This, howeverĪttracted little or no attention at the War Department, and not before 1858 was the inventor successful in bringing his plans before a military board duly authorized to consider them. His active interest in sign language, already displayed in his graduating thesis, was manifested at once by its development into a system of signal communication, for in 1856 he drafted a memorandum of his device. Myer entered the Army in 1854 as an assistant surgeon. It is with the period between these two phases of signal service that most of this sketch has to do.ĭr. Yet such was the influence he was still able to exert that he prevented the confirmation of Colonel Fisher twice appointed to succeed him. A chief without a corps, it was his consuming ambition to surround himself with a staff of trained assistants he succeeded in his ambition in 1863, but such were the animosities excited by his success that he was removed from the command of the corps he had created and in 1864 was out of the Army. In fact there was no corps, but there was Myer. In the beginning, the corps was enfolded in the enthusiasm and determination of Myer. To show how it was taken, to present some of the more striking features of this growth, rapid in the heat of battle, to sketch the plan on which the Signal Corps was built, this chapter of the history of the war has been written from study of the compiled Official Records of the Union and Confederate armies. The waving flag and torch of Myer were the first contribution to the solution of the problem which were efficient without cumbersome machinery, and while so simple as to be easily extemporized from any chance materials were yet capable of performing every service which they could be called upon to render.įrom the flag and torch of the enthusiastic inventor to a highly developed corps of the general staff is a long step. When simple the signal was inefficient, when efficient it was so unwieldy as to be impracticable the flashing shield at Sunium and the fingers of Chappé's semaphore were alike in their unavailability upon the field of battle. In all campaigns from the remotest times the maintenance of communication by transient signals had presented itself to commanders as of paramount importance, but in practice it had eluded them. What from the most ancient times other commanders had dimly comprehended, Napoleon first saw clearly enough to crystalize into his maxim, " Le secret de la guerre est dans le secret de communications." What the great captain of modern warfare recognized but could not attain was the problem whose solution fell to Albert James Myer of the Medical Department, United States Army. The genesis of military signaling is written in the labors of Myer.
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