History

How the first ever telecoms scam worked: the François and Joseph Blanc secret semaphore message scam

More educative entertainment from the archives with Tom Scott:

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.

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