How the Internet Crossed the Sea | Nostalgia Nerd

the Internet the sea now there's a challenge and to fully understand the challenge we need to go back over a century and a half let's begin in October 1831 the English scientist Michael Faraday famed a decade earlier for creating what was essentially the first battery had discovered electromagnetic induction by first sliding a magnet through a coiled wire and then spinning a copper plate through a magnet this Faraday disk created a continuous current which could flow down a wire really the first electric generator soon after and independently both a William sturgeon in Britain and a Joseph Henry in America discovered that by using electricity and reversing these methods sending a current through a coiled wire they could essentially create a strong electromagnet the more coils you added the stronger this magnet could be and it didn't take long for Henry to realize that it could be operated at whim over a large distance essentially a remote doorbell or even the Telegraph this was the age of steam and so such technology was both miraculous and highly useful taking this lead the William cook and Charles Wheatstone Telegraph was implemented in 1937 as a method to communicate between Houston and Camden Town stations this early system used a board configured with needles which could be moved to point towards letters of the alphabet depending on the magnetism applied across four lines but combined with Samuel Morse's messaging system conjured in the 1840s suddenly we had the ability to communicate over huge distances with a simple serial and unified code in August 1851 Watkins Brett's English Channel submarine Telegraph Company bit of a mouthful laid the first line to cross the English Channel using a tugboat named Goliath this early test used a copper wire coated in gutta-percha a latex like tree sap from the palak wium gutter tree however this initial protection was simply inadequate in September 1851 a new cable with a thicker and bound layer of protection around the core was laid proving much more successful it didn't take long for entrepreneurs to realize that it would be incredibly useful and profitable to connect the two largest powers on earth Britain and America using this powerful system in fact it was Samuel Morse himself who postulated it may be possible around the same time u.s. Navy officer and astronomer lieutenant Matthew Morey had recently finished a series of depth soundings across the Atlantic this was usually by simply dragging a weight across the ocean floor to measure the distance his findings revealed a 2,000 mile sedimented plateau between Newfoundland and Island which avoided the extreme depths which would make cable-laying impossible [Music] this miraculous stroke of luck was what Americans Cyrus field and Englishman John Watkins Bret and Charles Tilton bright needed to hear and by 1857 of Atlantic telegraph company was formed with 350,000 pounds of secured capital the company board consisted of 18 UK members 9 from the US and 3 from Canada and with that one of the largest projects undertaken by Mann had begun on the first of several attempts and using a huge ship filled with coiled cable they simply tried to reel the heavy lumbering line from one side to the other but despite several attempts they kept snapping under the load finally on the 29th of July 1858 two parts of a cable were spliced together in the Mid Atlantic and each was taken in opposite directions one to Newfoundland on the USS Niagara the other to Southwest Island on the HMS Agamemnon both ships supplied thanks to government cooperation now look at these ships you wouldn't really associate them with this new age of instant communication dawning but regardless just six days later the link was established not only was this an incredible achievement but to also beat off competition from the likes of Western Union who were trying to push the idea of going the opposite way around the globe connecting for shorter sea distance but larger land distance between Alaska and Siberia and then on to Europe Queen Victoria was the first to use this incredible new communication cable sending a message of congratulations to President Buchanan almost immediately however celebrations didn't last long captured using a siphon recorder at Newfoundland this initial message took an incredible 16 hours to send the signal was simply just too weak under the illusion that electricity flowed like water rather than pulses as we knew shortly after British engineer Wilde when the White House tried to force a higher voltage down the line to the messages through this just fried the cable and it stopped working entirely the problem was these pulses were simply getting distorted travelling across a huge length of metal so with careful studying and contemplation engineers and scientists made improvements to have a composition designed armoring and laying of the cable including twisting layers of iron strands around for increased harmer and the use of a pure copper core as suggested by Belfast scientist Lord Kelvin the huge hulking sailing ship Great Eastern using and also improved laying method was put to the task of unreeling the massive 9,000 tons of cable out across the ocean floor despite a failed first attempt with suspected threat of sabotage on board and losing the cable ends on more than one occasion the task was finally completed and on Friday the 27th of July 1866 the first clear message was sent from Island to Newfoundland a treaty of peace has been signed between Austria and Prussia with one message the world had become significantly smaller although the rate of transmission was still just a few words per hour using good old Morse code and actually it was Samuel Morse himself who had predicted and arguably ceded this idea way back in 1843 importantly and despite its numerous hiccups the project was also a financial success compared to traditional slow methods of communication by sea taking at least two weeks communications sent by the British government to commanders in Canada alone saved over 50,000 pounds in little time at all this paved the way for further private investment the world was becoming connected and there was no going back in 1866 the price of sending a telegram down the cable was $1 25 per word that's over 20 dollars per word in today's money it certainly wasn't cheap but still far cheaper than sending a note on a boat because of this by the early 1900's there were over a dozen transatlantic cables each of which performing admirably this was helped by improvements in understanding including the VAT bandwidth of a cable is hindered by the imbalance between capacitive and inductive reactance causing electrical resonance and signal distortion the progress on B's lines ensured there were hardly any outages from 1866 onwards but over those 40 odd years the world had began to move on although many mines laid the foundations for the telephone including a patent battle with Elisha gray it is commonly accepted for Alexander Bell's harmonic Telegraph which could send several pitches down a line simultaneously is the real dawn of a modern phone line across the world existing land Telegraph cables were repurposed to transmit voices rather than beeps this is something for transatlantic cables would have to adapt to so although a telegraph consists purely of strong binary electrical pulses the new telephone call was made up of a complex electrical wave which would simply get lost across four great lengths of undersea cable what came out the other end would be simply too weak to discern or even notice so to get a voice from one side to the other a new marvel would be needed the amplifier Sir John Ambrose Fleming would invent the first vacuum tube in 1904 the diode really an incandescent bulb with an extra electrode inside cordon anode this had the ability to convert AC signals into DC by restricting flow of current from the hot filament or cathode to V anode but in 1906 it would be leader Forrest who would turn this into a practical amplification device with the Audion the 1st triode vacuum tube introducing a new electrode in the form of a grid a small amount of positive charge could be applied to it which would in turn amplify the charge coming from the cathode to beep a node whilst retaining the same wave form although a telegraph amplification wasn't new in fact electromagnetic relays had been used to increase signal strength over land Telegraph by essentially receiving and then repeating the signal these devices couldn't handle the complex wave form required for voice transmission they also weren't used for undersea cables due to the complexity of installing and powering such devices underwater by 1912 AT&T had developed the triode into a practical amplifier which allowed the first transcontinental telephone line to open in 1915 connecting the east and west coasts of the United States however despite telephone calls being made on shorter undersea cables where amplification wasn't necessary the technology was still not portable or practical enough to install under oceans like the Atlantic and open up largest scale telephone communications to make matters worse for the undersea cable business the development of the amplifier also enabled radio signal to extend its reach over great distances and the sea cables hadn't stood still mind multiplexing had been introduced allowing multiple messages to be sent at 120 words per minute but even so the 1920s saw radio communication taking the front seat it was faster and cheaper than our trusty lines of metal not forgetting that those metal lines also needed repair if a shark was to bite it or a trawler was to cut through the line then measuring equipment would need to be used to find the way of a break was before zigzagging across the line that literally grapple it up from the ocean floor for reefs splicing in 1927 the radio telephone service initially allowed one telephone call at a time between the United Kingdom and the United States a queue system was implemented and when it was your time the operator would call you back up to connect your transatlantic destination over the coming years the capacity would of course increase but radio was still at the mercy of the weather and atmospheric conditions proving pretty unreliable a better and also more secure system was needed it wouldn't be until the 1950s that the vacuum tube amplifier was perfected for undersea you some of the most reliable vacuum amplifiers ever made these amplifiers had to be spliced into the cable every 20 miles meaning 200 amplification tubes were required for 2,000 miles of cable in 1955 AT&T and the British post office would begin the process of once again laying two undersea cables this time for telephone communication one cable would handle the west2east portion of conversation whilst the other the east to west each cable took a year to lay between gal knock bays Scotland and our faithful Newfoundland but haven't learned from the experiences of cable laying almost a century prior this time things went without a hitch we also had new technologies sonar could be deployed to find new routes on the sea for cable to be laid and to avoid those pesky fishing vessels from ripping the lines up cables could even be buried in the most risky parts using an underwater machine which created a groove at the front for the cable to fall into trans-atlantic one or t-80 one was ready for operation on September 25th 1956 with AT&T chairman Cleo Craig calling Postmaster General dr. Charles Hill to celebrate to be momentous occasion to me the cake this is this is must be Craig well it's very good to hear your voice the lines could carry 36 telephone conversations at a time with initial costs set at 1 pounds per minute equivalent to about 24 pounds or 31 dollars a minute today a call would soon add up but despite that demand increased rapidly again requiring a cue system like the telegraph line of old each of these tickets is a demand for a telephone call from England to the continent technology advancements such as time assignment speech interpolation meant by 1960 the cables could carry twice as many calls but just around the corner in 1976 new lines were added including T 86 which used transistors fan propagation and could handle 4,000 telephone channels simultaneously T 81 was retired in 1978 and it seemed like we had all the capacity we'd ever need but we were wrong the next issue were mobile phones just like the radio communication of the 1920s the world had become Wireless and with satellites becoming cheaper it seemed once again that cable would become a buried relic well actually satellite communication had been around since for 60s but the delays caused by sending data from the phone to the transmitter up to a satellite in geostationary orbit back to a receiver and then back to the end phone that meant that conversing was usually unnatural staggered and lacking the nuances and cues brought by almost instantaneous connections but mobile phones did mean more lines more people talking and the need for greater international bandwidth thankfully 1988 saw the introduction of T 88 the first fiber-optic transatlantic cable providing a transfer rate of 280 megabits per second equivalent to a whopping 40,000 telephone channels were no longer just a phone company or just a telephone network we're an international communications company 1990 T with C T 89 which doubled that capacity and also the introduction of tap 10 which could handle over 1,000 megabits per second yes whilst up to now we measured cable capacity in number of lines now we're switching to data this is because rather than analog fiber-optic is a digital transmission method that's not to say that copper wires can't carry digital data it just fiber-optic is very much suited for it so here's for crack optical fiber is a glass tube usually made of pure silicon dioxide but with a component of boron or germanium to decrease its index of refraction this means that when you shine a light from one end of a fiber the light is reflected entirely within the Strand and out the other end tat 8 contained in just six of these optical fibers three pairs for each direction although one pair was purely for backup purposes these were suspended in elastomer and protected by steel wire with an outer copper cylinder the cable was less than an inch in diameter but its carrying capacity was far higher than anything the cable was laid between tuckerton New Jersey and wide Murph England by shining a specific intensity of laser down this fiber to indicate zero and another intensity to indicate one these binary signals could move the speed of light making communication almost instantaneous you might think that because the light is completely contained within the Strand there is no use for a repeater or an amplifier but in fact there still is the light actually attenuates as it travels for huge distances and so amplifiers are required every 60 miles or so to repeat the signal these were powered by a high-voltage direct-current passed through a conductor of a cable Center to convert an analog phone signal which made up the majority of traffic van engineers use post code modulation to convert the wave into a digital approximation of course steve is fast enough and suddenly we can fit thousands of phone conversations down a single strand of course being the early to mid 90s this was also the dawn of a world wide web so what better means of communication to have the fiber-optic cables connecting the world initially we connected to this modern wonder with modems an analogue method of communicating with our isp where digital signals were modulated into an analog signal and then back again at the other end it may be strange thinking about connecting a computer in the UK with an isp or bulletin board in the u.s. via a modem especially when you consider this our log signal was very possibly converted again and sent down the fiber-optic cable but it wouldn't take long for the world to catch up and for digital connections to connect directly from computer to computer both Viall and fiber optics and more widely making use of specific frequencies to unlock extra capacity and enable DSL connections down standard copper phone wires from this point fiber optic cables became more and more of a main method for sending data across the sea currently 99% of data traffic is sent using undersea cables with satellites accounting for us single percent the faster transmission and increased carrying capacity and security completely out modes what satellites can offer and it's clear that investment into these huge lines will continue into the future since the 90s fiber optic undersea cables have improved significantly this includes the use of wavelength division multiplexing which essentially allows different colors of laser to be sent simultaneously therefore increasing bandwidth they also have redundancy usually by being laid as a ring network this means if one part snaps or breaks data can still travel to the destination using the longer route modern fiber-optic undersea cable is weather traversing the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean can carry multiple terabytes per second a trillion fold increase in carrying capacity in less than 200 years and when you think about it that's not too shabby at all really it's all thanks to those pioneers back in the 19th century who had a vision and made it happen of course we still need those huge hulking ships to painstakingly lay all the cables but now we have ships completely dedicated to the task and they're not driven by paddles or wind or even coal which is nice I guess some things just move along faster than others [Music]

Channel: Nostalgia Nerd

Views: 1,090,213

Rating: 4.9303107 out of 5

Keywords: undersea cable, undersea internet cable, transatlantic, sumbarine cable, how the internet is made, fibre optic cable

Id: A8q7Ayvw5kA

Length: 22min 5sec (1325 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YesIamaDinosaur]

This was very cool OP

[u/gergdawg]

I used to work with some of the cable ships from TE Subcom out of BMore.. pretty cool stuff.. bout 50 people on each ship, all of them sharp as hell.. one almost got hijacked by pirates one time in the Middle East, I think it was “CS Dependable”. ~End of Story

[u/grettelefe]

Coordination between that many countries and building that length of cable is amazing.

[u/marianeditor]

The story of getting connecting Europe with America via the first transatlantic cable (in the 1860s) is even more remarkable: http://failuremag.com/article/cable-ready

[u/Flaggstaff]

Great stuff thanks!

[u/samtheking25]

What's the song at 7:57 ?