The Legacy of Undersea Cables

This is an excellent submission except that there's another undersea cables thread already on the frontpage:

The British empire's resilient subsea telegraph network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432999

Generally we downweight follow-ups so as to avoid repetition [1, 2]. But once enough time has gone by for the hivemind caches to clear, what is old becomes new again. If you would be willing to email hn@ycombinator.com in, say, a couple months, we could invite a repost and put it in the SCP [3].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

A new book came out on this recently: The Web Beneath the Waves. The Fragile Cables that Connect Our World, by Samanth Subramanian.[0]

It is well worth reading if you like to go deep on this stuff. The author explicitly frames it as a kind of 2025 update of Neal Stephenson’s classic Mother Earth Mother Board article (which is now 30 years old!). Suffice to say that global geopolitics and the corporate tech landscape look a bit different from 1996 and unsurprisingly, that has implications for submarine cable networks.

[0] https://globalreports.columbia.edu/books/the-web-beneath-the...

Mandatory Neal Stephenson article in Wired on subsea cables [0], as previously discussed [1]. Also now available in the original magazine thanks to Archive.org [2].

[0] https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30342302

[2] https://archive.org/details/wired-magazine-04.12-1996-decemb...

I recently watched the Jon Bois documentary "Fool Time" which relates the story of the men involved in the development of telegraph lines to the 90s sitcom Home Improvement. It's an excellent watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmyBSrQodnI

NPR's Throughline podcast did a nice dive into this subject in October as well: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5582393

For many years I've been trying to buy a cross section of an undersea cable to no avail. Anyone have any ideas where I might look?

A good story (that does off script at points), but the pictures are great and the ability to zoom in for detail is also great.

I thought they were going to go into Oliver Heaviside. Instead we get gutta percha. /sigh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside