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that was 1854. You basically only needed Ohm's law for that, which was discovered in 1827

Ohm's law for a cable 4000 km/3000 miles long? That implies transmission was instantaneous and without any alteration in shape.

I guess the rise time was tens of milliseconds and rebounds in signals lasted for milliseconds or more. Hardly something you can neglect.

For reference, in my time (the 1980) in the telecom industry, we had to regenerate digital signals every 2km.

"Initially messages were sent by an operator using Morse code. The reception was very bad on the 1858 cable, and it took two minutes to transmit just one character (a single letter or a single number), a rate of about 0.1 words per minute."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cabl...

I guess your bandwidth in 1980 was a bit higher.

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