LOC, Brady Handy Collection [PD-US]
Brigadier General Albert J Myer c. 1880
By the time hand flags had been adopted for semaphore signalling in the Royal Navy, signalling with hand flags was well established on the other side of the Atlantic from the early days of the Civil War, with the adoption by both the US Army and Navy of a system developed by Albert J Myer. They became known as Wig-Wag Flags.
LOC, Brady Handy Collection [PD-US]
Brigadier General Albert J Myer c. 1880
While semaphore required two flags, Myer employed one flag only with a sharp swing to the left denoting ‘1’ and to the right, ‘2’. A vertical movement up and down in front of the signalman denoted ‘3’. The alphabet was encoded with permutations of ‘1’s and ‘2’s with one, two or three ‘3’s denoting end of word, sentence or message.
Flags were issued to signalmen in three sizes: 2ft, 4ft and 6ft with colour variations suited to different conditions.1 The chosen flag was tied to a hickory staff supplied in 4ft jointed lengths; the combination preferred by the newly formed Signal Corps being the 4ft white flag on a 12ft pole. The red flag was more generally used at sea, with the smaller flags reserved for covert signalling.
