"OooEEEoooEEoooeeOO!"

[tealin]

Mr. Gryle is no Mr. Ixolite.

I dug this up for you, Gabbysun!
He's not tall enough. Oh well. I thought the hat was just ... crying out for a feather.

I want to board the "One Month Prologue." How do semaphore towers work?

I so need to separate my Terra Extra Harry Potter stuff into sub-categories...

... Ankh-Morpork will raise your glass convivial and say, "Cheer! Here looking, you kid! Up, you bottom!"

Comments

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Weeell, the way I see it is ... there's like, this big shuttery array framework thing, right? And it's like ... got these ... gear pulley things connected to the control, er, mechanism, and ... they ... sort of flap, sorta fing. Now, I'd originally seen it as those sort of flippy disks you get in, say, bus displays, where one side of the ... thingy ... is white and the other black, and they'd sort of send out a morse code of long and short flips. But your mentioning of opening and closing reminded me that at night they work with lamps, so having something that gets closed off isn't going to work. Hmm.

Surely there's some extremely obsessed engineer who is a Discworld fan and who's figured this out...

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

OK, I can't help myself, had two minutes on a free computer and had to look it up.

SOMEONE, apparently, has designed something, because this list of activities was described in an account of a "Discworld Convention":
...Thud; role-playing and war gaming; Amateur dramatics; Paint your own; storytelling sessions; readings of Going Postal and build your own semaphore.

ARGH!

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

"Paint your own" what, exactly?

And then someone at the convention threw it all up in the air and said "Aaargh! They're just books!" and ran out of the room.

(I need to get back to work)

[gabbysun.livejournal.com]

Er. Badge? Towel? Painting? I'm at a loss here, really. xD;


:D FOR REAL? Wow, that would be the best ever.

EVER.

[gabbysun.livejournal.com]

But then again, it might just be a, what, paper tower with holes innit to shine lights through. xD; I DUNNO.

*pines for more information*

[gabbysun.livejournal.com]

I sort of end up skimming over the clacksy parts, because I'm terrible like that. xD;

Uh . . . *racks brain* In MR and NW they used flashlight-ish things and white paddles, respectively.

Crap. *wishes she had Going Postal* I think he gets more in-depth towards the end of the book, but I returned it to the library already, and can't remember. CURSES!

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I skip the clackses too. The in-depth stuff later on is mostly the Smoking Gnu's clever new ideas, though, isn't it? Anyway, I'm bound to get there soon enough with my reread...

Semaphore started out as a sort of signalling thing you do with flags, so that's where the paddles come in, I think, but that would be slow and wouldn't have anything to do with shutters or lamps. Blinking a light on and off as in MR would be an easy way to do Morse code, but that's not exactly "semaphore" (though it seems to be adopted by it).

The whole trans-continental clacks thing starts in Fifth Elephant, yes? That's where one is most likely to find a detailed description, logic would say... but my faulty memory is trying to tell me that the earlier semaphore towers had arms, not shutters, so maybe not.

I have very vague memories of hearing something once about a line of semaphore towers in Spain during the Napoleonic wars...? Ubiquitouspitt, I'd expect, knows all about this but unfortunately she's being held hostage by "World" Civ at the moment. Anyway, when I heard it my brain said "Aha! THAT's where he got it from!" and promptly discarded anything useful.

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Once again, my inner Klaus takes over.

From this village [Wellington] supervised the construction of 108 forts in three lines and linked by a Semaphore system. These proved invaluable in 1810 when the French led by Massena threw everything at them in a counter-offensive determined to retake Portugal.

And, earlier,
In
these battles, contemporary paintings of [Napoleon's] headquarters show that he used the world's first telecommunications system, the Chappe semaphore line, first implemented in 1792.

And then there's this little linkie (http://www.napoleonguide.com/semaphore.htm) which has the only picture I can find, and which makes me even more confused. Maybe ... they could put lanterns on the arms?

[gabbysun.livejournal.com]

. . .

I THINK YOU ROCK MORE THAN IS LEGAL.

Perhaps Pterry took the semaphore and adapted it to his own means. Who know what goes on in the mind of a madman genius? ;D

[gabbysun.livejournal.com]

Rereading is gobs of fun fun fun!

. . . :O

Ah. Yeah, see, I wasn't sure. xD; I think I assumed they were related somehow, which I suppose they sort of are. But not close enough, probably. I thought it would sort of be like, what, binary code because of the way how in MR where Blouse is discussing the clacks with Otto and William, and dumbfounding them. *clutches head* My head hurts now.

I can't remember! Gah. I think it's mentioned. I must go back and reread everything now. xD I BLAME YOU.

I respect you so much right now. Gosh.