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I have a quite good book on the shelves on the very same subject, but I am unable to locate it at present.

For a slightly wider take, Arthur C. Clarke's "How the world was one" is a most readable account of how telecommunications has made the world smaller, starting with the first submarine cables, proceeding with satellites (of course he would!) before devoting a section to fibre optics at the end. Brilliant account.

There is a museum on the cape cod massachusetts called the "French Cable Station Museum", that has a lot of the old euqipment used back to transmit telegraph data from Europe to America. Its not open year round apparently.

I did the tour a few year ago, run be retired engineer who was enthusiastic and excellent at explaining the difficulties in getting it all working.

As an added bonus, old school html:

http://www.frenchcablestationmuseum.org/index.htm

For more on the history of the telegraph, I recommend The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage, which also covers in detail the laying of the first trans-Atlantic cables. Fascinating stuff.