From the Stone Age to the present, people have shown a definite need to send messages to one another despite being far away. In 1084 B.C., a chain of fires on mountaintops was used to relate the news of the fall of Troy to people in Greece. In the past, native people in the Americas used smoke from fires to transmit messages. They developed a code in which certain combinations had special meanings. For example, two parallel columns of smoke indicated the successful return of a war party.