The first transatlantic telegraph cable was a bold, beautiful failure (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The first transatlantic telegraph cable was a bold, beautiful failure (2019)

spectrum.ieee.org

63 pointssparsesignal18 comments

I highly recommend Jon Bois' Youtube docuseries[1] on this story that's basically a 4-hour PowerPoint presentation which frames this all through the metaphor of the 90s Tim Allen sitcom Home Improvement. That descriptor probably sounds insane to anyone not familiar with his work, but Bois is one of a kind with what he does and I thought this series was one of his best.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmyBSrQodnI

Seconded. I went in with only a vague awareness of what Bois' thing is and knowing it somehow involved Tims, Als, and oceanic telegraph cables. I was not disappointed.

There is a hard to find book called "Tent life in Siberia" by George Kennan, which is his account of a scouting trip of a bunch of Americans trying to build an overland telegraph route to Europe via Canada, Alaska then Russia, because it's proven too difficult to go under the Pacific. It's quite an entertaining read if you're into that kind of thing. It's not the most professional operation and after two years they get word that the Pacific undersea line has succeeded.

It may be hard to find in print, but it's not hard to find! https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12328

Posted this because I saw a piece of the cable at the Science Museum in London years ago. It looks like it's still on display in the Information Age gallery:

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co33448...

I just finished reading this book, which came out this year.

Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Race to Wire the World and the Dawn of the Information Age by James M. Tabor (Author)

About this telegraph cable, and all of the different attempts to lay it on the sea floor.

I also recommend The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (1998) if you want to learn more about telegraphs.

It's very dense, but if you enjoy going down a rabbit hole about this stuff I recommend The Story of Telecommunications by George Oslin. It's the size of a history textbook.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable#...

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

Thomson (Kelvin) was right, and Whitehouse was wrong. It's seriously disappointing how the IEEE of all groups is now trying to spin this differently.

Once it was working, operation was like this: [1] The siphon recorder produced a squiggly line, which could be read as a code similar to Morse code. Not clicks, though. The cable had so much inductance that the data rate was very limited.

[1] https://atlantic-cable.com/Article/1895HazelHill/index.htm

Arthur C. Clarke wrote a non-fiction book about this, I think it is called Voice Across the Sea. I read it many years ago and found it very good.

If you ever had a root canal treatment, you might have some of the same building materials in your mouth as the cable (Gutta Percha)!

For more mathematics/physics behind it, Körner's classic Fourier Analysis [0] contains a few interesting chapters.

[0]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/fourier-analysis/5FD8F0...

Mother Earth Mother Board

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

I'm very jealous of everyone who gets to read this for the first time this weekend.

This is a very familiar pattern: brilliant visionary bring new technology too early and it fails. The next guy does not need to be such a prodigy - he just need to be right on time to succeed.

I highly recommend reading A Thread Across the Ocean, a gripping tale of the development and laying of the first transatlantic cable. It’s quite a page turner.

History of submarine telegraph:

https://atlantic-cable.com/

recent 99pi episode:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/672-transatlantic-fib...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com