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Amitabha Gupta

@amitabho58

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A Travel writer and photographer with a background of corporate branding

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Across West Bengal, Jharkhand and Bihar, mysterious brick towers still rise from fields, forests and hilltops. For years, many were mistaken for watchtowers, church towers and even relics of local battles.

Even more remarkably, they were built in a straight line from Fort William in Calcutta, then the capital of the Bengal Presidency, to Chunar near Varanasi, a distance of 694 km.

Their real story is far more unusual.

These were Semaphore Towers, part of an early communications network built by the British East India Company long before the electrical telegraph arrived in India.

The towers were constructed in a line running from Fort William in Calcutta to Chunar near Varanasi. According to one estimate, there were around 45 towers, positioned roughly 9.5 to 13 miles apart so that each remained visible from the next.

Atop each tower was a semaphore apparatus with movable indicators. Operators used telescopes to read signals from the neighbouring tower, then repeated them onwards. On a clear day, a message could travel from Calcutta to Chunar in just 50 minutes.

The idea had its origins in Revolutionary France, where Claude Chappe developed the semaphore telegraph in 1792. The British soon adopted the technology, and in India, Sir George Everest was tasked with surveying the Calcutta-Chunar route in 1817.

The system was mainly intended for military communication and never became a public service. The Calcutta-Chunar line was eventually abandoned in 1828, and the arrival of the electrical telegraph in India in 1850 sealed the fate of semaphore communication.

Today, several of these towers survive, often in ruins, as remarkable reminders of a forgotten experiment in sending information across hundreds of kilometres, one visual signal at a time.

Read the fascinating story of India’s forgotten Semaphore Towers on Live History India by LHI Contributor Amitabha Gupta @amitabho58

Images by @amitabho58

#livehistoryindia #historyofindia #storiesthatmakeindia
[history, history series, telegraph towers, semaphore towers, west bengal, jharkhand, varanasi] by @amitabho58

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