SIGNALLING.
Captain John Smith was one of the first to make use of signals to express regular words, three hundred years ago.
He was then fighting on the side of the Austrians against the Turks. He thought it wicked for Christian men to fight against Christians if it could possibly be avoided, but he would help any Christian, although a foreigner, to fight against a heathen; so he joined the Austrians against the Turks.
He invented a system of showing lights at night with torches, which when held in certain positions with each other meant certain words.
Several officers in the Austrian forces practised these signals till they knew them.
On one occasion one of these officers was besieged by the Turks. John Smith brought a force to help him, and arrived on a hill near the town in the night. Here he made a number of torch signals, which were read by the officer inside, and they told him what to do when Smith attacked the enemy in the rear; and this enabled the garrison to break out successfully.
In the American Civil War, Captain Clowry, a scout officer, wanted to give warning to a large force of his own army that the enemy were going to attack it unexpectedly during the night, but he could not get to his friends, because there was a flooded river between them which he could not cross, and a storm of rain was going on.
What would you have done if you had been him?
A good idea struck him. He got hold of an old railway engine that was standing near him. He lit the fire, and got up steam in her, and then started to blow the whistle with short and long blasts—what is called the Morse alphabet. Soon his friends heard and understood, and answered back with a bugle. And he then spelt out a message of warning to them, which they read and acted upon. And so their force of 20,000 men was saved from surprise.
Lieutenant Boyd-Alexander describes in his book "From the Niger to the Nile," how a certain tribe of natives in Central Africa signal news to each other by means of beats on a drum. And I have known tribes in the forests of the West Coast of Africa who do the same.