TAT-1 Telephone Cable: Bridging the Atlantic
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- Опубліковано 21 кві 2021
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TAT-1 was the world's first transatlantic telephone cable, laid between 1955 and 1956 and inaugurated on September 25, 1956. Operating until 1978, TAT-1 carried over 300,000 calls per year - including traffic from the Washington-Moscow Hotline - and laid the technological groundwork for dozens of cables - both public and private - laid over the following decades.
The two ships that laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable didn't sail from each side of the Atlantic and met in the middle. They started the cable laying by splicing the cable in the middle of the Atlantic and then the two ships sailed in opposite directions.
That makes a lot more sense because they wouldnt have to find each other at sea while carrying a huge cable. they just had to go back to port.
That makes more sense.
It also allowed the ships to stay in touch with each other proving the health of the cable over greater and greater laid distance.
@@frydemwingz Yes, but they had to find two ports going back instead of one.
you're actually retarded lmao @@fromthepeanutgallery1084
How I learned to stop worrying and love the intro
Dismisses Lord Kelvin. That's a bold strategy Cotton. Let's see how that plays out for him.
Another great episode. In the early 2000s I worked as a diver laying sub sea fiber optic cable. I would ride a under water vehicle that would cut a trench for the cable and push the cable into the trench. The vehicle used a 400 horse power water pump to cut the trench and blow water out of rear facing jets to propel the vehicle forward
Now THATS a cool job! What a wild story to have, and such a niche but important job. Kudos to you sir
Amazing. What depths did you operate at and what routes did you work on? I assume it was the sort of job oilrig divers did to relax? 😅 Would love to hear about some of the problems you encountered...
I want one of those.
@@ChristopherWoods it’s nice to see the interest in this. I will explain it in a little more depth. The deepest we would operate would be around 100’ and we would go all the way to the shore. The cable was already laid down by another ship. Our under water vehicle would get lowered down to the cable at around 100’ the vehicle would straddle the cable. The vehicle was attached to a barge on the surface of the water by a cable and a pump hose. The water pump was on the barge. The water was pumped down to the underwater vehicle where it cut the trench and pushed the underwater vehicle forward. Since the underwater vehicle was attached to the barge it would pull the barge along behind it. Getting the jets adjusted could be tricky. If there was too much pressure on the cutting jet it would blow the vehicle off of the bottom. I had it flip over on me once. You never could see much when you were operating the vehicle. When the vehicle was stopped you would see exposed cable in front of you and buried cable behind you. The Company I worked for was Maripro out of Southern California. The job I worked on was in the Perth and Fremantle area in Australia. I also worked on the oil rigs in Santa Barbara and did Salvage diving in the San Francisco Bay Area
@@jimstratford4577thank you for answering, and the follow up info. The internet is full of nerds like us, and these types of videos bring us together. Fascinating work!
So how did Churchill and Roosevelt talk to each other in WW2? I started work in 1968 as an apprentice at the Cable and Wireless training centre in Porthcurno. We knew that this was where a lot of transatlantic cables came to shore and that dug into the cliffs were tunnels housing the transatlantic telecomms kit. It was all closed off and we weren't allowed in. In fact the cliffs were covered in brambles and the entrance to the tunnels was covered over. Now it has been opened up and the public can go and visit it as a museum. You know when you are really old, when the place you started work is a museum!
I always understood they used a radio circuit. Later in the war the circuit was encrypted.
You know its going to be a brilliant channel when host wears a bowtie and doesa fantastic rendition of dr strangeglove
I heard a story related to the US-USSR hotline as it ran through Finland. Some time ago there were some construction work going on, when an excavator caught and snapped a cable. The workers were puzzled as they had checked the public records for any cables and there wasn’t supposed to be any there. As they were wondering the situation, a bunch of black cars drove over, and bunch of angry looking men got out. It was apparently the cable for the Hotline, it wasn’t marked on any public records. Now, at that point it was not in active use, but it was there as a backup. And they couldn’t really blame the workers as they couldn’t know it was there.
I knew a guy who did power line work in Saudi Arabia. Setting a pole they dug up an unmarked phone cable. Turned out to be a major govt phone line. He was in trouble. It wouldn't get marked because it s location was secret yet if the cable got hit scalps were on the line.
where in Finland and what year? i have never heard this story and i'm Finnish.
@@johanpalola I’m Finnish as well. I don't know the year, but it happened in Lohja. It wasn't really reported anywhere, as it was semi-secret. I heard it from someone who was somewhat connected to the event.
The line getting cut is not unheard of. As Wiki says:
"The primary link was accidentally cut several times, for example near Copenhagen by a Danish bulldozer operator, and by a Finnish farmer who ploughed it up once."
8:44 the decorative border in this shot is a linesmans splice, the traiditional way of attaching wires without solder. Neat little detail
Also referred to as a 'Western Union'. Best inline splice ever :)
Wasn’t this typically also soldered or welded? I didn’t think it was designed to replace soldering, but rather to ensure maximal joint strength without disrupting the cable’s linear shape. I’m happy to be wrong here, but I have always used it in concert with soldering myself.
I remember, as an Internet Engineer, being at an early (probably c. 1990) presentation on one of the transatlantic Internet links. The presenter showed a graph of the amount of traffic each way over a day and was showing, "here we see early morning in Europe and everyone downloading from the US, and later the traffic goes the other way as the Americans wake up and start doing cross pond loading." There were several other effects you could see, including lunch hours. But there was one late day peak the presenter didn't have a story for, one of the audience responded, "oh, that's all the late night traffic of Americans downloading porn from the Netherlands." :-)
The internet is for porn! ua-cam.com/video/eWEjvCRPrCo/v-deo.html
Go america!
Of course, without fibre, we wouldn't have the modern Internet, as copper cables across the pond couldn't handle the traffic.
1990? If you're talking about downloading images, I suspect this must have been at least 1993, but I could be mistaken. If it was 1990, those people downloading porn must have been at large institutions. At the time, that would have had to have been FTP site traffic, as the web didn't even exist, and I don't think dialup internet service did, either. There was binary sharing on USENET, but that traffic was spooled and transmitted between nodes; people would have been downloading from a server on their side of the pond. The transmission of that data wasn't coupled to when people viewed it.
In 1990, the fastest modems available IIRC were V.32 @ 9600bps, and they were EXPENSIVE.
Any home user would have been dialing up to a terminal server and logging in to a UNIX or VMS machine.
But hey, the links were WAY slower back then, so perhaps there really was a surge in traffic, driven by a select [relatively] few people connecting to FTP sites.
I can still remember the days when making an intercontinental phone call was very expensive , poor quality, often had to shout to be heard, and you sometimes had to book the call because the line just wasn't available.
Great history lesson. I'm a boomer and during Boy Scout meetings we would sometimes watch Bell Telephone System movies and one of them I fondly remember was about the TAT-1 telephone cable.
OMG, I caught the reference after the third word into the phone! Peter Sellers would be proud of you.
Loved the Dr. Strangelove reference. This channel is very underrated.
As a boy, my father and I visited the Oban transatlantic cable base as a guest of an employee there. We observed three cables carrying telecommunications from London, one in use and two backups. We also looked in the battery room the rotary no-interrupted power which powered the base from mains electricity or battery and the battery bank had generator sets that were used if a power interruption was longer than 10 minutes?
The cables I think were CAN-TAT 1, 2 and 3. Radio was used, modulating 10 channels on 10 carriers. That was modulated on to 10 super carriers giving 100 channels, then 10 more creating a total of 1,000 channels. Most of them were digital, some voice and the majority not used.
We also said hello to the Canadian guy in the Canadian section. It was the most interesting visit I have ever had. The guy showing us around was the husband of the lady running the B+B, he pulled the live cable from London and the circuit immediately switch to one of the other cables without any of the users detecting an interruption, he told us. This visit probably occurred in the late 1960s?
Heavyside was an absolute genius. So few have ever heard of the fellow.
Heaviside is mostly known for his "Heaviside Layer", an ionised band high in the atmosphere which reflects radio signals.
HeavIside, not HeavYside
The book "The Victorian Internet" goes into a lot more detail about how our modern telecommunications got started with the telegraph. Including some more stories of trouble with the 1st transatlantic cables. Well worth reading.
Just finished that book a month or so ago. Well worth the read!
@@hagerty1952 i agree, it gives us a look back at how things got started.
@@charlesbrentner4611 - It's where I got the info on my other long comment.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room.
Still great 2 years later, thank you Gilles!
You've reminded me I need to have my yearly viewing of Dr Strangelove. Best Kubrick film ever imo.
Not only did they not trust transistors, they used vacuum tubes designed in the early thirties. These had demonstrated reliability and long life.
The Soviets had a similar sentiment - I've dealt with a lot of Soviet post-military stuff (from tank helmets to high-power rectifiers, antennas, you name it), a LOT of it was tube-based, even things made well into the 80s, hell, 90s even (that's literally post-Soviet, but still).
A common explanation that I've heard is that it's more resistant to nuke-related EMP, and the use of vacuum tubes was a protective measure. I'm an idiot with almost no background in electronics, so I'd be glad if anyone could confirm or deny it, or otherwise comment on it, 'cause I'm definitely interested.
@@michaireneuszjakubowski5289
Sadly, i don't know exactly either.
for high power and high- frequency stuff, tubes stuck around longer, i think. Like, radio transmission and radar.
Semiconductors seemed to have trouble reaching those frequencies and power levels.
Also, microwave ovens use magnetron tubes, so they are still alive and will propably stay around :)
@michaireneuszjakubowski5289, what @nos9784 said is definitely true but there is also another factor that plays an huge role in military, nuclear, aerospace, banks, security, manufacturing and other very mission critical fields:
*If it works enough, don't touch it!*
In these fields, a new technology may be accepted only if it carry some very beneficial pros (and only after weighting the cons!): if there are no beneficial pros (or the pros are only minimal), there is no need for a newer technology!
In other words, they kept inventing new technologies but they kept the older ones until some very useful new features were available.
@@michaireneuszjakubowski5289 oh, about the emp resistance thing:
Afaik, it's just a question of heat capacity due to part size.
If you compare a tiny fleck of silicon encased in resin to a bunch of wire grids and (partially oxide coated) sheet metal in a glass or steel tube, one will be easily vaporized by induced overvoltage and the other will just slightly increase in temperature.
@@nos9784 Of course, transistors and integrated circuits have been proven to be far more reliable than tubes and consume a fraction of the power. Also, even tubes, such as the magnetron and traveling wave tube, can't keep up with the ever higher frequencies that will be used in modern microwave systems, such as millimetre wave 5G.
I went snorkeling at Hanauma Bay in Hawaii a few months ago. I went out past the reef, where the water gets deeper, and I noticed two cables on the ocean floor. These are the HAW-1 cables, landing in the bay (why they chose to land the cable in a place of such beauty, I will never know). It uses the same cable technology as TAT-1.
Vacuum tubes? Inside the telephone cables? 😮 That is deserving of its own video. Not much written about this. Be interesting to know how they were made. (special tubes were designed) How they were maintained, etc. I'd like to know how they insulated it from the water pressure. Are those amplifiers still down there?
Please do a video on this. 😊
Yes! Please?
I did some work to support TAT-8, the first optical fiber transatlantic one. Interestingly, because of power losses over the distance, the repeater power is wired in series, just like the old Christmas tree lights. They have circuitry to bypass and switch to a different portion of the repeater so one repeater failure doesn' t silence the whole cable.
Wired like Christmas tree lights seems like a good analogy.
I recall reading that fiber repeaters have to be just a few km apart and because of this, the power supply at one end needs to sit at about +20kV and at the other end -20kV, to give overall about 40kV from end to end. As a result, the repeater bang in the middle of the ocean gets whats left, +6V and -6v from each end at a few hundred milliamps.
There must be some fascinating out of band control systems to be able to manage failed sites, particularly as repairs equire unsealing the cable at sea after dredging it up from the seabed.
I read an interesting reply on Quora from someone called Bill Wing who worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; he mentioned that previously every tenth or so repeater site was called a "region site" where media conversion back to electrons occurred, cleaned up then "relaunched" as light again. Mad science!
Nowadays the technology is even more magic - vastly improved 100% optical amplification end to end, Erbium doped fiber amps, Raman effect amplifiers, coherent optical transmission techniques and improved DSP at both ends. There's some brilliant pictures of some of this kit online.
Airport runway lights are similar, 24v lamps in series with perhaps two or three KV across the lot. Special short circuit fuses/resistors would operate if a filament failed, often two lamps per fitting so it all still worked.
@@howardsimpson489 so adjusting the brightness as you see done sometimes is basically nothing more than a voltage adjustment?
Fun fact! I have a silk tapestry on my wall depicting one of the ships that laid the transatlantic telegraph cables in 1866, the SS Great Eastern. Its a souvenir from the Yokohama Silk Museum in Japan and I bought it at an antique fair not knowing what the ship was. I only later found out when I learned of the ship while researching transatlantic ocean liners and was able to indentify the distinct 6 masts, paddle wheels, and 5 funnels, two aft of the paddle wheels and three forward.
The Dr Strangelove reference was top notch 👌 😂🎉 Greater dimension is added to that movie. Thank you. 😊🙏
My grandfather was vice-president and secretary of COTC at the time the cable was laid, and was at the inaugural ceremonies in London. Afterwards he was presented with a souvenir length of cable not unlike the one in this video, except it's a desk set, it only has one length of cable in the centre, a pen one side, pencile on the other, an inkwells in front of the own, and a cigarette lighter in front of the pencil (because of course it did, everybody smoked back then), an between them a little plauqe engraved metal plaque with the whole "presented to blah blah" on clear acrylic (im assuming?) base.
In addition to that, he was also given a short, flat piece of the raw cable, itself, lopped off from the main spool before before it was all spliced in and hooked up on the Newfie side (I'm sure they lopped off a huge length and cut it into hundreds of such souvenirs), which my grandmother gave to me as a gift shortly before she passed. And, absolutely coolest of all, he was given *the* actual phone (or at least one of *the* actual phones) that Her Majesty used to place one of Her first transatlantic telephone calls, and that phone is sitting right here right on front of me right now. It's one of most prized possession, because it's family heirloom and a link to my family's history, and it's also a piece of and link to world history. Plus, Her Majesty the Queen used, I'm a staunch monarchist and, to me, having the phone that She, personally, used on an historic occasion is just *really* effin' cool.
Nice channeling Peter Sellers!
I could kiss this man for his correct pronunciation of Newfoundland
Best darn intro ever!!
The electric telegraph revolutionised communications and the laying of a 547 km submarine cable between Balaklava and Varna in April 1855 enabled officials in London and Paris to communicate with their commanders in the Crimea within 24 hours.
Another feature of the Gt Eastern that made her invaluable for cable laying, was that he had both Paddles and a Propeller and hence could hover in place.
This was actually more of a drawback as it allowed the brass in the capital who had no real concept of conditions on the ground to micromanage the siege of Sevastopol. With predictable results...
It's an interesting story. back in about 1975 I used a Mirror Galvanometer (by then a much sleeker design). Looking at early versions of technical equpmnt, such as a gold-leaf electroscope (the tool once used to measure the charge on an electron) makes one wonder how in hell they ever got a result.
Human ingenuity, and lot's of failed attempts.
Thank you for your high quality content!
An excellent film. I worked in a cable factory testing, jointing and developing telecomms cables inclding undersea.(25 years) A really interesting film.
Ummm... If you refer to this UA-cam article, it is VIDEO, not film. None of that stuff with the holes down the side.
semantics. If Ii watch moving picures its a film.@@The_DuMont_Network
The cables on ascension island landed in comfortless cove, there are the remnants of cables there to this day
I've only discovered this channel - how come you've got less than 50k subscribers? This is professional stuff here, both in terms of presentation and content alike.
Kudos to you, and may the algorithm bless you!
I completely agree. I only found it a few weeks ago, but I really don't undertand the lack of love from the UA-cam algorithm here. He makes good stuff.
Cuz people are tarded these days? This channel would have been huge in the 50s.
I just found this channel yesterday, gives off some technology connection vibes but of course this channel is still unique and the production value is very good for its following
Anyone who likes Technology Connections but doesn't necessarily *require* sarcasm at all times would really enjoy this channel. I love sarcasm, but the non-sarcasm here is good too. You're right, this is some quality stuff here! @@5skdm
Fascinating! Thankyou for that!
Absolutely fascinating, I loved the audio clips I didn't even know existed.
I love these videos where you mix history and technology. Thank you!
Each time when this initiative about the laid cable crossing the atlantic ocean pass my reading I am in disbelieve...that must have been such a mind boggling and for sure lucrative undertaking. For the people living during those times this must have been something similar like we all got internet cable..
I laughed so hard at the intro. One of my favorite movies!
Just found this channel and have been enjoying your content. The Dr. Strangelove opening was brilliant. One of Sellers best scenes!
Telestar was close behind.
I watched the first broadcast and saw the bright satellite moving across the sky above Cornwall.
...and then they nuked it :(
I also remember watching the first television through Telstar (only 1 e) when I was a kid. It was the first live TV across the pond.
@@James_Knott
Was it Cliff Michelmore at the British end? I can't be certain now.
For the other side of the moon it was the 'The Sky at Night' presenter. We had to wait for it coming out before the Russians could make contact.
@@20chocsaday No idea. I was only 9 YO at the time and just remember seeing it, but not who was on it.
Super presentation thank you
Fascinating video. Never even thought about transatlantic cables, but just sat and watched this from start to finish
Thanks for your time spent on this video. I seem to recall a few TATs going though the repeater stations that I maintained in the UK in my late teens & early twenties. We had to monitor the air pressure using mercury manometers.
Wow! I heard stories about first cables but this video explained everything on a much detailed level
Thanks for that simple explanation of how heavyside worked out the problem with the early comms cables and how co-axial cables overcame the issues. I am amazed at how anyone was able to "dredge up" a cable from the bottom of the ocean, miles deep. That must have taken a lot of swear words.
just grab it on the land side and pull really hard
Heavyside is a great name for a layer.
And when you were grappling the cable from the deepest parts, you needed _really_ _strong_ swear words. :-)
@@20chocsaday HeavIside, not HeavYside
@@The_DuMont_Network
Thank you.
Love the history of communication's cables. I use to be a telephone linesman / cable splicer in the U.S. Air Force in the 1980s and 90s. Loved it. Thanks for that history lesson about transatlantic cable's.👍
Excellent video!
Never expected to hear guttapercha used in ocean cable construction. As a dentist, I place guttapercha frequently in root canal(endodontically treated) teeth. During dental school, they always expressed "guttapercha won't hurt'cha." Many materials have been tried, but eventually fail, and guttapercha remains the stalwart. Originally, used in the core of golf balls, found its way into teeth and undersea cables.
Thank you for explaining the construction of the cable. Most interesting. I have a souvenir section purchased on Valencia Island a few years back.
Great episode.
First time viewer of this channel, subscribed already! I watch Technology Connections and Curious Marc, and this channel seems to have an energy and special interests lying somewhere in between both. Looking forward to seeing the channel grow, it deserves it!
Very informative and technically completely accurate presentation, thank you!
Very interesting and well presented episode.
Thanks for a fascinating video. Some of this I knew already in pieces, but it was great to hear you explain the whole story all the way through like this.
I shall definitely be looking through your other videos.
I used to work for the company that owned AC-1 and my team was responsible for designing customers' services using this cable.
FANTASTIC....introduction..a movie classic.
Brilliant intro!😅 wonderful scene.💥
Your theme music is beautiful. It gives me fanciful notions that our humble species can match it with any superior interstellar beings with our music, art, culture,
Nice information. Than you.
Very interesting! My mother's cousin - David Alford was on the Monarch as a navigator/second officer (not sure which) when TAT-1 was laid down. He can be seen (and elsewhere) on the left at 10:47 in this video: ua-cam.com/video/yqRj3lvvg7Y/v-deo.html . He went on to skipper the Monarch - and occasionally the Alert - in the '70s.
both, I should think -- deck officers on cable laying ships had a (well deserved) reputation in the MN of being the finest navigators out there (pre gps, astro-nav --sextant, ephemeris,six figure logs, pencil & paper), & on most ships the second mate was the main navigator, though the mate would take star sights (as the 4-8 is the watch to do this in) & the old man & cadets would all take the noon sun..
I think it's important to talk about dispersion. In an unbalanced transmission line, the square wave breaks up into it's Fourier Series components. Heavyside and Kelvin bother discovered the telegrapher's equation at the same time.
* *its* Fourier Series components (no apostrophe)
* bother => both, I think.
I enjoy all your videos I don’t leave as many comments as I would like lm so absorb in the content ❤ a lot of good information
This cha. El is a gem
Fascinating. It must have been late 56, or early 57. that I recall a neighbour coming around to my grandmother's house to use her phone to call relatives in the USA. It all had to be pre-booked, and tightly timed.
Though not quite as early, I also recall when those calls had to be booked and they were a few dollars/minute, when a dollar was a significant amount of money.
Grew up in Clarenville, went on a school tour of the cable building in 72/73. Very unimposing building. The thing I remember was the basement was filled with large lead/acid battery's in case there was a power failure.
Excellent video thank you. I worked for Western Union based in Snow Hill London when they were still running their Cablegrams Service. I was a young enthusiastic telecommunications engineer and I provided maintenence service at the London end of the TAT cables. As well as telegraphy I worked with cutting edge 9.6KBPS Codex Modems and repairing the amazing COM2 system you mentioned which had 4-6 bearer telephony channels and through time assignment speech interpolation provided 8-12 (can't remember the exact numbers!) simultaneous calls from the dealer board systems in city trading houses.
Fascinating thank you. As a kid I can remember talking to my father who was working in the USA in 1972-3, we had to book the call to him in the UK about three hours before the call was made and the voice delay was a number of seconds possibly three. I now talk to my friends in the UK which is over four times that distance from Australia to the UK with no voice delay and it's often a clearer call than many local calls I make, obviously fiber optic cable links. Why do people think their calls run via space satellites from populated areas? I'm sure it's under ocean fiber optic cables for the majority of all international calls today and sadly these cables that people take for granted without thinking about the infrastructure of them are very vulnerable to attack!
Really well done presentation, as usual (and by the way, thank you so much for not interlarding a bunch of mindless stock video).
Great intro gilles keep up the good work
As a cable engineer I very much enjoyed this and I am very envious of your artefact. The Oban landing station is abandoned now by all accounts sadly.
i recognized the scene within three words
I had to look up the Heavyside condition to get an explanation of what the two resistive values refer to. R is the series resistance per unit length, G is the parallel conductivity (i.e. leakage between conductors) per unit length. Note that separating the conductors further will decrease G but will also proportionally decrease C and so have no net effect on signal dispersion.
HeavIside, not HeavYside
INCREDIBILE VIDEO
Thank you Dr. Strangelove.
This was fascinating technically and socially.
fantastic! subscribed.
Loved it!
I have visited both Valentia Island (Ireland) and Heart's Content (Newfoundland), both were endpoints for early transatlantic cables. The Cable Museum in Heart's Content is really worth a visit.
Thanks for sharing. 😉👌🏻
Only 16k views and 51.4k subs in 2 years. This video is absolutely amazing by the way
I worked for AT&T in NY in the late 1950's. TAT1 came thru my department. In contrast to the cable repeaters TASI was all solid state. (transistors) The first TV sent from Europe to the US was a video of Queen Elizabeth. They had it on tape and slowed it down enough to reduce the bandwidth for TAT1. This was then recorded on tape and sped up to broadcast it on TV. This was a very nice presentation. On a note each repeater contained 3 tubes. They were rated for 20 years use each. If one burned out they could switch to the next. Total 60 years service.
I wonder how TAT1 held up to nuclear tests both above and underwater. There must be a whole subset of data-cables for nuclear tests. Top-secret data-cables!
TAT1 was in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. There were no bomb tests conducted there. The repeaters (amplifiers) for TAT1 and TAT2 were all powered by vacuum electron tubes. These are impervious to and not effected by radiation. I have seen a film while I was working at AT&T that was taken at Hiroshima shortly after the blast that showed that any buried telephone cables and equipment running under the streets was unaffected. This had a lot to do with AT&T burying entire switching centers later on. There is one just North of NYC in case NY should be knocked out.
@@vinquinn But then, NYC was taken out by Hurricane Sandy, a few years back, flooding the copper cables and telecom offices.
I'm loving your intro. Just beautiful man 😂
I’ve heard a lot about the Atlantic cable, but I noticed on your Redline Map that there was also a line laid from Canada to Australia! That seems like a Huge Undertaking!
Fascinating.
Extremely well done presentation.
imagine pulling one of those repeaters on TAT-1 up and digging into it- vacuum tube era tech is art.
I like when he says to "Tune in". I imagine some guy with an old radio or TV tuning the station in with his ear right up to it.
I have a school book of sciences from 1859 and there's a bit that's about the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable with a print of a cross-section of the cable.
I laughed my a$$ off in the opening. Thank you!
If you're ever in Cornwall, in the UK, the Museum of Global Communications in Porthcurno (where many of these cables come ashore) is a fascinating place to learn more about submarine communications.
I wonder why Charles Hill, the Postmaster General sounds on that phone call like he has a South African accent? On his broadcasts as the Radio Doctor he sounds perfectly English.
I find it fascinating that signals lasted for that many hours at the start of it all. I was always told the signals were so weak that they weren't able to decipher it and she just sent it as a letter instead.
I happen to know quite a bit about the vacuum tube-based repeaters used in the cable. The tubes are perhaps the rarest tubes in the world. Not all of the stock they had were used at the time of the laying of the cable. In other words, there were "spares". I happen to know what happened to those spares. Reply if you are interested in learning their whereabouts.
Good morning. What happened to these electron tubes?
I hope this doesn't have anything to do with meeting in a parking garage
Good presentation. Just one comment on the first transatlantic cable.
Using a galvanometer for a display reader was not new for that cable, rather it was the standard method of reading signals in Europe. The technology we think of as telegraphy, i.e., dots and dashes transmitted by an interrupting switch (the key) and read out by a sounder made of an electromagnet pulling an iron bar to make a clacking sound, is more correctly referred to as the "Morse system" since that was the inventor in the US. While that eventually became the international standard, telegraphy had been around in Europe for nearly a century before that starting in the form of helio-telegraphs (or just "heliographs"). These used large structures to revolve black/white indicators arranged in a pattern which could be read at the other end through a telescope. As cumbersome as this seems, the efficiency was kept up as each block of patterns represented whole words or phrases that were encoded in a book.
When electrical transmission became possible in the early 1800's, the system was continued by having multiple wires run between stations, each one connected to a different galvanometer at the receiving end. To send a message, the outgoing apparatus would set all the switches to the appropriate "+" or "-" setting (representing the black and white of the mechanical indicators), then close the transmitting switch. At the other end, the different galvanometers would swing to position and the receiving operator would write down the code. While an assistant was looking up the code, the operator would close a switch indicating to the sender that he was ready for the next word. On reflection, this is really like how computers talk to each other. With a 6-bit "word" they would have 64 different codes available. Also different organizations could have different code books, so the military, government offices and businesses could encode/encrypt their messages as a matter of course.
It was the economy of the Morse system's construction, needing only one wire (and a grounding link) that eventually won out. And with the code representing "primitives" consisting of just letters and numbers, operator training could be standardized and the system worked from memory without code books. I think it's almost poetic that the first transatlantic cable required both systems to work: the Morse system's use of only a single wire combined with its simple one-bit binary code; and the European switch-and-galvanometer equipment to enable the incredibly feeble signal to be transmitted and read.
You're so steampunk, Monsieur Messier!
Great Opener! "Be Careful- I think he's drunk"
For fiber optics, I recommend: "City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics" (Sloan Technology) by Jeff Hecht (Author). I read it a long time ago and still remember much of it. For that matter, the Sloan Technology series contained many good books.
I’m open to being wrong, but I have an EE degree, and I think the inverse square law refers to radiant energy, because it’s spreading in both x and y. The signal on a transmission line is affected by the resistance linearly.
An electrical book I read some time ago claimed he series connected telegraph batteries to 5000 Volts before causing an insulation breakdown short.