John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times
A view through a telescope shows coded messages in an office window.
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: November 21, 2006
via NYTimes:
Watch That Space: The Oracle of the 17th Floor {links courtesy ng}
The creators of the maritime semaphore system apparently did not have New York office workers in mind when they formulated the staccato messages used by ships and ports for basic communication. But as it turns out, the language is quite supple when it comes to conveying the universal urban condition.
There are signals for the angry: "Keep clear of me." There are signals for the frustrated: "I have received faulty instructions." And of course there are signals for the weary and the Friday-afternoon defeated: "I am dragging anchor"; "I require a tug"; "I am ending maneuvers early."
Several years ago the artist Nina Katchadourian found herself staring up at the sky full of office windows in Times Square and thinking about the faceless occupants behind them. "You think, 'My God, all those anonymous people up there, living and working,'" she said. "There’s this sense of so much detachment between interior and exterior."
With the cooperation of one of those anonymous people and the help of the Public Art Fund, Ms. Katchadourian is now trying to build a bridge — or at least, as she says, stretch a tenuous thread — between those two worlds.
Last week, on a windy plaza at the corner of Liberty and William Streets in Lower Manhattan, workers installed a heavy-duty tourist-type telescope. Its lens is fixed on a 17th-floor office window two blocks to the east, and at least once a day for the next two months the corporate lawyer who sits near that window will choose three objects from his office — for instance, a potted plant, a picture of his young son and a calculator — and arrange them on the sill. Anyone who wanders by the telescope can peer into it and see the objects, a kind of occupational variant on the famous lanterns in the Old North Church.
Then, using a pictorial key mounted on the telescope, the observer can translate the lawyer's messages and, perhaps, divine something about personality or his soul. Or at least whether the deli forgot to put mustard on his pastrami sandwich again. [...]
more about the history of the semaphore system, via Wikipedia:
An animation showing a Chappe tower Semaphore telegraph in operation. Courtesy of l'Ecole Centrale de Lyon http://chappe.ec-lyon.fr
[...] Semaphore lines preceded the electrical telegraph. They were faster than post riders for bringing a message over long distances, but far more expensive and less private than the electrical telegraph lines which would replace them. The distance that an optical telegraph can bridge is limited by geography and weather, thus in practical use, most optical telegraphs used lines of relay stations to bridge longer distances. [...]
Claude Chappe and his brothers took up the challenge [...] and succeeded to cover France with a network of 556 stations stretching a total distance of 4,800 kilometres. It was used for military and national communications until the 1850s. Many national services adopted signaling systems different from the Chappe system. For example, Britain and Sweden adopted systems of shuttered panels (in contradiction to the Chappe brothers' contention that angled rods are more visible). In Spain, the engineer Agustín de Betancourt developed his own system which was adopted by that state. [...]
