Image by Foto-Rabe from Pixabay
There’s a joke, about a Victorian football newspaper reporter, who takes a homing pigeon with him to the match so that he can swiftly return the score to his editor in order to make the evening paper. Both teams score a goal early on in the match but nothing much has happened for the last half hour and things are dragging on. With minutes to go and an eye on the pub the reporter writes “one all” on a slip of paper, scrolls it up and attaches it to the leg of his pigeon, releasing it to fly back to the office. And then, suddenly, with seconds to go before the whistle’s final blow one side scores another goal. Our reporter is seen calling pitifully after the bird “two one… TWO one!!” but alas the bird’s message is beyond editing.
Carrier pigeons have been used since ancient times to send messages and during World War 2 messages delivered by pigeons saved human lives (some of the pigeons were even awarded medals!). The speed of data transmission is a combination of how fast they can fly home and how quickly the human reading the message can get it to its final destination.
The internet, but made of pigeons
The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) regularly publishes documents on various internet standards and protocols (the way computers communicate with each other to send and receive information). These are called ‘Requests for Comments’, or RFC, and are an invitation for experts to comment on and contribute to the document. The IETF also publishes an annual joke RFC for April Fools’ Day and in 1990 it published one called “A Standard for the Transmission of IP (Internet Protocol) Datagrams on Avian* Carriers (RFC 1149)”. The document (you can read it here) considers the pros and cons of carrier pigeons for data transmission, noting that “bandwidth is limited to the leg length”. [*avian means ‘of or relating to birds’]
I bet you won’t be remotely surprised to learn that some people have tried to implement it!
Eleven years later a group in Norway attempted to send a packet of data via a carrier pigeon noting the amount of data transmitted and the time taken to send it. Despite the pigeon being distracted by other homing pigeons also in flight, and then deciding to rest on a roof for a bit instead of returning promptly to the home point, the experiment was a success (sort of) and the pigeon returned 64 bytes in around 6,000 seconds (6 million milliseconds!), about an hour and 40 minutes.
Not great in terms of broadband speeds but not bad as a proof of principle.
A few years later, in 2009, an employee at an IT company in South Africa complained that internet speeds were too slo-o-o-w and joked that it would be quicker to send the data by carrier pigeon. So a bet was made to see if a pigeon could beat the broadband upload speeds of the time and the company gamely, and perhaps somewhat bravely, tested this out. Unfortunately it turned out to be true and the pigeon promptly ‘pinged’ the packet of data by flying 60 miles in just over an hour while the computer-based version got a bit stuck and had sent less than 5% of the data. Oops.
Holiday snaps delivered and developed before you get back
A company in the US which offers adventure holidays including rafting used homing pigeons to return rolls of films (before digital film took over) back to the company’s base. Instead of attaching the film to the birds’ legs the pigeons wore customised backpacks. The guides and their guests would take loads of photos while having fun rafting on the river and the birds would speed the photos back to the base, where they could be developed, so that when the adventurous guests arrived later their photos were ready for them.
Watch out for data loss though, just make sure you’re not standing beneath one in case they drop any ‘packets’ on you… Happy April Fools’ Day (though everything in this post is actually true!).
– Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London
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Part of a series of ‘whimsical fun in computing’ to celebrate April Fool’s (all month long!).
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