Email in the 18th century

I invented this in my head a few years ago. Figured that if I was sent back to the 17th century or so, I'd get rich by building towers to send messages long-distance with light. No surprise that someone already did it.

Remember playing the game "Post Office" in elementary school? The first person would whisper "The quick brown fox jumped over the spoon," to the second person. This would go around the room until the last person revealed the message, "My mother bakes brownies on Tuesday." And it happened like this every time!

What did these systems do to avoid that translation problem? Probably nothing, leaving me to believe that they weren't that effective and were quickly replaced by the next available technology.

The Great Wall of China had one of those fire towers every some distance (to alert invasions I think), kind of like the set up in the LoTR: The Two Towers. I never thought people would use these signaling methods to actually transmit these kinds of information. Pretty cool.

This made me think of that scene from "The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers" where Merry sets fire to one of the signal towers in Minas Tirith. (Or was it Pippin?)