Slashdot Mirror
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."
On October 31, 1902
Why does it take slashdot so long to report these things?
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
burst out shortly afterward....
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
100 years ago, you could call all over the British Empire. Today, you can't call next door because your phone company hosed your bill and you didn't pay them the $23,412 they think you owe.
...the two empty soup tins connected at each end.
How could one 5500KM cable link the mother country in Europe to all its colonies in Africa, south Asia, Australia and the Americas???
I was going to post a funny message in morse code on here, but I hit the lamness filter "too many caps".
:(.
Oh well - I guess morse code is lame now
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!
cable is still regarded as the longest single run of cable in the world
Obviously nobody has seen the mess under my desk!!!
...but how quickly can this cable you speak of provide me with easily downloadable, electronic images of nudity?
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
A 5500 mile long cable... that's 1/5 of the earth's circumference. Truly an engineering marvel.
Amazing that it hasn't been hit by a backhoe in 100 years.
geez, no wonder everyone in England complains about not having any bandwidth. Talk about oversold!
While the All-Red Route was an impressive achievement, the first transatlantic cable laid in the 1860's was a much more impressive and historically important achievement, given that it was the first time a transocean telegraph cable was attempted and it took several tries to successfully lay the cable between Ireland and Newfoundland.
What's interesting was it wasn't until the late 1950's and early 1960's that we finally achieved the technology to send voice messages on undersea cables on a large scale. Of course, today with fiber optic cables we can send even high-bandwidth data like video through these cables; a huge fraction of international Internet traffic nowadays are transmitted through these cables.
OTOH, the thought of that fat pipe moving *more* spam is scary.
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.
We salute you "www.pacific-cable.org" - and not least for saving us from a bushel of lame jokes about the /. effect...
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
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."
I'd be buggered if I had to break out the tone probe and trace the damn thing. I'd wager the batteries wouldn't even make it to the mainland.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
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.
The first message across the "All Red Route" telegraph cable was
. _ _ . _ _ . _ _ _ _ . _ _ _ . _ _ . . . . _ . _ . _ . . _
Ah! It's the Commie Reds! They have an All-Red telegraph line, and they've had it for a century! Mr. President, we cannot allow a telegraph gap!
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
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
I'm still pretty new to slashdot, so I thought I should practice...
:)
"Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!"
No, that doesn't seem right somehow...
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.
If you considered connecting up cities by telegraph as its first manifestation. The socialogical implications were similar- light speed communication, an inductry bubble, etc.
Al Gore's great-great grandfather even helped build it!
Cartographers usually colour British colonies Pink, not Red but maybe it was different in the 19th and early 20th century. Does a better informed Slashdotter know?
All British schoolchildren have been shown the map of the British empire at the height of its powers, and given the standard lecture about how much better it was when the world was Pink. It's an oft-heard saying by older British Citizens. "Ahhh... I can remember when the world was Pink, and good King George was on the throne... etc. etc."
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
Has anyone tried seeing if a signal could still be carried on the cable? Would be a cute test to see if it held up to the century of existance...
Or, just to play on the irony, run some packets over it do a bit of IRC or telnet chatting...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!