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The All-Red Route 100 Years On
An anonymous reader writes "On October 31, 1902, the first messages were sent along the All-Red Route -- a 5500km telegraph cable linking the whole of the British Empire. First envisioned in 1879, the long-decomissioned cable is still regarded as the longest single run of cable in the world."
From the article:
The cable station was open for business in the December of 1902 and thus Australia had a direct communications link with Norfolk Island, Fiji, Vancouver, Canada, across the internal telegraph system finally to Great Britain via connections to the Atlantic submarine cable..
There's your transatlantic cable!
Not sure where you got this number from the story. I see references to two lengths of cable totalling 7320 nautical miles.
By my math that is 13,556 km, but maybe I'm missing something.
An interesting article regarding the technology, business, and history behind laying of transcontinental cables is Mother Earth Mother Board, by Neal Stephenson. The tagline is "The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth."
This Wired Article by Neal Stephenson back in 1996 is all about the underseas fibre, the major players and what the world was like at the start of the web revolution. It weighs in at 56 pages (link to first page only).
In it he charts a new cable as it goes 28,000km around the world. Its well worth a read if you have time.
RTFA. The blurb was crap but the article is quite clear - the 5500KM Trans-Pacific Telegraph Cable linked Vancouver via Fanning and Norfolk Island, Fiji, to New Zealand and Southport, Queensland. Canada had already been linked to England via the Trans-Atlantic cable in 1866.
Just imagine the tension in such a long cable!
There are great tensions on cables when you roll them out on the bottom of an ocean. If the bottom is say 2 miles deep, then the top part must hold the weight of m2 iles of cable (minus the lifting force of the water). Creating cables strong enough was a great engineering challenge.
However, how long the cable is in total is utterly irrelevant - if the cable goes from the California to Hawaii or Australia does not matter.
Tor
Factoid: Did a little searching and found that APCN2 is the longest cable in the world sitting at 17000km long.
Anyways, I'm still amazed at the simple yet overwhelming idea of laying cables under oceans to link continents, and that it was done so long ago. Wasn't the Atlantic cable (or part of it) recently tested? I seem to recall that it was in relatively good shape.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Tout = Tin + LW Where:
Tout= Tension Out
Tin= Tension In
L = Length of Straight
Run W = Weight of Cable (per length)
= Coefficient of Friction = Angle of Bend
e = Natural Log
I proved an equation and stated facts. You merely stated unsubstantiated opinion, yet somehow have a 3 and I have a 2.
You did not prove any equation, you merely stated one. Anyway, the equation covers the tentions that arise when pulling a long cable into its conduit. Was the point you tried to make was that when you make such a long cable with a conduit, you have to make it in portions? I am sure you are right, but can you substantiate that this was a major cost driver of the project (it seems unlikely)?
There is, of course, no material source of tension in a stationary cable on the bottom of the ocean.
Tor