Desert Diary
February 24, 2003

History/Heliography

 

This page was designed with CSS, and looks best in a CSS-aware browser--which, unfortunately, yours is not. However, the document should still be readable, though perhaps not presented in the most sophisticated manner.

Before the telegraph and the radio, the only way to get information from one place to another was by messenger, right? Wrong! But then, you knew that! Smoke signals, drums, signal flags--probably tens of different ways long in use. Most, though, had the disadvantage of signal points having to be relatively close to each other in order to see or hear.

But, what about light transmission? No, not optic cable--heliographs! These ingenious devices sent Morse code, not by electricity via telegraph wires, but by flashes of sunlight. With a telescope, messages sent from one mountain peak to another could be read from long distances, and then be relayed to the next station. In 1886, during the Geronimo campaign, a message was sent from Fort Cummings in New Mexico to Tubac, Arizona, and back in some 4 hours--a round-trip distance approaching 500 miles. In our Chihuahuan Desert, Fort Selden was responsible for a heliograph station across the Rio Grande from it, on top of the Robledo Mountains. Just think, no wires to be cut, no interception. Not bad!

Contributor: Arthur H. Harris, Laboratory for Environmental Biology, Centennial Museum, University of Texas at El Paso.

Desert Diary is a joint production of the Centennial Museum and KTEP National Public Radio at the University of Texas at El Paso.

References

Web Resources

Fort Cummings

Fort Selden