How Were Undersea Cables Laid Back in Ye Olde Days? [Cables]

Jan 13th 2011
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Compare and contrast. This monochrome photo, above, is how submarine cables were laid back inside the day (in 1906, to be exact). It’s not much different from how companies like Cable&Wireless Worldwide and Alcatel-Lucent do it now , right?

While cables aren’t as sexy or riveting an issue as the most recent Android phone, I find it really interesting and almost humbling that the tactic of laying them has stayed much an identical for 150 years. Sure, the first cables may’ve only carried telegraphy messages, but they went on to glue people with the transport of telephony and now within the modern-day fiber optic cables, internet.

Companies began laying out submarine cables within the 1800s, and continue to accomplish that today, using different-sized cables for varied depths. Funnily enough, the thicker, stronger cables are actually for shallower depths, because anchors and fishermen’s nets can wreak more havoc on them than sharks. Many countries-and the corporations that lay them-consider these undersea cables to be of big importance and price. Once you speak to the Australian government for instance, they think them to be ” vital to the national economy,” and have actually built protection zones around the cables, for fear of injury.

There are around 250 submarine systems everywhere today, an enormous jump from the mid-1800s when the first cable was laid-and they connect each of the continents now too…aside from cold, lonely Antarctica, which still relies on satellite.

It wasn’t until 1858 that the first-ever transatlantic cable transmission was made, however, from Queen Victoria in England to President Buchanan inside the US. It actually took 16 hours to send, despite it being just 98 words in length. By 1870, the process had accelerated-however it still would’ve taken 37 days to send over the total text of Tolstoy’s War & Peace. Now though, it’s estimated that 150,000 copies of the book will be sent over every second.

Want to grasp something even funnier? Nowadays the rope it’s used to remove cables (with a grappling hook attached at the tip) actually costs more than the cables themselves. Feels like money for old rope to me.