TRANSATLANTIC CABLE

Transatlantic Telegraph

While radio telephone was being considered for the continental United States, it was the only option available for transatlantic voice communication. Such telephone links were at the mercy of storms and assured a great deal of static in connections at the best of times. The only transatlantic communication option was the telegraph, via a transoceanic telegraph cable the first one of which was laid in 1866. Since 1928 consideration had been given to linking the continents with a cable system for direct telephone communication.

The Cable

The transatlantic cable was actually just two big specially coated and insulated wire bundles laid along the ocean floor: one eastbound, one westbound. The cable required a series of more than one hundred tiny "repeaters," electronic components (made of vacuum tubes) which amplified the sound carried along the cable and made up for volume lost in the long trip as sound traveled across the Atlantic. The coatings and insulation had to be able to withstand pressures of 6,800 pounds per square inch and a 26,000 pound pull.

Engineering

The cable was an engineering master-piece. It was designed to carry thirty-six conversations at a time and up to twelve hundred calls a day. The cable itself cost $40 million. It had to be more than twenty-five hundred miles long in each direction. Near the shores the cable also had to be specially reinforced. Unlike in mid ocean, the area near the shore exposed the cable to stresses such as anchors and even icebergs.

Planning

American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) sponsored the operation in conjunction with the British Post Office (which ran the British telephone system) and the Canadian Overseas Telecommunication Corporation. They decided on a route to avoid the twenty-one telegraph cables already on the floor of the Atlantic. Simplex Wire & Cable Company (Newington, New Hampshire) produced the extraheavy cable, while Western Electric (an AT&T subsidiary) built a factory at Hillside, New Jersey, to make the repeaters, which were flown to England and incorporated into the entire cable length.

Laying the Cable

The British ship Monarch, the world's largest cable-laying ship, was chosen to lay the cable. The difficulties in laying it were enormous. Rain, shine, or storm, the cable laying had to continue at a steady pace. Stopping could kink or break the cable. The ocean floor has deep caverns. Laying the cable across the top of two opposing cliffs under water would expose it to potentially destructive hazards, so the Monarch had to map the ocean as it went along and bypass these areas. The actual cable-laying began in June 1955. At one point, Hurricane lone caused the buoy marking the cable route to be lost, and the ship had to grapple the ocean floor to find the cable end for splicing. But the job was, at length, completed. On 27 September 1955 AT&T's William Thompson first used the completed eastbound cable for a transatlantic phone call. By 1956 the full system was operational. Not many people were expected to use the local pay phone for transatlantic calls, though. Calls via the cable cost twelve dollars during the day or nine dollars at night for three minutes' time.

Sources:

Popular Science, 132 (May 1956): 168.

TRANSATLANTIC CABLE

In 1866 a transatlantic cable was laid along the ocean floor to carry telegraph messages from North America to Europe. But this success had been long-awaited: it followed four failed attempts to lay the wire. In 1854 American financier Cyrus W. Field (1819–1892) founded the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company (two years later renamed the Atlantic Telegraph Company). He became determined to connect America and Europe with a submarine telegraph cable, which would greatly improve communication. Cables laid in 1857 and 1858 broke. A third cable was put down later in 1858 and it successfully carried messages across the Atlantic for a period of four weeks before it broke. A fourth wire was put down between Newfoundland (Canada), and Ireland in 1865, but before the project was completed, it too broke. The following year, aided by a cable developed by British mathematician and physicist William Thomson (1824–1907), the project was finally a success. Thomson, who had been a chief consultant during the laying of the first cable in 1857–1858, developed a theory on the mechanics of submarine cables, and a cable following his specifications was successfully laid, from east to west, between Valentia, Ireland, and Heart's Content, Newfoundland. The crewmen who worked on that project were also able to repair the cable laid in 1865. By 1900 there were fifteen telegraph cables lying on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, enabling telegrams (called "cables" when they were intercontinental) to be transmitted between the United States or Canada and Europe. The development was a tremendous boom to communication. Prior to the transatlantic telegraph cable (1866), the fastest way to send a message across the ocean was aboard a ship. The telephone (invented 1875), which allows voice transmission over electrical wires, gradually replaced the telegraph. But for many decades the two technologies were both in use.

See also: AT&T, Alexander Graham Bell, Telegraph