20 Ways Breaking News Traveled Surprisingly Fast Before Radio

On the night of April 18, 1775, Paul Revere and other riders traveled through Massachusetts to warn people that British troops were on the move. In reality, they warned each house along their route. Revere only said, “The Regulars are coming out” (the famous “The British are coming” line is from a 19th-century poem by Longfellow). Revere rode as part of a carefully planned network of messengers, of which he was simply one. Only Samuel Prescott completed the ride to Concord. So much for the version of the story that made Revere the lone midnight hero!

In April 1850, Paul Julius Reuter used 45 pigeons to carry stock market news between Aachen and Brussels, filling a 76-mile gap in the telegraph network. Each flight took about two hours, while sending the same news by railway took eight. Reuter really did put financial news in the wings of pigeons! A similar story about Nathan Rothschild, however, isn’t quite as solid. In 1846, a French pamphlet claimed that Rothschild had used carrier pigeons to get early news of the Battle of Waterloo and corner the market. There’s actually no evidence that he used pigeons, but the Rothschilds did use a fast courier service.

In 490 BCE, before the Battle of Marathon, Herodotus reported that the Greek messenger Pheidippides ran more than 140 miles between Athens and Sparta to request military support. The oft-quoted story that he ran 26.2 miles from Marathon to Athens and then dropped dead comes only centuries later from writers such as Plutarch and Lucian, and is considered legend rather than history. He did all that running, and history still gave him an extra run! Centuries later and on the other side of the world, the Inca Empire had its own long-distance messengers called Chasqui. They worked in a relay system, traveling between way stations along paved roads and covering as much as 150 miles a day, with quipu, or knotted cords, serving as a recording system.

Starting in the 1890s, newspapers found a rather dramatic way to announce election results before radio. The New York Times and Chicago Daily News published beam code keys on their front pages so readers who couldn’t get into the city could still learn which candidate had won from up to 30 miles away. They watched a searchlight atop the newspaper’s building swing side-to-side (Candidate X won!) or rock up and down (Candidate Y won!).

Before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, British Admiral Horatio Nelson wanted to send a signal to his fleet. Lieutenant John Pasco suggested that Nelson change his original message, “England confides that every man will do his duty,” to the famous “England expects…,” because “expects” had a flag code in Sir Home Popham’s numerical codebook. The word “confides,” meanwhile, would have to be spelled out letter by letter. A tiny word change saved them quite a few flags! Nelson agreed, and that’s the version the Royal Navy signaled at Trafalgar on October 21, 1805.

In parts of West Africa, tension drums called dundun and wooden slit drums were tuned to replicate the tones and rhythms of spoken language (Yoruba, Igbo, and Twi, for example, are tonal). Drummers using these instruments communicated actual phrases, not just coded messages, from village to village four to five miles apart. News about war, a birth, the death of a king, or other important events could travel dozens of miles within minutes, according to ethnomusicologist J.F. Carrington.

Before transatlantic telegraph cables connected Europe and North America, news traveling between the two continents took 10 to 14 days by steamship. Financier Cyrus Field’s first cable delivered Queen Victoria’s 98-word telegram from Ireland to Newfoundland in 1858, but the cable failed after only three weeks of use when electrician Wildman Whitehouse applied high-voltage bursts that destroyed the insulation. Talk about a short-lived breakthrough! A stronger cable, laid by the SS Great Eastern on July 27, 1866, finally created a permanent telegraph connection.

Along the Great Wall of China, elevated watchtowers called fengsui (not feng shui!) were used to send warnings over long distances. Guards would make thick smoke during the day or light bonfires at night to alert guards at neighboring watchtowers of danger. The smoke was made by mixing straw and manure and was known as “wolf smoke,” or langyan. It had but one meaning: enemies are coming! The signal was then passed from watchtower to watchtower. According to military records and archaeological evidence, the alarm could travel 300 to 500 kilometers in just a few hours.

From the 1666 Great Fire of London to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, bells have broadcast the latest headlines. Centuries before the general population could read actual news, municipal and church bells provided an auditory broadsheet, an alarm system of sound: an unrhythmed tocsin rung rapidly communicated an approaching army, impending flood or fire; the slow, rhythmed “passing bell” announced a death; a peal of bells announced a battle won or a peace accord.

On May 24, 1844, the message “What hath God wrought” was sent by telegraph along copper wire between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, demonstrating how news could arrive almost instantly instead of days later. By May 1846, New York papers covering the Mexican-American War pooled funds to pay for the use of this technology (developed in America by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail, while a commercial telegraph system was being run in Britain by William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone). This cooperative became the Associated Press. News had officially picked up the pace!

In July 1588, when the approaching Spanish Armada was sighted from Lizard Point, Cornwall, lookouts lit a warning fire. Another was lit on the next hilltop, and then the next, until the signal spread across England through pitch barrels and iron braziers. The message was simple but unequivocal: the enemy had come. The news reached London within hours, calling out militias nationwide, days faster than a horseman could have managed.

France built a network of semaphore towers in the 1790s to send messages over long distances. The towers were not flags carried by hand, but fixed structures. They were spaced out every 5 to 15 kilometers across the French countryside. Each tower signaled with wooden arms in a series of coded configurations. Each station saw the previous station’s message through a telescope and relayed it on. One famous message in August 1794 carried news of the recapture of Condé-sur-l’Escaut from Lille to Paris, a distance of about 120 miles, in less than an hour using 15 relay stations.

From the 1500s through the 1800s, the most common form of music print was broadside ballads. They functioned as a sort of tabloid newspaper, telling of current events and exaggerating them. The printers published the news of the moment, in rhyme, printed on cheap paper about executions, battles, and scandals. Traveling singers would buy broadsides and sing them to familiar tunes in taverns and on street corners; and even if the crowds could not read, some of them still bought copies.

It’s traditionally believed that we say “posting a notice” because town criers once nailed their proclamations to a post after they’d read them aloud. Associating town criers with the saying “don’t shoot the messenger” is similarly mythic. In reality, from 1066 into the 19th century, criers rang their handbell to call for silence and made their customary threefold proclamation before reading news about wars, tax decrees, or other proclamations in the marketplace, after which they posted a written version on a wooden pole.

On October 26, 1825, when Governor DeWitt Clinton left Buffalo to open the 363-mile Erie Canal, a cannon was fired to announce “the Governor has departed.” More cannons were posted all along the route of the Canal, each within range of the next. As the gunners at each post heard the cannons, they too fired theirs. In about 80 to 90 minutes, New York City heard the news that the Governor had left Buffalo.

New York and Boston newspapers were so competitive that from the 1820s through the 1850s, some owned fast schooners or steam launches to meet inbound steamers at sea. Crews retrieved canisters of European news, cast into the water from the ships, and rowed back to shore. Typesetters began laying out the Extra editions hours before the steamers actually came into port. There were no undersea telegraph cables yet.

The heliograph consisted of a small, adjustable, tripod-mounted mirror that reflected sunlight in Morse code. Messages could be seen, in clear weather, at distances ranging from thirty to fifty miles. The heliograph was used historically by the British Army, in India and South Africa. The U.S. Army used them during the 1880s Apache Campaigns to flash tactical alerts across New Mexico and Arizona. Heliographs were completely useless if it was cloudy, though!

War bulletins, election results, stock quotes, and other breaking news sent by telegraph reached banks, brokerages, and even hotels and clubs through the stock ticker, invented in 1867 by Edward Calahan. The stock ticker received telegraph code and printed the corresponding letters onto a narrow strip of paper. The ticker, so called because of the clicking sounds it made, did not require a Morse operator at the receiving end. The machine could do the translating itself! Thomas Edison patented an improvement to the ticker’s design in 1869.

Before searchlights swept results across the night sky, there were chalkboards, hand-lettered bulletins, and sheets of paper printed with wire copy from the newsroom, posted in the windows of newspaper buildings at street level. For major events, namely elections, World Series games, and wartime battles, the crowds came out in force and congregated in plazas like Times Square to watch the results trickle in.

When a major event was worthy of immediate coverage, and the normal publication schedule wouldn’t work, newspapers published a special “Extra” edition. These single-sheet broadsides were printed by rearranging type on the front page in a matter of minutes and sold by the bundle to newsboys, who would shout “Extra, extra, read all about it.” Extra editions gave people the shocking news of the Titanic sinking in 1912 or the start of World War I in 1914 and dominated breaking news coverage until superseded by radio in the late 1920s and 1930s.

This content was created with the help of AI.