Pay attention to the carrier pigeons: the possibilities of this technology are amazing.
About the author: Allison Marsh is an associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina, one of the directors of the Ann Johnson Institute of Science, Technology and Society.
Avian espionage: in the 1970s, the CIA developed a tiny camera that turned post pigeons into spies
For thousands of years, carrier pigeons carried messages. And they were especially helpful in wartime. Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Arthur Wellesley Wellington (during the Battle of Waterloo ) - they all relied on bird communication. During World War I, US liaison forces and the navy held their dovecotes. The French government awarded the American bird named Sher Ami with a Military Cross for their valiant service during the Battle of Verdun. During World War II, the British held over 250,000 mail pigeons, 32 of which received the Maria Deakin medal , a special award for animals for military service [ from 1943 to 1949, the medal was awarded 54 times - thirty-two pigeons, eighteen dogs, three horses and ship's cat Simon / approx. trans. ].
And of course the US Central Intelligence Agency could not help turning pigeons into spies. In the 1970s, the CIA's research and development department created a small and lightweight camera that can be fastened to the pigeon’s chest. After graduation, a pigeon flew over the target of espionage on the way home. The motor inside the camera, running on batteries, scrolled the film and opened the shutter. Since pigeons fly just a few hundred meters above the ground, they could get much more detailed photographs than airplanes or satellites. Have the pigeon tests been successful? We do not know. This data remains classified to this day.
')
However, the CIA was not the first to use this technology. German pharmacist Julius Gustav Neubronner is usually considered the first person to train pigeons for photographing from the air. At the beginning of the 20th century, Neubronner was fastening cameras [of his own invention, using a pneumatic shutter opening / approx. trans. ] to the chest of the pigeons. The camera took pictures at regular intervals while the dove flew home.
The Prussian military studied the possibility of using Neubronner's pigeons for reconnaissance, but abandoned the idea, being unable to control the routes or take photographs of certain places. Instead, Neubronner began to make postcards from these photographs. Now they are collected in the 2017 book Pigeon Photographer . Some of them can be viewed on the Internet:
The main reason that pigeons can be used for messaging or surveillance is that they have magnetoreception — the ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field, determining their location, direction of movement, and orientation.
Early observations in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia showed that pigeons usually return home to their roost, even if released far from home. But only relatively recently, scientists began to understand how the magnetic orientation of birds.
In 1968, the German zoologist Wolfgang Wilchko described the magnetic compass charge , migratory birds. He watched the captured charges gather from one edge of the cage, and look in the direction in which they would move, being free. When Vilchko manipulated magnetic fields in the laboratory with the help of the Helmholtz rings , the charges reacted to this by changing their orientation in space, without visual or other clues.
It was more difficult to study the magnetoreception of post pigeons, since birds have to be released into their natural environment in order for them to show their characteristic behavior. Outside the laboratory, there is no simple way to control magnetic fields, so it was difficult to understand whether birds relied on other methods of orientation, for example, on the position of the sun in the sky.
In the 1970s, Charles Walcott , an ornithologist from New York University in Stony Brook, and his student Robert Green came up with a cunning experiment that made it possible to overcome such difficulties. At first they trained a flock of 50 post pigeons to fly in sunny and cloudy conditions from west to east, releasing them from three different points.
After the pigeons began to steadily return home, regardless of the weather, scientists dressed them in fashionable hats. They put coils with batteries on each pigeon — one coil surrounded the bird’s neck in the manner of a collar, and the other was glued to her head. Coils were used to change the magnetic field around the bird.
On sunny days, the presence of current in the coils had little effect on the birds. But in cloudy weather the birds flew to the house or in the direction from it, depending on the direction of the magnetic field. This suggests that in clear weather, pigeons are guided by the sun, and on cloudy days they mostly use the Earth’s magnetic field. Walcott and Green published their discoveries in Science in 1974.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Julius Gustav Neubronner used pigeons and cameras to obtain aerial photographs.
Additional studies and experiments helped to clarify the theory of magnetoreception, but so far no one has been able to pinpoint exactly where the bird magnetoreceptors are. In 2002, Wilchko and the team suggested that they were located in the right eye. But nine years later, another team of scientists published a response to this work in the journal Nature, claiming that they failed to reproduce the stated result.
The second theory was the beak - more precisely, iron deposits in the upper part of the beak in some birds. This idea was also rejected in 2012, when a team of scientists determined that the cells there were macrophages, part of the immune system. A few months later, David Dickman and Le-ching Wu suggested a third possibility: the inner ear. So far, the search for the causes of magnetoreception remains an area of ​​active research.
Fortunately for those who want to create a blue light, an understanding of where the birds know the direction of flight is not important. They just need to train on flights between two points. It is best to use a time-tested incentive in the form of food. If you feed the pigeons in one place and keep them in another, you can teach them to fly this route. It is also possible to teach pigeons to return home from unfamiliar places. In competitions, birds can fly up to 1,800 km , although the usual distance limit is considered to be 1000 km.
In the 19th century, pigeons carried messages packed in small tubes tied to their paws. Among the typical routes, there was a path from the island to the mainland city, from the village to the city center, and to other places where the telegraph wires had not yet reached.
One pigeon could carry a limited number of regular messages - it does not have the capacity of a drone from Amazon. But the invention in the 1850s of microfilm, made by French photographer Rene Dagron, allowed one bird to endure more words, and even images.
Ten years after the invention, when Paris was under siege during the Franco-Prussian War , Dagron proposed using pigeons to carry microphotographs of official and personal communications. The Dougron Post Office eventually transferred over 150,000 microfilms, which together contained more than a million messages. The Prussians appreciated what was happening, and took to the service of hawks and falcons, trying to intercept the cruise messages.
In the 20th century, the reliability of regular communication through mail, telegraph and telephone grew, and pigeons gradually moved into the field of hobbies and special needs, becoming the subject of study for rare connoisseurs.
For example, in the mid-1990s, a rafting company from Rocky Mountain Adventures in Colorado, included pigeon-mail in their travels along the Cache-la-powdered river. The photographic film taken along the way was loaded into small pigeon backpacks. Then the birds were released, and they returned to the headquarters of the company. By the time the rafters returned, the photos were already ready - pigeon mail gave uniqueness to similar souvenirs [ in the mountainous regions of Dagestan, some residents use pigeon mail , transferring data on flash cards / approx. trans. ]
A company spokesman said that the birds had to endure the transition to digital technology. Transferring SD cards instead of films, they strove to fly into the forest, and not to return to the pigeon house, possibly due to the fact that their cargo was much easier. As a result, when all the tourists gradually acquired smartphones, the company had to send pigeons to retire,
And my brief overview of messaging with pigeons would not be complete without mentioning the RFC from David Weizman, sent by him on April 1, 1990 to the Internet Engineering Council. RFC 1149 described IPoAC , Internet Protocol over Avian Carriers, that is, the transmission of Internet traffic through pigeons. The update , released on April 1, 1999, referred to not only security-related improvements (“There are problems with privacy regarding pigeon hunters” [ a word game using the concept of stool pigeon, which means bird as a stuffed bird, designed to lure birds while hunting and a police informer / comment. pered. ], but also questions of patenting (“Currently, there are trials about what came before - a carrier of information or an egg”).
In real-world testing of the IPoAC protocol in Australia, South Africa and Britain, birds competed with local telecommunications, the quality of which in some places left much to be desired. As a result, the birds won. Thousands of years serving as a means of messaging, pigeons do not give up today.
In the matter of establishing a connection between two points, nothing can defeat a pigeon. Except, perhaps, a rare hawk.
Avian espionage: in the 1970s, the CIA developed a tiny camera that turned post pigeons into spies
For thousands of years, carrier pigeons carried messages. And they were especially helpful in wartime. Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Arthur Wellesley Wellington (during the Battle of Waterloo ) - they all relied on bird communication. During World War I, US liaison forces and the navy held their dovecotes. The French government awarded the American bird named Sher Ami with a Military Cross for their valiant service during the Battle of Verdun. During World War II, the British held over 250,000 mail pigeons, 32 of which received the Maria Deakin medal , a special award for animals for military service [ from 1943 to 1949, the medal was awarded 54 times - thirty-two pigeons, eighteen dogs, three horses and ship's cat Simon / approx. trans. ].
And of course the US Central Intelligence Agency could not help turning pigeons into spies. In the 1970s, the CIA's research and development department created a small and lightweight camera that can be fastened to the pigeon’s chest. After graduation, a pigeon flew over the target of espionage on the way home. The motor inside the camera, running on batteries, scrolled the film and opened the shutter. Since pigeons fly just a few hundred meters above the ground, they could get much more detailed photographs than airplanes or satellites. Have the pigeon tests been successful? We do not know. This data remains classified to this day.
')
However, the CIA was not the first to use this technology. German pharmacist Julius Gustav Neubronner is usually considered the first person to train pigeons for photographing from the air. At the beginning of the 20th century, Neubronner was fastening cameras [of his own invention, using a pneumatic shutter opening / approx. trans. ] to the chest of the pigeons. The camera took pictures at regular intervals while the dove flew home.
The Prussian military studied the possibility of using Neubronner's pigeons for reconnaissance, but abandoned the idea, being unable to control the routes or take photographs of certain places. Instead, Neubronner began to make postcards from these photographs. Now they are collected in the 2017 book Pigeon Photographer . Some of them can be viewed on the Internet:
The main reason that pigeons can be used for messaging or surveillance is that they have magnetoreception — the ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field, determining their location, direction of movement, and orientation.
Early observations in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia showed that pigeons usually return home to their roost, even if released far from home. But only relatively recently, scientists began to understand how the magnetic orientation of birds.
In 1968, the German zoologist Wolfgang Wilchko described the magnetic compass charge , migratory birds. He watched the captured charges gather from one edge of the cage, and look in the direction in which they would move, being free. When Vilchko manipulated magnetic fields in the laboratory with the help of the Helmholtz rings , the charges reacted to this by changing their orientation in space, without visual or other clues.
It was more difficult to study the magnetoreception of post pigeons, since birds have to be released into their natural environment in order for them to show their characteristic behavior. Outside the laboratory, there is no simple way to control magnetic fields, so it was difficult to understand whether birds relied on other methods of orientation, for example, on the position of the sun in the sky.
In the 1970s, Charles Walcott , an ornithologist from New York University in Stony Brook, and his student Robert Green came up with a cunning experiment that made it possible to overcome such difficulties. At first they trained a flock of 50 post pigeons to fly in sunny and cloudy conditions from west to east, releasing them from three different points.
After the pigeons began to steadily return home, regardless of the weather, scientists dressed them in fashionable hats. They put coils with batteries on each pigeon — one coil surrounded the bird’s neck in the manner of a collar, and the other was glued to her head. Coils were used to change the magnetic field around the bird.
On sunny days, the presence of current in the coils had little effect on the birds. But in cloudy weather the birds flew to the house or in the direction from it, depending on the direction of the magnetic field. This suggests that in clear weather, pigeons are guided by the sun, and on cloudy days they mostly use the Earth’s magnetic field. Walcott and Green published their discoveries in Science in 1974.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Julius Gustav Neubronner used pigeons and cameras to obtain aerial photographs.
Additional studies and experiments helped to clarify the theory of magnetoreception, but so far no one has been able to pinpoint exactly where the bird magnetoreceptors are. In 2002, Wilchko and the team suggested that they were located in the right eye. But nine years later, another team of scientists published a response to this work in the journal Nature, claiming that they failed to reproduce the stated result.
The second theory was the beak - more precisely, iron deposits in the upper part of the beak in some birds. This idea was also rejected in 2012, when a team of scientists determined that the cells there were macrophages, part of the immune system. A few months later, David Dickman and Le-ching Wu suggested a third possibility: the inner ear. So far, the search for the causes of magnetoreception remains an area of ​​active research.
Fortunately for those who want to create a blue light, an understanding of where the birds know the direction of flight is not important. They just need to train on flights between two points. It is best to use a time-tested incentive in the form of food. If you feed the pigeons in one place and keep them in another, you can teach them to fly this route. It is also possible to teach pigeons to return home from unfamiliar places. In competitions, birds can fly up to 1,800 km , although the usual distance limit is considered to be 1000 km.
In the 19th century, pigeons carried messages packed in small tubes tied to their paws. Among the typical routes, there was a path from the island to the mainland city, from the village to the city center, and to other places where the telegraph wires had not yet reached.
One pigeon could carry a limited number of regular messages - it does not have the capacity of a drone from Amazon. But the invention in the 1850s of microfilm, made by French photographer Rene Dagron, allowed one bird to endure more words, and even images.
Ten years after the invention, when Paris was under siege during the Franco-Prussian War , Dagron proposed using pigeons to carry microphotographs of official and personal communications. The Dougron Post Office eventually transferred over 150,000 microfilms, which together contained more than a million messages. The Prussians appreciated what was happening, and took to the service of hawks and falcons, trying to intercept the cruise messages.
In the 20th century, the reliability of regular communication through mail, telegraph and telephone grew, and pigeons gradually moved into the field of hobbies and special needs, becoming the subject of study for rare connoisseurs.
For example, in the mid-1990s, a rafting company from Rocky Mountain Adventures in Colorado, included pigeon-mail in their travels along the Cache-la-powdered river. The photographic film taken along the way was loaded into small pigeon backpacks. Then the birds were released, and they returned to the headquarters of the company. By the time the rafters returned, the photos were already ready - pigeon mail gave uniqueness to similar souvenirs [ in the mountainous regions of Dagestan, some residents use pigeon mail , transferring data on flash cards / approx. trans. ]
A company spokesman said that the birds had to endure the transition to digital technology. Transferring SD cards instead of films, they strove to fly into the forest, and not to return to the pigeon house, possibly due to the fact that their cargo was much easier. As a result, when all the tourists gradually acquired smartphones, the company had to send pigeons to retire,
And my brief overview of messaging with pigeons would not be complete without mentioning the RFC from David Weizman, sent by him on April 1, 1990 to the Internet Engineering Council. RFC 1149 described IPoAC , Internet Protocol over Avian Carriers, that is, the transmission of Internet traffic through pigeons. The update , released on April 1, 1999, referred to not only security-related improvements (“There are problems with privacy regarding pigeon hunters” [ a word game using the concept of stool pigeon, which means bird as a stuffed bird, designed to lure birds while hunting and a police informer / comment. pered. ], but also questions of patenting (“Currently, there are trials about what came before - a carrier of information or an egg”).
In real-world testing of the IPoAC protocol in Australia, South Africa and Britain, birds competed with local telecommunications, the quality of which in some places left much to be desired. As a result, the birds won. Thousands of years serving as a means of messaging, pigeons do not give up today.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/449758/
All Articles