What Lies Beneath: The First Transatlantic Communications Cables

[LiberalArkie]

Snip

We tend to forget how isolated the world was in the 19th century. The invention and commercialization of telegraphy in the middle of the century lead to a rapid build-out of the lines and circuits needed to connect cities and towns across the world. People rapidly got used to communicating at the speed of light, but since the telegraph system was limited by wires strung on poles, the speed of communication across the ocean quickly dropped to the speed of the fastest ship.

Telegraph companies and bold entrepreneurs began dreaming of undersea telegraph lines, and even managed to lay a few across narrow bodies of water by the 1850s. But the dream of connecting Europe and America seemed too audacious, at least until Cyrus West Field came along. A self-made man and one of the richest in New York, Field was retired by his 30s and sitting on a load of capital. He decided to throw his resources into a transatlantic cable that would run on the Great Circle Route from Newfoundland to Ireland, with existing submarine cables completing the link from England to the United States.

These efforts were met by a series of disasters. The first cable snapped after only a few miles had been laid due to a nervous engineer who slammed on the laying gear brakes. With multiple expeditions over a four-year period, a cable was completed in 1858. The event was greeted by raucous celebrations by jubilant crowds on both sides of the ocean. Queen Victoria and President Buchanan exchanged ceremonial greetings over the line, but it must have been a boring conversation – line quality issues limited bandwidth severely enough to make the 96-word message take hours to transmit. Quality rapidly degraded, and soon a single word would take an hour to come across. Within a month, the line went dead completely, thanks to the efforts of one Wildman Whitehouse, chief electrician for the cable. He applied 2000 volts to cable and ruined it.

Subsequent cables were laid, some by Field’s company and some by others. Advances in cable design, and better hires in the engineering department, lead to greater durability, better bandwidth, and multiple circuits in the same cable. Eventually the technology advanced to multiplex telegraphy, and by the late 1870s a sophisticated web of lines connecting the Old World and the New World hummed with traffic. The hemispheres have been connected ever since.

Snip

http://hackaday.com/2016/03/18/what-lies-beneath-the-first-transatlantic-communications-cables/

[oneshooter]

1. During the Spanish/American War

The cable station in Cuba was a prime target. It as the only link between Spain and her forces in Cuba. The station was destroyed and the cable cut, leaving the Spanish forces with out communication off the island.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

2. My girlfriend has a peice of undersea telegraph cable from the 1870's

She ran Ethernet over it a few years ago just to prove it was possible.