xii AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 
January, 1912 
From an old printin La Telegrafie Historique- 
Napoleon’s Visual Telegraph 
The First Long Distance System 
Indians sent messages by means of 
signal fires, but Napoleon established 
the first permanent system for rapid 
communication. 
In place of the slow and unreliable ser- 
vice of couriers, he built lines of towers 
extending to the French frontiers and 
sent messages from tower to tower by 
means of the visual telegraph. 
This device was invented in 1793 by 
Claude Chappe. It was a semaphore. 
The letters and words were indicated by 
the position of the wooden arms; and the 
messages were received and relayed at the 
next tower, perhaps a dozen miles away. 
Compared to the Bell Telephone system 
of to-day the visual telegraph system of 
Napoleon’s time seems a crude make- 
shift. It could not be used at night nor 
in thick weather. It was expensive in 
construction and operation, considering 
that it was maintained solely for military 
purposes. 
Yet it was a great step ahead, because 
it made possible the transmission of 
messages to distant points without the 
use of the human messenger. 
It blazed the way for the universal 
telephone service of the Bell System 
which provides personal intercommuni- 
cation for 90,000,000 people and is ind’s- 
pensable for the industrial, commercial 
and social progress of the Nation. 
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light the rest of the time. This is temper- 
ing the wind to the shorn lamb, for the par- 
tial shade shields the newly transplanted 
celery until it gets a good start, while it is 
not long until the early corn is ready for use 
and the stalks, of course, are cut down to 
give the celery the space. The purpose of 
this arrangement, however, is the economy 
of space which comes from being able to 
throw the soil from the trench among the 
rows of corn, and, when the celery is ready 
for blanching, being able to gather it again, 
and indeed all the soil from the space 
which the corn rows occupied, to hill up 
the celery. In a small garden, where every 
inch of space is valuable, one of the most — 
difficult things is to get soil enough for 
blanching purposes. Half of my celery is 
of the Self-Blanching and half of the Giant 
Paschal variety. The former, being short 
and stocky, is easiest covered for winter 
use, while the latter, being a rapid grower, 
may by early hilling be made soonest ready 
for the table. 
The first year that I had a garden I 
planted peas and string beans in the spring, 
only to find that they matured about the 
same time, and that we could not use both; 
in fact, that we did not care for the beans 
while the more delicious peas were available. 
I do not plant my beans now until I have 
taken off my last planting of peas. We find 
them just as good in the autumn as in the 
spring, and very welcome for fall use. I 
stick in a few hills of beans in any vacant 
spaces that I find in the garden after July, 
as for example where a tomato vine has 
been killed, or along the edges of walks, 
or the margins of my potato patch. 
We like to use beets when they are young 
and tender. Last year I raised two crops 
from the same row, and both the early and 
the late planting had ample time to mature. 
If beets are canned for winter use it is 
doubtless best to can from the late crop, 
as the risk from the heat is not so great. 
A year ago I stored beets for winter use, 
packing them in sand in the cellar, but they 
kept too well, becoming as hard as rocks, 
so that the hardness could not be adequately 
reduced by boiling. This winter we are 
trying a new experiment, that of not pulling 
up the beets, but, after the tops have been 
somewhat frozen, covering them with 
leaves where they stand. I found that in 
December, and there had been some severe 
weather, that my beets, as they were pulled 
and prepared, half a dozen at a time, were 
as fine as at any season of the year. 
Of onions we are very fond, but instead 
of planting many onion sets, as at first, 
[ have learned to have a corner with winter 
onions for early use, and then to sow the 
onion seeds with a view to thinning out very 
freely for the table. There is no delicacy 
in the onion line quite equal to the tender 
onions pulled up in thinning an onion bed. 
I go over my small bed many times, aiming 
to do the thinning so as to keep the grow- 
ing onions from crowding, and in the season 
we are never without all the green onions 
we can eat. 
Two bushels of potatoes last us a year. 
but we always plant an early variety, not 
only because new potatoes are expensive, 
but also because the vines die down early 
enough so that we can utilize the ground 
between the rows for some fall crop. 
One important part of my garden is the 
strawberry bed. We like the berries right 
from the plants, but they ripen too rapidly 
for us, and so I have learned to uncover only 
half of the bed at a time in the spring, leav- 
ing the other half to be held back by its 
covering as long as I dare, and thus the cenit 
season is prolonged. 
At first we found it difficult to use a rivets ; 
