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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."
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.
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!
Amazing that it hasn't been hit by a backhoe in 100 years.
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.
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.
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.
The first message across the "All Red Route" telegraph cable was
. _ _ . _ _ . _ _ _ _ . _ _ _ . _ _ . . . . _ . _ . _ . . _
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.
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!