Signal Corps  "From Station To Station"

The Union Signal Corps that saw service in the Civil War never amounted to more than 3,000 officers and men; the Confederate Signal Corps, not so extensive or organized as the Union corps, had only about half that many members. Because of the small number of men involved and the secrecy of their work, little has been witten about the valuable and dangerous services they performed. Excerpts from an article written by a signalman in 1889 give some insight into the duties of members of the Signal Corps:
 

When a message is about to be sent, the flagman takes his station upon some elevated object and "calls" the station with which he desires to communicate by waving the flag or torch slowly to and fro. The operator, seated at the glass, watches closely the distant flag, and as soon as it responds by dipping, he is ready to send his dispatch. Holding the written message before him, he calls out to the flagman certain numbers, each figure or combination of figures standing for a letter. The flagman indicates each separate figure by an ingenious combination of a few very simple motions... There are a few sylables which are indicated by a single stroke of the flag; otherwise the word must be spelled out letter by letter. Experienced signal officers, however employ many abbreviations by omitting vowels, so that scarecely a single word, unless a very unusual one, is spelled out in full.

The rapidity with which all this is executed by experienced operators is astonishing. The flag is kept in such rapid motion that the eye of the inexpert can scarecly follow... An ordinary message of a few lines is dispatched in ten minutes; a whole page of foolscap occupies about thirty minutes in the transmission... The distance also through which signals can be transmitted, without an intermediate station is surprising. [Messages were sent] regularly from Ringgold to Summerville, on Lookout Mountain, a distance of eighteen miles... But these instances required remarkably favorable conditions of the atmosphere, locality, etcetera. Ordinarily, messages were not sent a greater distance than six or eight miles.

Fascinating Fact:  The greatest recorded distance of successful message transmission was 24 miles, from Maryland Heights, MD, overlooking Harpers Ferry, WV, to Sugarloaf Mountain, near Frederick, MD.


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