What was the best way to spread information? Everything from news, gossip, and emergencies
In: 71
Word of mouth: official messengers, town criers, bards and griots, travelers (including merchants and pilgrims), religious services
Written word, either handwritten or printed: carried by messengers or couriers, posted in public places like market squares, sold as [broadsides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadside_ballad) or newspapers
The “best” way probably depended on the situation.
“Extra! Extra! READ all about it!”.
Also, word of mouth, telegraphs, horse-back, messenger pigeons??( not fully sure on that). Traders/travellers going from town to town…
Horse back riders, I mean the Pony Express wasn’t the first, just the longest.
for cross ocean news it was common for investors to have swift boat (schooner?) stationed out by normal shipping channels to intercept and collect letters/newspapers. Getting info a few hours earlier meant buying or selling stocks or shares of whatever is coming in on the ship.
The Rothchilds made a massive fortune because their intelligence system was better/faster than England’s and Paris literally thought Napolean was the victor for a week after.
even today with speed of light electronic info/stock deals, someone wanted to tunnel through a mountain to install a fiber optic cable to shave micro seconds off the time it takes to go over.
kind of along the same line is the time of day. every city would have its official time and could be off by alot. if using a sundial for instance Columbus Ohio 20 to 30 minutes behind New York.
Let’s go back in time – because the answer varies.
Even before radio, near-lightspeed communication was possible with the telegraph. Message speed was limited to Morse Code – communication was measured in words per minute; but with the trans-Atlantic cables, you could communicate between Moscow and San Francisco in under an hour if the message *needed* to get there.
If you had a longer message, you would need to carry it. Trains across the US or Europe were going 60-80 MPH, and could carry just about any size of message/news/etc.; so a delay measured in days was normal. Traveling between Europe and America could take weeks, sometimes longer, depending on how fast a ship you were willing to use.
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Before trains and telegraph (which happened around the same time – and in the US, were often laid down together); horse messengers were the best you can do. Staged horse routes allowed fast horses to be run without regard to tiring the horse: about as soon as your horse was getting tired, you’d arrive at a waystation where they would trade horses, resting your tired horse for a fresh one; allowing either single riders or stagecoaches with teams of horses to go near full-horsespeed, which could easily be 30-45 MPH; ridden 8-12 hours/day, especially if you could trade riders/drivers as well as horses – getting 250-300 miles/day.
Without staged horses, you’d be limited to a horse’s daily pace, which is closer to 100-150 miles/day; or slower as you go farther back in history (because less specialized horse breeding had had time to be done). By Roman times, it was actually faster in many cases to use a runner – a human, trained to run long distances. Roman and earlier runners could run 100 miles/day; which limited how fast you could get messages.
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However, there’s a second part of your question: spread. Radio pretty easily spreads information in every direction – horses, boats, and runners don’t. There’s cases of battles in wars happening weeks, even months, after the war ended because news of the end didn’t get to the people in that battle. If you were off the main lines of communication, you might get news days, weeks – or in some cases, even years after news happened. You see this a lot in the decline of the Roman Empire: Britannia in particular dropped out of the Roman Empire because by the time anyone in Rome could respond to anything in Britannia or vice-versa, it was too late to do anything; but the same thing was true in various backwaters everywhere in the empire.
Before telegraph and trains, it was mostly by word of mouth. Word would be spread to local news agencies and mass printed out.
It was…. slow. Very slow.
[The Victorian Internet](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/162040592X) is about the communications just before, during and just after the development of the telegraph.
“Nothing of much importance happened today.”—George III, Diary Entry, July 4, 1776
It took a bit for news to travel back then.
Telegraph was super fast at getting information arund the world and then it would be printed in newspapers. The pre telegraph era was alot slower. Think Pony Express.
Telegraphs and Printing Presses were common enough since the 1830s. So phone calls and newspapers.
Before the telegraph? Depends completely on distance.
For correspondence of any kind, however long it would take for your mail to be delivered by courier (on horseback).
More complex systems were common as well tho.
Smoke signals are very effective over long distances. They were especially used by precolonial native peoples; Horses are a Eurasian Animal.
In some mountainous regions, whistled languages had developed, and someone proficient in them can communicate with other speakers from miles away (in good conditions)
I wouldn’t be surprised if some codes were developed to function with horn usage as well.
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