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Trending Now: Astronaut Chris Hadfield Answers The Web's Most Searched Questions

The document discusses the history and development of telegraph and undersea cable technologies from the 19th century to present day. It describes how early telegraph systems like Samuel Morse's connected distant locations, changing global connectivity. Over decades, telegraph codes and technologies improved, with a focus on sending more data over fewer wires. The first transatlantic cable spurred major engineering innovations to overcome signal degradation over long distances. The cable projects involved significant financial risk and scientific advancement, similar to modern tech startups. Undersea cables became highly advanced technologies, with some countries becoming leaders in the field, including ongoing dominance by AT&T until recent new competitors.

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26 views2 pages

Trending Now: Astronaut Chris Hadfield Answers The Web's Most Searched Questions

The document discusses the history and development of telegraph and undersea cable technologies from the 19th century to present day. It describes how early telegraph systems like Samuel Morse's connected distant locations, changing global connectivity. Over decades, telegraph codes and technologies improved, with a focus on sending more data over fewer wires. The first transatlantic cable spurred major engineering innovations to overcome signal degradation over long distances. The cable projects involved significant financial risk and scientific advancement, similar to modern tech startups. Undersea cables became highly advanced technologies, with some countries becoming leaders in the field, including ongoing dominance by AT&T until recent new competitors.

Uploaded by

John Cena
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Wires warp cyberspace in the same way wormholes warp physical space:

the two points at opposite ends of a wire are, for informational purposes,
the same point, even if they are on opposite sides of the planet. The
cyberspace-warping power of wires, therefore, changes the geometry of
the world of commerce and politics and ideas that we live in. The financial
districts of New York, London, and Tokyo, linked by thousands of wires, are
much closer to each other than, say, the Bronx is to Manhattan.
Today this is all quite familiar, but in the 19th century, when the first feeble
bits struggled down the first undersea cable joining the Old World to the
New, it must have made people's hair stand up on end in more than just
the purely electrical sense—it must have seemed supernatural. Perhaps
this sort of feeling explains why when Samuel Morse stretched a wire
between Washington and Baltimore in 1844, the first message he sent with
his code was "What hath God wrought!"—almost as if he needed to
reassure himself and others that God, and not the Devil, was behind it.
During the decades after Morse's "What hath God wrought!" a plethora of
different codes, signalling techniques, and sending and receiving machines
were patented. A web of wires was spun across every modern city on the
globe, and longer wires were strung between cities. Some of the early
technologies were, in retrospect, flaky: one early inventor wanted to use
26-wire cables, one wire for each letter of the alphabet. But it quickly
became evident that it was best to keep the number of individual wires as
low as possible and find clever ways to fit more information onto them.

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Astronaut Chris Hadfield Answers the Web's Most Searched Questions

This requires more ingenuity than you might think—wires have never been
perfectly transparent carriers of data; they have always degraded the
information put into them. In general, this gets worse as the wire gets
longer, and so as the early telegraph networks spanned greater distances,
the people building them had to edge away from the seat-of-the-pants
engineering practices that, applied in another field, gave us so many boiler
explosions, and toward the more scientific approach that is the standard of
practice today.
Still, telegraphy, like many other forms of engineering, retained a certain
barnyard, improvised quality until the Year of Our Lord 1858, when the
terrifyingly high financial stakes and shockingly formidable technical
challenges of the first transatlantic submarine cable brought certain long-
simmering conflicts to a rolling boil, incarnated the old and new approaches
in the persons of Dr. Wildman Whitehouse and Professor William
Thomson, respectively, and brought the conflict between them into the
highest possible relief in the form of an inquiry and a scandal that rocked
the Victorian world. Thomson came out on top, with a new title and name—
Lord Kelvin.
Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades
also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech
venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to
read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects (I
recommend Arthur C. Clarke's book How the World Was One). The only
things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten
smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less
interesting.
Those early cables were eventually made to work, albeit not without
founding whole new fields of scientific inquiry and generating many
lucrative patents. Undersea cables, and long-distance communications in
general, became the highest of high tech, with many of the same
connotations as rocket science or nuclear physics or brain surgery would
acquire in later decades. Some countries and companies (the distinction
between countries and companies is hazy in the telco world) became very
good at it, and some didn't. AT&T acquired a dominance of the field that
largely continues to this day and is only now being seriously challenged by
a project called FLAG: the Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe.

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