快猫短视频

In January 1871, the Prussian troops encamped near the upper reaches of the river Seine took little notice as Emile Robert trundled past on his horse and cart. The Frenchman in his smock and otter-skin hat was obviously an itinerant egg seller, and the occupying Prussians had more pressing things on their minds. After all, their job was to lay siege to Paris.

The Prussians should have taken more notice. Concealed beneath the hay in Robert鈥檚 cart were the strangest eggs. They were the size of a child鈥檚 head and made of zinc, and inside each one were hundreds of letters bound for Paris. For the purpose of Robert鈥檚 frequent trips to the Seine was to secretly submerge the 鈥渆ggs鈥� in the river so they would roll along the riverbed to Paris.

ON 19 July 1870 France declared war on Prussia. It was a disastrous miscalculation. By 2 September the French emperor Napoleon III and his army had surrendered to the Germans at Sedan. By 19 September, the Prussians had surrounded Paris and laid siege to the city and its two million inhabitants. For France it was the end of empire. A new republican government abandoned the capital and headed south-west to Tours.

It would take inspiration, ingenuity and modern technology to keep Paris in touch with the rest of the country. The war with Prussia prompted the world鈥檚 first airmail service, first in the besieged eastern town of Metz and then in Paris. During the 20-week siege, 2.5 million letters were carried out of Paris by balloonists.

Getting post into the city was more difficult, however. Fran莽ois-Fr茅d茅ric Steenackers, the government鈥檚 director of Postes et Telegraphes, put his faith in balloons, but these were at the mercy of both the wind and Prussian guns. Leaving Paris was possible 鈥� if you left after dark 鈥� but flights into the city were hopeless. The first and last attempt was a miserable failure: the wind dropped and the balloon landed two hours after take-off almost where it had started.

Carrier pigeons seemed a better option, and so the postal service set up a pigeon loft in Paris. The pigeons were flown out of the city by balloon and sent back with messages on microfilm. Few made it. The Prussians shot them and harried them with falcons. Of 102 pigeons released during September and October 1870, only 22 reached Paris.

Communication was considered vital both for those running the city and to bolster flagging morale. And so three Parisians, Emile Robert, Pierre-Charles Delort and a Monsieur Vonoven, put their heads together and came up with an ingenious plan. Their idea was to send the post by river, packing the letters inside watertight metal balls and dropping them into the Seine upstream of Paris. The current would do the rest.

In early October, Robert took the idea to the city鈥檚 military governor, General Louis-Jules Trochu. Impressed, Trochu asked the head of the postal service, Germain Rampont, to look into it.

鈥淓ach of the metal balls could hold more than five hundred letters鈥�

The technology was simple. The balls would be about 20 centimetres across, with a series of vanes from end to end to help the current propel them downriver. Each ball could hold more than 500 letters but buoyancy tanks ensured they were only just heavier than water, so they would bump along the river bed without sinking into the silt. Anticipating attempts to float goods into Paris, the Prussians had stretched nets across the Seine. The balls would sneak beneath these and roll on into a net fixed to the river bed close to the city walls, where postal workers would retrieve them.

Rampont ordered a trial. The inventors and postal officials crept out of Paris to a small stream just beyond the city鈥檚 southern gate. To the sound of Prussian cannon, they dropped two balls into the water and waited with a net. They caught the first; the second travelled so fast it broke through the net.

Rampont ordered another trial, this time in the Seine. It took the inventors two weeks to make and install a net across the river bed at Port-脿-l鈥橝nglais, close to the city wall. Before they could test it, a Parisian gunboat snagged it and wrecked it. The three men made another, diving into the icy waters to stretch it across the river bed. The new net resembled a trawl, with a mouth 280 metres wide and weighted to keep it on the river bed. It was 1 metre high, big enough to catch a rolling ball without fouling the gunboats.

On the day of the experiment, Rampont and the inventors took a gunboat 2 kilometres upstream, as close to enemy lines as they dared. Rampont dropped a ball into the Seine and the boat party swiftly retreated. The next morning Vonoven retrieved the ball from the river at Port-脿-l鈥橝nglais. Satisfied, on 6 December Rampont signed an agreement with the inventors, promising to pay them 1 franc for each letter delivered.

The next day, Robert and Delort took the first balloon out of Paris, leaving Vonoven in charge of the net. They made their way to Tours to see Steenackers. According to Robert, he wished them success and gave them letters to send to Paris. However, Steenackers was engaged in a bitter feud with Rampont, and had tried to thwart his earlier initiatives. When one inventor proposed a better microfilm for the pigeon post, for instance, Steenackers threatened him with a court martial and firing squad if he pursued it. Two days after their meeting, Robert and Delort received a telegram from Steenackers threatening legal proceedings if they went ahead with their scheme.

It was now 18 December and the government had moved south to Bordeaux. Robert and Delort followed and tried to reason with Steenackers. He refused to acknowledge the agreement made in Paris. 鈥淲e are the masters here,鈥� he said. Frustrated, they hurried to see Alphonse Feillet, the man in charge of developing new technology to communicate with Paris. He promised to talk to Steenackers.

Back in Paris it was one of the coldest winters for years. The average temperature during December was -1.4 掳C and stories circulated of wine freezing in cellars. The people were short of food and fuel, and the cold paralysed the pigeon post: only three birds reached Paris that month. Things were desperate. But Feillet鈥檚 intervention must have worked, because the next day the inventors had a new agreement. It was much the same as the old one, but reduced their take from 1 franc to 80 centimes.

On 25 December adverts appeared in the French press informing the public that they could send letters to Paris by a new and secret service. Paris-bound mail should be sent to the post office at Moulins, a town 300 kilometres south of Paris. Letters flooded in from all over France and beyond. On 4 January Robert and Delort made their first collection from Moulins. Delort packed the letters into the balls and Robert took them to the Seine, submerging them at various places between 70 and 115 kilometres upstream of Paris.

A total of 55 balls went into the river. None appeared in the net at Port-脿-l鈥橝nglais. Vonoven checked the net every day, but on 23 January he arrived to find it had been badly damaged by ice floes. Five days later France surrendered. Steenackers halted the now redundant service on 1 February, leaving 14,600 letters still at Moulins.

The letters that were left behind were the first to be delivered, in the middle of February. On 6 March a ball was found 170 kilometres downstream of Paris. On 26 March a second one turned up near the mouth of the Seine. These two balls had travelled an average of 5 kilometres a day. Over the next 11 years 18 more balls turned up: some had reached Paris, some didn鈥檛 get that far, and still others had travelled far downstream. They are still turning up, the most recent in 1982, but 20 remain unaccounted for.

The wide distribution of balls is exactly what you would expect, says Roger Bettes, a river-flow specialist at hydrological consultants HR Wallingford in Oxfordshire, UK. But could the service ever have bettered the 20 per cent success rate of the pigeon post? And what effect did the delay caused by Steenackers鈥檚 politicking have? The first balls were probably just reaching Port-脿-l鈥橝nglais at the time the net was damaged, says Bettes. 鈥淚f they had had a couple of weeks more they would have done a lot better than 20 per cent.鈥� Robert, Delort and Vonoven had been tantalisingly close to success.

No one gained much from this episode. Steenackers resigned in February 1871. Two parliamentary reports criticised him for frustrating initiatives from Paris. The six postal workers manning the nets at Port-脿-l鈥橝nglais received medals. Vonoven did not. And when Delort asked for the inventors鈥� money, 150,000 francs, the postal service refused to pay.