcher to go to the archives in Paris."
Thanks, UA-cam.
Tom, you may not quite be the new James Burke... But I think you're really damned close...
I'd like to see you try something long form like that. I don't know what; you probably know better than I do.
I remember seeing about Semaphore in the Count of Monte cristo where The count bribes a person who worked there to send a message that spain was at war to ruin one his enemies who had invested.
The amount and quality of research that was put into this video is incredible. Thanks for the great work Victoria and Tom.
Way to credit your researchers Tom, amazing work from all of you too on this one!
ive been listening to the count of monte cristo lately and there is actually a few mentions of these towers in the book. and in a late 20th century movie adaptation there is a scene where one can be seen
Yeah. Read the book and always wondered about how it works. Thanks Tom.
Mentions? Spoiler alert: It's a major plot point!
Remarkable production. Your delivery is very engaging and professional. I enjoy your work immensely
No other youtuber's video makes me so happy to see in my feed as yours. I can't even out a finger on what exactly is so appealing in them, I just know i love them!
Two questions come to mind: what was the very last message sent via French semaphore tower? Is there an RFC for a TCP/IP implementation over semaphore tower (presumably similar to RFC 4824)?
1) AFAIK nobody knows. There was no good bye message. People didn't think of such things in the 1850s.
2) Not yet :)
IETF should really write one for this!
The British had semaphore telegraph system during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, although I think that they were abandoned afterwards. Signalling as far as can be seen fails badly in fog or rain, even with telescopes, and so was not felt worth the trouble and expense over sending riders, since there was felt to be no chance of missing an invasion.
@David Weihe Actually, it was abandoned because of a brand new invention: telegraph
Rule 34 for communication protocols: If a communication medium exists, there is a TCP/IP implementation for it (or there soon will be).
Re:getting trading news faster -- in the ~90s there was a big race to buy up all the data lines closest to the NYSE and Nasdaq. There's a stock exchange in the US (IEX, founded in 2012) that via a 38 mile loop of fiber injects a minimum delay specifically to counteract this advantage for close-proximity, high-frequency traders. Might be worth a video on its own next time you're in the NYC area.
Yes, the dark money book
Tom also made a video about this exact topic.
Huh, did Tom get inspired to make the video about that same topic from comments like this?
Tom, you have the best channel on UA-cam. The content is always fascinating and never feels like a waste of time. Thanks!
Hey, I just wanted to say thank you for your effort and the amazing stories that come out of it. Your success is very much deserved!
Wow great video! Loved how the signal was encoded "invisibly" by the backspace function.
Gotta love the Grand Trunk. Keep him alive in the Overhead..
Not enough people get this reference...but I do. De Chelonian Mobile
GNU Terry Pratchett.
@@pintpullinggeek indeed the turtle moves
Yessss. I was looking for this reference
I really appreciate how much time and effort you seem to put into your videos. They are always very interesting and I just wish the world had more Toms so we could get more videos like this one! I am very thankful for the one Tom and all of his crew we have the privilege of being entertained by, though. Thank you!
Wow, those semaphore lines look really interesting! I wonder how quickly the messages were sent? Like, how much time was there between each position? I imagine you get really good at reading it with time, sort of like Morse code, but it seems quite complicated due to the spatial position element.
going postal - the globe world version.... Thanks Tom, reminds me to read the masterpieces of Sir Pratchett again ;)
And thank you, Tom, for showing us a real-life, honest-to-goodness Clacks tower from the original (?) French network! Or a gorgeous replica. Optical telegraphs are a bit of trivia I've just happened to know since I was very, very young (thanks, weird tech museum at Rocky Reach Dam), and it was lovely to see that one still exists, or has been recreated!
Not to mention a version of the Blanc brothers scam taken straight from the French sources, well done.
This is fascinating and such an incredible tale. Thank you for sharing information like this with the world!
Amazing story. Thanks for the work on this Tom!
Well now I know more about the reserch behind going postal
This is a very odd comment if you don't know that Going Postal is a book.
Prior to the intention of optical semaphore towers, dozens of French citizens were employed to wave their arms about from the rooftops.
Brilliant :-D
Of course, in Italy they didn't even need to be paid!
Really fascinating! Thanks to all involved in making this video.
Great Scott! What an impressive and precious lesson on history!
Thank you so very much, dude.
Greetings from Portugal.
Genius! Love this story. I love stories where there's no real victims, as such. No one was injured, no one went bust. It shows that people will always try to find a short cut. Joe and Frank White are fortunate that they didn't meet the shiny part of la guillotine.
You didn't mention the semaphore erected in the Wizard's Tower. A very important part of the scam. :)
Just beware of the owls and Mister Gryle.
I really appreciate the lengths you go to in order to ensure accuracy. Great video.
I'm in IT and I happen to know this is a current issue today with respect to Tier 1 providers being bribed or explored. It drastically can affect the amount of time advantage certain broker firms have. The FCC doesn't investigate this yet imposes harsh penalties on service vendors and customers. Net neutrality is a massive issue.
I love that you don't make your videos 10 minutes. There's SO MUCH information, and you can compact it down so that it's watchable. Thank you
So much info packed into this short video. I want to watch it again now!
Always enjoy your videos, Tom. Interesting history for sure.
Thank you Victoria!
Oh so that's the tower in The Count of Monte Cristo.
Spectacular video Tom, one of your best.
I love your videos, Tom! Very informational.
That's freaking steganography.
Nice.
Love you Tom x
Thanks for sharing the documents! Facinating
I always enjoy your videos. This one, especially so. Thanks for brightening up my day.
I find your titles and topics seemingly mundane and yet, you never disappoint in your depth and breadth of knowledge. You connect the dots and let me see the whole picture. Thank you Tom.
Terry Pratchett's Clacks Tower... almost :-)
Beat me to it!
GNU Terry Pratchett
@@mrkrunch4340 what.does GNU mean? Other than "GNU's not Unix"
@@vaclav_fejt G means to send the message to all towers, U means to turn the message around at the end of the line (combining both means the message will travel the line forever) and N means to "not log" the message in the tower's logbook/message drum.
@@mrkrunch4340 A man's not dead till people speak his name!
Could someone (such as an certain enterprising UA-camr) set up visual semaphores to transmit Internet Packets, then use that (very slow) link to send a Tweet?
On it....designing a system now. Check with me in a few weeks.
At least it would probably beat IPoAC (rfc1149) ;)
It’ll still be better than dealing with Comcast
I would be stunned if it hasn't _already_ happened, tbh.
Be fairly simple to get a proof of concept going between neighbouring tower blocks with some meccano and a couple of webcams duct taped onto telescopes. Or maybe Kinects?
For throughput, I think rfc1149 still got it beat.
This is the content that make your channel great
Pressed Like for mentioning "Tours"... Loved that city...lived there for 6 years and never heard about this story... amazing...Thank you!
I had no idea that Going Postal was based on the real world
Just about every fantastic thing Pratchett wrote about had a real-life counterpart, often only slightly less fantastic and ridiculous
Of course it was
Pratchett was a great reader of Victorian reference books, by which I mean both reference books about the Victorians and, primarily, reference books written by Victorians about everything.
Sometimes more.
Sometimes more.
In The Count of Monte Cristo, the Count abused the French semaphore network to make false news that financially crippled one of his old rivals.
For some reason, I have a version where the count sets one of the rivals up to be kidnapped and forced to pay back all the money that the rival had just taken, but the count does the actual kidnapping.
The other rival is dealt with by exposing the fact that the guy literally sold a fortress in greece to the turks.
I finally get to see a real-world example of what the telegraph towers looked like in L. Sprague De Camp's "Lest Darkness Fall". Always wondered about those
I think this is Tom's best video ever, and he has made some really, really good ones.
I bet these guys were just phoning it in.
PowahSlap Entertainmint lmao
how do i delete someone's comment
*WHY ARE YOU HERE?*
Since i subbed to you I’ve seen you’ve everywhere
The Beacons are Lit. Gondor Calls for Aid
Mmmm delicious beacons
And Rohan will answ. . . oh, never mind. They've backspaced.
Bru you know it those beacons are lit af
This was fascinating! I had never heard of this before and the dates make it even more amazing!
Fascinating info for sure, thank you for illustrating something I'd never even thought about!!
If these optical telegraphs were legal for private use, one could potentially send a signal to another unrelated telegraph line, causing mixed communications. I guess a solution for that would be to require lines to be painted with specific colour bands to distinguish them.
I remember reading an article once about a private financial network that was thwarted from getting the lead on its competitors by technicians installing a (hidden) local fiber patch in their colo / data center space that was several kilometers long, thus increasing the time to send/receive messages by a few microseconds ... enough to make a difference.
I think that you might me talking about the intentional 'speed bump' used by IEX to thwart parasitic high-frequency trading on that exchange.
That was a good one! Interesting content, lots of research, and good visual effects :)
Fascinating story, as usual, Tom! I don't know how you do it...I just enjoy!
(0:43) If you're synced and you know it, clap your hands!
LMAO They made the clacks from Discworld into a real thing 😂😂😂
Terry Pratchett isn't that old
Lived in Tours for five years whish I heard that story before. Great video as usual !
Awesome content as usual Tom!
sounds like the Clacks Towers in going postal.
Ankh Morpork Clacks messaging. Epic!
Tom Scott you are such a dude. Love this channel. Fascinating stuff 👍🏻
Surprisingly interesting, as always. Great work.
Wasnt something similar plot point in Count Monte Cristo?
That was just bribing someone to include a false message to distort the market till the real news got around.
You mentioned that French names sound classy in English, variations on theme: we think Italian pasta names sound cool, but native Italians are literally ordering like "little hats in tomato sauce please"
Ye, I'd like a pile 'o top hat in a sphere filled with tomahto sus please¿
Nice work on the research!
Very interesting.
I love how you've done the edited in movements.
You said 18th century france when in fact it took place in 1830s. This would be the 19th century.
As in the semaphore system was built in the late 18th century.