Editing Optical telegraph (section)

==In popular culture==
[[File:Télégraphe Chappe par Töpffer.jpg|thumb|A cartoon strip of "Monsieur Pencil" (1831) by [[Rodolphe Töpffer]]]]

By the mid-19th century, the optical telegraph was well known enough to be referenced in popular works without special explanation. The Chappe telegraph appeared in contemporary fiction and comic strips. In "Mister Pencil" (1831), a comic strip by [[Rodolphe Töpffer]], a dog fallen on a Chappe telegraph's arm—and its master attempting to help get it down—provoke an international crisis by inadvertently transmitting disturbing messages. In ''[[Lucien Leuwen]]'' (1834), [[Stendhal]] pictures a power struggle between Lucien Leuwen and the prefect M. de Séranville with the telegraph's director M. Lamorte. In Chapter 60 ("The Telegraph") of [[Alexandre Dumas]]' ''[[The Count of Monte Cristo]]'' (1844), the title character describes with fascination the semaphore line's moving arms: "I had at times seen rise at the end of a road, on a hillock and in the bright light of the sun, these black folding arms looking like the legs of an immense beetle."<ref>[http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/pdf/dumas_monte_cristo_3.pdf Page 84 in LE COMTE DE MONTE-CRISTO Tome III]</ref> He later bribes a semaphore operator to relay a false message in order to manipulate the French financial market. Dumas also describes in detail the functioning of a Chappe telegraph line. In [[Hector Malot]]'s novel ''Romain Kalbris'' (1869), one of the characters, a girl named Dielette, describes her home in Paris as "...next to a church near which there was a clock tower. On top of the tower there were two large black arms, moving all day this way and that. [I was told later] that this was [[Saint-Eustache, Paris|Saint-Eustache]] church and that these large black arms were a telegraph."<ref>[http://www.inlibroveritas.net/lire/oeuvre23495.html#page_163 See second paragraph in]</ref>

In the 21st century, the optical telegraph concept is mainly kept alive in popular culture through fiction such as the novel [[Pavane (novel)|''Pavane'']] and [[Terry Pratchett]]'s "Clacks" in his [[Discworld]] novels,<ref>{{cite book |last1=Webb |first1=Simon |title=The Real World of Victorian Steampunk: Steam Planes & Radiophones |date=2019 |publisher=Pen and Sword |isbn=978-1526732866 |pages=49–51 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Ak8IEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT49}}</ref> most notably the 2004 novel ''[[Going Postal]]''.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Hague |first1=Jim |title=The Clacks in Discworld and Roundworld |url=https://accu.org/video/spring-2018-day-3/hague/ |website=ACCU.org |publisher=ACCU |access-date=28 December 2022}}</ref>