{"id":557507,"date":"2025-08-25T10:57:56","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T13:57:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=557507"},"modified":"2025-08-25T10:57:56","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T13:57:56","slug":"portuguese-telegraph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/portuguese-telegraph\/","title":{"rendered":"Portuguese telegraph"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Tib\u00e9rio Diniz\u2009\/\u2009Facebook<\/span>Optical semaphore telegraph on Vit\u00f3ria beach in the Azores; ropes were used to open the windowsTib\u00e9rio Diniz\u2009\/\u2009Facebook<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Before electricity, the first telegraph operated in the state of S\u00e3o 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 Ant\u00f3nio Ciera (1763\u20131814), 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 S\u00e3o 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 P\u00e1tio do Col\u00e9gio, in the center of the state capital. Operators in Santos and S\u00e3o Paulo encoded or decoded the messages while the intermediaries simply received and relayed the messages. \u201cIn good weather, a transmission would take an hour and a half, but if it was cloudy, it could take days,\u201d says Cintra. Similar systems operated in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Pernambuco, Cear\u00e1, Maranh\u00e3o, and Santa Catarina, until they were replaced by the electrical telegraph network from 1852 onwards (Anais do Museu Paulista<\/em>, December; Pesquisa FAPESP<\/em> issue n\u00ba 338<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"S\u00e3o Paulo’s first telegraph used a system of small windows to encode messages","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1651],"tags":[],"coauthors":[785],"class_list":["post-557507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557507"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":557719,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557507\/revisions\/557719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557507"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=557507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}