[alexfoo]

> Blew my mind that there was a wire that went all the way to London from Australia!

Before the telegraph they used to do things wirelessly: https://www.brunningandprice.co.uk/_downloads/telegraph/tele...

(Not quite London to Australia though...)

In the late-1700s/early-1800s the Admiralty Telegraph was used to relay messages between London and Portsmouth (70 odd miles apart) using a semaphore type system with repeater stations every 10 miles or so.

[kitd]

Yes, the Uk (southern England in particular) is dotted with "Semaphore Hill"s or "Telegraph Hills"s. There's one very close to where I'm sitting now, a few miles NE of Portsmouth.

[vintagedave]

In Tasmania, you can still see at least one semaphore station on Mt Nelson, which is above several suburbs on the south of the city of Hobart. I believe there was a semaphore route from the capital to Port Arthur (convict prison) and possibly other routes over the state too.

https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_histo...

Sadly the semaphore pole itself is gone. The building is still there and was used until 1969.

[Aromasin]

To think it was done even 1000s of years prior to that with just smoke and fire! Granted, the ability to communicate through the rain would be a necessity for the British.

[jillesvangurp]

My home country the Netherlands became a republic after a long war with the Spanish that controlled the territory from Spain after having inherited it via various wars and conflicts that divided up the remains of the Carolian empires. The Austrians ended up with a lot of states across what is now Germany and Belgium. France emerged as well as a country.

The Netherlands was too far away from the courts in Spain for them to govern effectively. Travel time was measured in weeks. So, remote regions like that necessarily had a large degree of autonomy. That became the basis for power to centralize around Amsterdam as it was favorably located for for trading. There were a lot of grievances with religious issues (Catholicism vs. Protestantism), taxation, etc. But the Spanish failure to project power from a distance had everything to do with the centralized nature of their empire and long communication channels.

In the so called golden century (17th century), the Netherlands got filthy rich on global trade and expansion. Information and knowledge flowed to and from Amsterdam from all over the world.

The Dutch naval forces dominated the North Sea for quite some time and it's only later that the British emerged as the better/bigger empire. Navies and ships were the fastest way to move information around at the time. Until the British finally upgraded to cables and telegrams which enabled them to have colonies on all continents. They really nailed command and control across their empire for a while.

The Romans had their roads to move armies and information. Shipping and navigation technology leveled that up from the 1400s or so. These days, low latency communication is a commodity of course.