ALEXANDER DUMAS. “THE COUNT OF MONTECRISTO”, CHAP 4 (“THE TELEGRAPH AND THE GARDEN”, 1844).

-Well, I’m going to visit something that has made me think for hours. – What’s that? -An optical telegraph. – A telegraph! repeated Madame de Villefort, between curiosity and astonishment. Yes, yes, a telegraph. Several times I have seen on a road on a pile of earth, rise those black arms similar to the legs of an immense insect, and never without emotion, I swear to you, because I thought that those strange signals splitting the air with such precision, and that they carried three hundred leagues the unknown will of a man sitting in front of a table, to another man sitting at the end of the line in front of another table, they were drawn on the gray of the clouds or the blue sky, only by the force of caprice of that omnipotent chief; then I believed in geniuses, in sylphs, in short, in occult powers, and I laughed.

Now, I had never wanted to see those immense insects with white bellies and thin black legs up close, because I was afraid to find under their stone wings the little pedantic human genius, packed with science and magic. But one morning I found out that the motor of each telegraph was a poor devil of an employee with twelve hundred francs a year, busy all day looking, not at the sky, like an astronomer, nor at the water, like a fisherman, nor at the landscape, like an empty brain, but to its corresponding insect, also white with thin black legs, placed four or five leagues away. Then I was very curious to see that insect up close and attend the operation it used to communicate the news to the other.