What Lies Beneath: The First Transatlantic Communications Cables (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: Our global information networks are connected by many many fibre optic cables sitting on the the ocean floor. The precursor to this technology goes all the way back to 1858 when the first telegraph cable connecting North America and Europe was laid. The story of efforts to lay transatlantic cables is fascinating. First attempts were met with many failures including broken cable in the first few miles of installation, and even frying the first successful connection with 2000 volts within a month of completion. But the technology improved quickly and just a century later we laid the first voice cables that used — get this — vacuum tubes in the signal repeaters. This seems a good time to link to one of my favorite-ever pieces in Wired, about a more modern but similarly impressive cable install, as told by Neal Stephenson.

Comments

An oldie but goodie:

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Hurr hurr, old people were soooo dumb!

[Anonymous Coward]

Millennials know ya just drop a facebook in the ocean and the interwebs connect themselvesz1!!one

ah yes

[hackertourist]

The Wired article is a favorite of mine, too. Well worth the read.

Thanks to that article, I learned about the Telegraph Museum in Porthcurno, at the western tip of Cornwall (UK). It's the location where many undersea telegraph cables landed. The museum includes the tunnels that were dug in WW2 to provide a secure shelter for the operators and equipment. It's a fascinating place. I especially liked the working telegraph links they use for demos.

Re:ah yes

[rockout]

You can still see one of the early undersea cables with nothing more than snorkeling gear.

Go to Hanauma Bay in Hawaii. A few dozen feet from the sandy beach, there exists a man-made channel that was cut through the coral in 1956. The ends of those cables are still there, about 10-15 feet underwater.

Re:ah yes

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL that telegraph museum website... looks like a domain squatting page at first glance. What horrible choice of layout, fonts, and stock photos.

From critical importance to sneezing pandas

[Anonymous Coward]

All this cost and effort has continued to grow such that essential international communications have turned in to the global ability to watch a sneezing panda scare the bejeezus out of its mother.

The Internet is made of cats... and it's awesome.

Blocked by the ad blocker blocker

[Monoman]

Hereâ(TM)s The Thing With Ad Blockers

We get it: Ads arenâ(TM)t what youâ(TM)re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on.
So, add us to your ad blockerâ(TM)s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. Weâ(TM)d really appreciate it.

Here's the thing with Ads.

I get it. You know I'm not on your site for the ads (or security and privacy risks). But ads keep your lights on. So, I'll ad you to my ad blocker's whitelist or pay $1 per week if Wired accepts all risk associated with the ads on their site as well as stops tracking my browsing. That way, I know you support our privacy and security as much as I support your journalism. I'd really appreciate it.

Re:Blocked by the ad blocker blocker

[Anonymous Coward]

I use ublock, and see no such message at Wired, or anywhere else - if you choose to continue to use adblock, then you're choosing to continue to see those messages.

Re:Blocked by the ad blocker blocker

[swm]

I don't use adblockers, and I get that message.
I don't know what they are keying on.
FlashBlock, maybe?

Re:Blocked by the ad blocker blocker

[nctritech]

It hides everything with a div called "veil" and it adds "hr-pinned" to all the items on the page, preventing you from removing the "veil" in the way and then being able to use the page. Just forbid wired.com in NoScript and it'll solve that problem easily.

Re:Blocked by the ad blocker blocker

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use archive.is and it also solves the problem: http://archive.is/19Msi

Re:Blocked by the ad blocker blocker

[Anonymous Coward]

ABP rule that will block Wired's ad blocker blocker: |http://www.wired.com/assets/load*blockadblock*

Re:Blocked by the ad blocker blocker

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the tip!

Re:Blocked by the ad blocker blocker

[PPH]

FlashBlock, maybe?

Perhaps. I don't even have Flash installed*. That may be why I get popped.

*Most porn sites have gone to HTML5 by now. So I can't find a reason for having Flash anymore.

Re:Blocked by the ad blocker blocker

[AthanasiusKircher]

The other thing about the quoted policy is that "$1 per week" seems not only arbitrary but quite excessive for many users. I probably read a Wired article once per month at most (well, at least until their recent policy went into effect). They certainly aren't making $4 in ad revenue off of me from the one article I view each month.

In fact, except for very heavy users of Wired, I can't imagine that they're making anywhere close to $1/week in ad revenue. Perhaps if they're also tracking you and selling your data, they'll make a little more -- but if so, this whole complaining about "ad blocking" is a bit dishonest: they really want to track you.

In general, I'm fine with sites that want to switch to some sort of paywalled model. But this cost isn't worthwhile to me given how much I visit that site. So I just don't visit Wired anymore.

The funny thing, of course, is that these anti-ad blocker campaigns seem to be targeting the people who are least likely to be responsive to ads. So, sites are complaining that that they "can't keep the lights on" without charging ad producers money for people who are least likely to actually use the ads.

In effect, they want to cheat ad producers out of their money by inflating their "impressions" numbers by serving up ads to people who don't care. I realize companies are struggling to survive, but this doesn't strike me as the most moral (or sustainable) practice either.

Now, if Wired wanted to charge me a "cost-per-viewed-article" fee of a few cents, that would probably be more than they'd make off of my ad views. And maybe I'd consider it. But there's no easy method to set up such a practical payment structure yet. Maybe something like that could ultimately be sustainable for online content producers; I don't know.

But if they want to charge me $4/month to view on average one article... no thanks. Bye, bye, Wired.

Re:Blocked by the ad blocker blocker

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mind ads.

I hate the click-bait garbage served up by Taboola and Outbrain.
If I could block those and keep the ads on Wired, I would.

Re:Blocked by the ad blocker blocker

[Geeky]

I went there without the adblocker and couldn't read the article because of the animated ad next to it that didn't stop. I can't concentrate on reading when there's something flashing in the corner of my eye like a migraine. So as well as the other risks, they're choosing to use ads that render their content unreadable.

Fun Fact

[ickleberry]

A lot of these early cables landed in Valentia Island, Co. Kerry but at some point they stopped being bothered about having the cable cover the shortest possible distance and the people living on that Island are most likely stuck on DSL for now

Get this

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys — get this — you won't believe it — get this — at a time when they — get this — used vacuum tubes — get this — they used them when — get this — they installed something.

Did you get it?! They used — get this — contemporaneous technology!

Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

We achieved all this without going into space? But I thought we only have technology because of space spinoffs?

"Reacts to adblockers"

[Anonymous Coward]

When linking to Wired or any other site requiring a whitelisting in ad blocker PLEASE put a note to the story. We already use this: (behind a paywall), so there is no excuse not to use (reacts to adblockers) or something similar. Otherwise it looks like you are intentionally supporting the advertisers.

The case of Wired was in Slashdot quite recently so this should not come as a surprise to the submitter of the story.

Re:"Reacts to adblockers"

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't require a whitelisting in an ad blocker.

It requires whitelisting in SHITTY ad blockers.

Re:"Reacts to adblockers"

[Anonymous Coward]

If both the submitter and the editor use a good ad blocker, how the fuck are they supposed to know how your shitty ad blocker will react to it?

But how?

[Calydor]

The article seems a bit of a fluff piece to me. Personally I am more curious how they did it.

When I try to imagine the process of putting a cable between Europe and America, I picture one of those gigantic container ships with an absolutely massive spool mounted on it. Ridiculous, I know, but how far off the mark am I in that mental picture? Sadly the article doesn't say anything about how the cables were laid, just that the first ones took four years to complete.

Re:But how?

[slashping]

I figure they use multiple smaller spools. The cable has repeaters in it anyway, so that's a good splice point.

Re:But how?

[50000BTU_barbecue]

http://lampes-et-tubes.info/sp...

Re:But how?

[hackertourist]

Not so far off the mark. The ship used for one of the first cables was the SS Great Eastern, the biggest ship in the world at that time. This was the only ship big enough to carry the whole cable in one piece.

Earlier cables had been laid in sections and spliced together, but the splices were found to be a weak point. They also complicated the laying operation, so for a long time, cables were laid in one piece. These days, splicing has become feasible again, and is done routinely e.g. to repair cables.

Re:But how?

[Melkman]

As slashping says the cable is manufactured in segments. However your mental image is not that far off as the segments are pretty long and need specialized ships for laying them. See for example http://offshore-fleet.com/data/cable-lay-vessel.htm.

Re:But how?

[hackertourist]

The Wired piece has good information on how cables are laid these days (and on every other aspect of the business).

Re:But how?

[Anonymous Coward]

There can be no mention of the "Great Eastern" without mentioning Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I mean that literally: Say it out loud- "Isambard Kingdom Brunel".
They don't make great Engineers with names like that these days. (A good runner up was James Clerk Maxwell.)

Re:But how?

[Strider-]

The first cables were run between the UK and Newfoundland, which is about the shortest distance possible across the Atlantic. The process of storing it on the ship is actually not a whole lot different than it is today; in the ship's hold they constructed giant drums and coiled the cable up in it. As the ship moved along through the Atlantic, it was played out the back. The cable itself is actually not all that thick, so you can store an incredible amount in a ship's hold. Also, it's not spooled up in the traditional sense, as getting that much mass moving would be problematic and dangerous. Instead it was coiled, probably in an over-under type fashion to keep the twist out, and then it could just pull off the top of the drum.

Re:But how?

[Strider-]

It wasn't until the trans atlantic telephone cables that they had to put amplifiers at the bottom of the sea. The first telegraph cables were nothing more than a long insulated wire, spliced together. The first cables were laid by the SS Great Eastern, which was one of the largest ships of her era, and she could carry enough cable, coiled in her holds, to complete the entire run between the UK and Newfoundland.

Re:But how?

[MightyMartian]

Must have been a helluva job coiling all that cable.

Cool Map

[Rob Lister]

Here's a Google Map of world's undersea cables.

http://www.cablemap.info/

I'm not certain of the accuracy but it looks cool.

Re:Cool Map

[Rob Lister]

Edit to add: you can really see the politics in that map.

Re:Cool Map

[DarkOx]

Really,

It looks to me like it mostly makes sense in terms of geography and population densities. The noteworthy exception being there is so little between Russia and Alaska.

Oh God, my eyes

[UberVegeta]

Is it just me, or is white on a dark background a terrible way to render text for any length of time spent actually reading? I'm genuinely interested to know whether other Slashdotters experience "lines" burned into their vision from reading Wired and other sites like it. When I look away from the screen I can still tell that I've been reading something with horrible contrast options. It's 2016, is it really necessary to do the whole "you're a 1337 hax0r because you used d@rk backgr0undz" thing?

Re: Oh God, my eyes

[Type44Q]

Turn down your brightness, perhaps?

Re:Oh God, my eyes

[tmp31416]

/* old fart alert */

if you're old enough, you'll remember that's how things were displayed back in the day. upper case white characters on a black background, or light blue on black (adm-3a, people?), or bright green on a dark green-ish background (lanparscopes, some hazeltine terms), etc. and that didn't bother us at all.

but now, like you, i can't read such colour schemes and do experience the "burned in my vision" feeling too. maybe it's to be expected when you are older?

i wouldn't say it's to give off a "1337 hax0r" vibe, but rather it's for the *retro look*, for the younger ones who never experienced it.

(well, that's my theory and i'm sticking with it)

Re:Oh God, my eyes

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually find it easier on the eyes than the usual black text on white background. My experience is that black text on white is great for a reflective display like text on paper, but white text on black is much better for a luminous display like a computer monitor (though maybe not kindle like devices).

But then I'm ye olde enough to remember green text on black. In fact my default editor is set to that :)

The Victorian Internet

[OzPeter]

Once you have cables, you get an online community - as described in The Victorian Internet

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers is a 1998 book by Tom Standage. The book was first published in September 1998 through Walker & Company and discusses the development and uses of the electric telegraph during the second half of the 19th century and some of the similarities the telegraph shared with the Internet of the late 20th century.

The central idea of the book posits that of these two technologies, it was the telegraph that was the more significant, since the ability to communicate globally at all in real-time was a qualitative shift, while the change brought on by the modern Internet was merely a quantitative shift according to Standage.

Re:The Victorian Internet

[MightyMartian]

The telegraph really does stand out as one of the great inventions of human history, up there with agriculture, writing, gunpowder and the printing press. Near instantaneous communication revolutionized just about everything. What many of us have been doing for the last century and a half afterwards is simply building on the first telecommunications networks.

Re:The Victorian Internet

[slimjim8094]

I've read that book several times. Well worth the read - talks about the development of the Morse electric telegraph from the earlier mechanical and needle designs, the extensive pneumatic tube links between post offices, and the first undersea cables and some of the technical rivalries that developed. It even talks about multiplexing and ciphers and stock tickers and so on.

One of my favorite stories is how comparatively late Morse&c were to the party. There were working electric telegraphs but they were fantastically complex, using multiple wires to move needles around to point at letters. There's the famous story about developing the code by going through a bin of printer's type to figure out letter frequencies (which is why 'e' is the shortest encoding). Morse's one-wire telegraph was the most straightforward and reliable - but even Morse started out overly complex with a tricky machine that drew the dots and dashes on moving strip of paper. It didn't occur to them that before long operators would simply use the ticking sound to hear the code. In retrospect the telegraph would've happened much sooner if people had realized it didn't have to be so complicated in order to work.

Yet another SJW headline on SJW Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Stopped reading at "Trans".

DATA in the DEEPS, an artistic interlude

[TheRealHocusLocus]

[repost]

Open music in different tab.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaqTVVq-vZ4

[pause for music to begin]
OK, here we go.

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar---
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world---here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat---
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth---
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, 'Let us be one!'

~Runyard Kipling, 'Deep Sea Cables'

This artistic interlude brought to you by Interwoven Socks.
We now rejoin your jolly Slashdot discussion.

Who wil block the ad blocker blockers?

[radarskiy]

"if Wired accepts all risk associated with the ads on their site as well as stops tracking my browsing."

Considering that ad blocker blockers have been used to distribute malware, I am not hopeful on this point.

Good documentary on this here

[Anonymous Coward]

PBS American Experience & Transatlantic Cable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

get this — vacuum tubes

[Anonymous Coward]

"But the technology improved quickly and just a century later we laid the first voice cables that used — get this — vacuum tubes in the signal repeaters."

Why the "get this"? Vacuum tubes are perfectly good devices, useful for rectifying, amplifying, oscillation, microwave emitters (there is one in every (I think) microwave oven) etc.
Would you prefer they waited until transistors were invented?

To Whitelist in Adblock Plus

[Anonymous Coward]

Options - Customized - @@||www.wired.com^$document