AI for Good’s Post

Transcript

So where are we? Either we're in the archival storage area, the International Telecommunication Union. It's in the second basement of the building and it says space that was dedicated for the archive storage. In total, here we have over 8000 meters of shelving for our historic documents. So what are we going to find here? We have the history of it. I guess all those boxes have special things in there. They do indeed. Can I help? So basically you have the history of the ITU right here? That's right, yes. How did it start? It started in 1865 with a conference in Paris that was called by the the Paris government to resolve problems related to the Telegraph. And this conference was very important because it represented one of the first times that the countries came together to solve a problem that wasn't related to war. So this is special because you have all the documents from the foundations of the ITU year or the. Former organization before the ITU? Yes, the first organization was the International Telegraph Union and the conference was held in 1865. And here we have all of the discussions that were held over a period of three months. And in the end they agreed to sign the first International Telegraph Convention, which is the agreement to make it possible to send telegraphs across borders. So there are lots of agreements about tariffs, coding equipment and the regulations priority of telegraphs. Beautifully handwritten it is. So how did it go after that? Because obviously this is the foundations of the organization, but then you have to organize the ITU in effects. How? How does that transform into a real organization? So this first conference brought together 20 member states or 20 states in in Europe. And it was an interesting setup. There were two types of delegates. There were the diplomats and there were the technical experts, the the people from the administrations who knew how Telegraph worked. And in the opening of the conference, the diplomats agreed that there was a need for cooperation in order to improve the service of telegraphy. And they decided that they would set up a committee. Of these technical experts, who would be the ones who would work on the details? O here we have the, the first, the delegates to the first conference, the technical experts 2020. Sorry, 20 And you'll notice that many of these countries don't exist anymore. There's Vertibird. Yeah. Baden. Pressure. That's right. We're in the world. The world has changed, absolutely. So after two months of negotiation among these these technical experts, the the conference met in a plenary session with the diplomats. It was agreed that this would help improve telegraphy. And then they signed the. The diplomats are the ones who signed and posed their seals and their signatures on this first. International Telegraph Convention. Perfect. It's all written in French, by the way. Yes, the language, the diplomatic language of the time was French and the primary language of it. You continued to be French until 1947. What was the problem at the origin of the the conference? Well, it goes back to the invention of the electric Telegraph at the beginning of the 1800s, which really revolutionized long distance communications. It before that it was not possible to send messages long distance quickly. So when the electric Telegraph was invented, it was quickly became very popular and countries established national networks. But it was difficult to send telegraphs across borders from 1 country to another and particularly if you needed to send it safe from Switzerland to England and you would be going across several different countries because the different countries all had different equipment and different working methods. This is a photograph or an image that shows the problem we have. Year and a joint station on the border between France and Germany in 1850 where we have the operator from Germany and the operator from France. So if the operator from Germany had a message, he would receive the message from somewhere in Germany and you can see here he's writing out the message so he's downloading the message he then would hand the written message to his his French compatriot who would then hear used to have the. The person with the Telegraph key and he is now using the Telegraph key here to send the message on somewhere else in Germany. He clicks on the key and it is sending the the Morse code so beep, beep, beep, beep, beep along the wires to its destination. So of course this is going to slow down the rapidity. Of the communication and the countries recognize that telegraphy could revolutionize commerce, diplomacy, news, even to have news travel more quickly from one part of the continent to another. So this was what initiated. The French government under Napoleon to call a conference to find a solution to these these roadblocks. Thank you.