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

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.

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

[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.

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

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?

[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?

[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.)

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.

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.