Tibério Diniz / FacebookOptical semaphore telegraph on Vitória beach in the Azores; ropes were used to open the windowsTibério Diniz / Facebook
Before electricity, the first telegraph operated in the state of São Paulo from 1822 to 1828, establishing communications between the capital and the coastal city of Santos. The optical semaphore telegraph, a method invented by Portuguese cartographer Francisco António Ciera (1763–1814), had three windows with shutters that could be open or closed to represent numbers and letters. Jorge Cintra, an expert in historical cartography from the Paulista Museum at the University of São Paulo (USP), studied old documents and archaeological remains to reveal the history and location of six telegraph relay stations, the first in Monte Serrat, Santos, and the last in Pátio do Colégio, in the center of the state capital. Operators in Santos and São Paulo encoded or decoded the messages while the intermediaries simply received and relayed the messages. “In good weather, a transmission would take an hour and a half, but if it was cloudy, it could take days,” says Cintra. Similar systems operated in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Pernambuco, Ceará, Maranhão, and Santa Catarina, until they were replaced by the electrical telegraph network from 1852 onwards (Anais do Museu Paulista, December; Pesquisa FAPESP issue nº 338).
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