among the many firsts in the unabridged version of “The Count of Monte Cristo”,is the first hack of high tech communications employed to manipulate securities markets, namely the Count pays off one of the tower operators of Claude Chappe’s semaphore telegraph to send the opposite information than was actually supposed to be transmitted, so that Spanish bonds collapsed when the false news reached Paris that the Spanish government had collapsed ... the Count bought the collapsing bonds for pennies on the dollar, bankrupting one of his foes in the process, and then turned around and sold the bonds for a massive gain when it was discovered a couple of days later that the news was false and that all was well with the Spanish government ...
btw, the unabridged (Penguin version) of “The Count of Monte Cristo” is the greatest novel ever written ...
Thanks for that info about “The Count of Monte Cristo”! I remembered somewhere that there was a financial collapse from the Semaphore system. I thought it might have been simple arbitrage from the speed of the information transmission, but I totally forgot about that plot in the book!
I’m not sure I read the unabridged Penguin version — I have an old hardcover copy I bought decades ago. It is a great tale!