Vesta, crossed semaphore flags are still the symbol of the Army's Signal Corps (using a system basically like the Navy's in their day), and the heliograph sets (mirror systems mounted on a tripod like surveyors use) the Signal soldiers used to send Morse turned out to beat the shit out of smoke signals. Napoleonic France had a network of semaphore stations to transmit urgent news and instructions back and forth from Paris as well, in the days before railroads and Morse telegraphy.
However, those visual signal systems all fell out of military use due to two reasons - first, the availability of faster and all-weather electric, then electronic, means of doing the same thing, and second, the advent of long-range indirect fire artillery (Which relies on those same superior communications) which made showing yourself to send visual signals a suicidal endeavor. In the civilian realm, there was always plenty of overflow from the military technology to accommodate any need, except for emergency expedients like signal mirrors, panels, downed aircrew ground signals, and such, and nobody's going to use a slower, shorter-range, less-reliable nonelectronic signal system unless they are forced to by circumstance.