France

-uses Semaphore and invented it
-very mature network and used for non-military purposes
-relaying commodity and stock prices and news bulletin from Le Moniteur Universel
-to stay afloat, also used for civilian businesses (chiefly banks)

United States

-in 1810s the US with its surplus begins work on a semaphore network
-in 1820s during and following US's Wars > Luisiana War (1823-8) the US builds a semaphore network
-attached to post office, for conveying commercial info
-nationalizes semaphores that ran out of business during it
-for military use
-full scale of network
-New York City to New Haven to Boston
-New York City to Philadelphia
-Philadelphia to Baltimore to Washington
-Washington to Richmond
-Richmond to Norfolk
-Richmond to Charleston
-Norfolk to New Bern to Wilmington
-Wilmington to Charleston to Savannah
-New York City to Albany to Syracuse to Black Rock
-Black Rock to Erie to Cleveland to Sandusky
-Sandusky to Miami [Toledo]
-New Orleans to Mobile to Pensacola
-Sandusky to Columbus
-Columbus to Concord [Indianapolis]
-Concord to Vandalia to St. Louis
-Washington to Cumberland to Pittsburgh
-important and iconic part of the Liberty and Union War (1868-76)
-gets shut down only in 1850s
-with Telegraphy wires having been laid across semaphore towers, beginning in 1840s

China

-China's Wars > Transition from Qing to Bai (1854-63) - Chinese civilization has faced quite a shock
-forces it into introspection
-adopts semaphore but to make it compatible with characters does many different schemes
-transmit index of character in Kangxi dictionary
-phonetic character (by Phags-pa script)
-compressed index per char, transmit index
-in 1867 Feng Wei constructed something else
-he successfully reduced characters to 24 base roots
-each character decomposed into 2-4 of these roots
-he made sure for the basic 3000 characters used for transmission
-it would take 2-3 roots
-each root would be mapped to a semaphore position
-and a shutter at the bottom, with different colors and designs on each side would be flipped to delimit characters
-allowed transmission in less than the four-symbol number-to-character transmission used, much less the other schemes running around
-meant it became dominant.
-connected the Bai Chinese capital of Nanjing to the Great Wall which served as the border with the Russian-aligned Qing remnant
-later, it became extended to the South, wrapping the nation in great towers of communication.
-only discontinued over the 1880s