The British empire's resilient subsea telegraph network(subseacables.blogspot.com)
128 pointsby giuliomagnifico8 hours ago15 comments
  • pchristensen3 hours ago
    I always have to recommend Mother Earth, Mother Board by Neal Stephenson[1] if the thought of undersea cables sounds at all interesting. I'll also second andyjohnson0's recommendation of The Victorian Internet[2] - it blew my mind how much of modern digital culture existed on telegraphs prior to voice.

    [1] https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

    [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46433901

  • andyjohnson06 hours ago
    An interesting book on the subject of telegraph networks is The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage [1]. As well as the technical and commercial drivers, it also describes how the telegraph forced people to confront concepts like simultaneity, information being distinct from its physical medium, privacy, early approaches to encryption, etc. A fascinating book.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet

    • retrac2 hours ago
      The GBP/USD currency pair is still known just as "the cable".

      Aside from all its other uses: the telegraph gave a way to synchronize clocks. And accurate time is accurate measurement of distance.

      > [...] The latest determination in 1892 is due to the cooperation of the McGill College Observatory at Montreal, Canada, with the Greenwich Observatory. [...] The final value for the longitude of the Harvard Observatory at Cambridge, as adjusted in June, 1897, is 4h 44m 31s.046 ±0s.048.

      -- https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1897AJ.....18...25S

      71.12936 W; give or take about 2 metres: https://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=42.38148%7E-71.12936&style...

    • zoeysmithean hour ago
      That book led me to Gutta Percha, the plastic-like coating on the wires used in these cables which was quite the innovation and made this all possible. Vulcanized rubber was the other option but performed poorly in cables and was harder to work with.

      https://atlantic-cable.com/Article/GuttaPercha/

      The above is a fascinating and depressing history of the Gutta Percha factory that made all these cables, after joining with the cable company that supplied the actual wires. There's an 1853 travelogue piece embedded here of an author visiting the factory, where he notes in the worst parts of the factory where boiling and heat are applied, it was staffed with boys who barely made more than a dollar a week. By boys I thought it was slang for young men then I realized 1850s England was heavily using child labor.

      Those cables are the product of child labor, like much of the Victorian age's industrial and textile output. Children often made up significant portions of factory workforces, sometimes 25-50% in certain textile sectors, with many under 14. I wish the stories of child labor were better told and more prominent. This abuse and exploitation of children gets quite whitewashed during this age and its nice to see it acknowledged, albeit briefly.

    • kogasa240p3 hours ago
      Oh wow will definitely give that book a read, very interesting.
      • eszed3 hours ago
        I've recommended that book on this board before. If you read it, I'd be curious about how you think it hits now, because part of its interest - I'd say insightfulness, at the time, but it now might risk anachronistic "charm" - was noting similar emergent behaviors between telegraph operators and early internet adopters. The technical content won't have dated, but the social parts may have.
    • jgalt2123 hours ago
      I came here to recommend this fine book as well.
  • neillyons6 hours ago
    When visiting Ayers Rock in Australia I stayed in Alice Springs. While I was there I learnt that Alice Springs exists because it was a repeater station for a telegraph line that stretched from Southern Australia all the way to London. There would be people listening to morse code, and tapping it out again to the next repeater station. Blew my mind that there was a wire that went all the way to London from Australia!
    • alexfoo5 hours ago
      > Blew my mind that there was a wire that went all the way to London from Australia!

      Before the telegraph they used to do things wirelessly: https://www.brunningandprice.co.uk/_downloads/telegraph/tele...

      (Not quite London to Australia though...)

      In the late-1700s/early-1800s the Admiralty Telegraph was used to relay messages between London and Portsmouth (70 odd miles apart) using a semaphore type system with repeater stations every 10 miles or so.

      • vintagedave3 hours ago
        In Tasmania, you can still see at least one semaphore station on Mt Nelson, which is above several suburbs on the south of the city of Hobart. I believe there was a semaphore route from the capital to Port Arthur (convict prison) and possibly other routes over the state too.

        https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_histo...

        Sadly the semaphore pole itself is gone. The building is still there and was used until 1969.

      • kitd2 hours ago
        Yes, the Uk (southern England in particular) is dotted with "Semaphore Hill"s or "Telegraph Hills"s. There's one very close to where I'm sitting now, a few miles NE of Portsmouth.
      • Aromasin4 hours ago
        To think it was done even 1000s of years prior to that with just smoke and fire! Granted, the ability to communicate through the rain would be a necessity for the British.
    • dboreham6 hours ago
      Similar history for Denver.
  • teleforce6 hours ago
    Fun facts, the subsea telegraph network cables coating were made from Gutta Percha [1].

    Unlike normal rubber, it is a type of thermoplastic and it's a popular organic plastic before the petroleum based modern plastic become pervasive [2].

    [1] The legacy of undersea cables:

    https://blog.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/the-legacy-of-underse...

    [2] Gutta-percha:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha

    • daedrdev2 hours ago
      They also got a tiny fraction of the rubber from cutting a whole tree down due to not finding a method to get all the rubber, and so cut almost all of the trees down
  • utopiahan hour ago
    The Cable that Changed the World (2024) is pretty nice on the topic. Shows us how, again, most of the things we consider "new" or at even revolutionary most showcase how historical ignorance.
  • jphoward7 hours ago
    Here is some more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Red_Line

    And one of the old cable huts still exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Cable_Station

    • alexfoo5 hours ago
      Anyone visiting the South West of the UK should go visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PK_Porthcurno (https://pkporthcurno.com/)

      (There's also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minack_Theatre built into the cliff face nearby.)

      (I've been to the theatre a number of times but never convinced my in-laws to visit the Telegraph Museum.)

    • 2 hours ago
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    • kitd2 hours ago
      My wife and I were visiting County Kerry in SW Ireland last summer. We were on Valentia Island and quite by chance walked past the telegraph building where the first transatlantic cable came ashore. Only marked by a (very interesting) plaque describing its significance.
  • KineticLensmanan hour ago
    It was strategically important in WW1 because the British could communicate with the colonies with very chance little chance of messages being intercepted. The Germans, in contrast, didn't have access to their own transatlantic channels and had to use plain-text messages on cables that the UK/US controlled (US operators disallowed coded comms).
  • hakkikonu38 minutes ago
    in this context: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
  • Alive-in-20253 hours ago
    I love stories like this! Neil Stephenson has a great wired magazine article about information technology of that time, and telegraphs. The article is kind of a precursor to the ideas in his excellent book cryptonomicon. You should stop what you are doing and read that wired article. And then cryptonomicon if you haven't already done it. Best book to read over the rest of our holidays.

    Article in paywall at https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

    The book and the article are fascinating explorations of the impact of technology and cryptography on the world. The people who did the work to invent and build these worldwide systems were just like us (hackers, inventors, technologists), and we are just like them in a way. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

    Also I can't believe that article is 30 years old, boy I'm old.

  • mjleean hour ago
    If you enjoy this, you might like to read about the Zimmermann Telegram - British SIGINT that took advantage of this network, bringing the USA in to World War I.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_telegram

  • nephihaha2 hours ago
    The original internet, more or less. Apparently whales liked to scratch themselves on some of the cables though.
  • thijson3 hours ago
    Seeing the telegraph cross Canada like that reminded me of the network of hotels across Canada that were used by the wealthy on their way to the Orient from Europe during a bygone era.
  • alexjf12an hour ago
    here's an interesting series of videos on undersea cables, as described by... Tool Time from Home Improvement

    https://youtu.be/zmyBSrQodnI?si=OpFZhiQeNn3ax58p

  • jimmySixDOF2 hours ago
    ... an era bookmarked at the end by the first live music broadcast transatlantic performance of Old Man River from a studio in NYC to a theater in London and that wasn't until 1957 and is a story all on its own

    https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/robeson...

  • petesergeant6 hours ago
    Is the latency the same now as it was for the signal itself? Obviously the throughput is rather different.
    • hylaride4 hours ago
      Over long distances, fibre optic would have lower latency so it'd be shorter if taking the same path today. But these signals would likely have been morse code and sent one-way at a time, so latency wouldn't have been noticed unless the repeaters were people rebroadcasting the signal (no idea how that was done).
      • joecool10292 hours ago
        > Over long distances, fibre optic would have lower latency so it'd be shorter if taking the same path today.

        Source that claim, it's well understood the speed of light is around 66% due to refractive index in glass.

        It gets weird with telegraph cables and capacitance, wikipedia at least touches on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity

        • hylaride2 hours ago
          I should have definitely qualified that statement. Technically, electrical signals over copper are "slowed down" less than light through fibre optic cables. However there's attenuation, electromagnetic interference, and other signal loss for electrical signals that (for long haul cables) will mean you will need repeaters that add significant amounts of latency. On top of that, the higher you try and up the frequencies, the worse these problems get.

          For some medium-haul stuff, it wouldn't surprise me if you saw copper still being used for lower latency (eg between datacenter sites for flash-trading), but otherwise it's just not economical.

          • everfrustrated2 hours ago
            That's the point of hollow-core fibre which is absolutely being used where decreasing latency even by small amounts is worth it.
            • joecool102911 minutes ago
              > That's the point of hollow-core fibre

              Ok, how does that work though? I understand the concept of lower attenuation since air/vacuum has less molecules to get in the way. Less repeaters, should have less system latency.

              What I don't understand is how light is moving through what is a hollow bendable medium. Is the tube that it's in reflective and there's just less time it's passing through it? I guess that's the main one in commercial use to shave some time off, reading about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber