Early telegraph routes were strikingly similar to today’s Internet pathways | Hacker News Reader

Early telegraph routes were strikingly similar to today’s Internet pathways

moreintelligentlife.com

35 pointsbenbreen25 comments

Over and over i have to relearn archaic does not mean stupid. If you want to build a stone cathedral today, you're not going to get more arch height than the medieval state of the art. If you want to lay a cable, it's going to go pretty much in the same spot as telegraph cables, because people solved that problem 150 years ago.

People have been cunning and brilliant forever, they just had sucky tools.

And made up for it by throwing man-hours at it.

I don't think so, for example look how start menu in Windows has changed to... ooops, never mind.

Of course?

Where else would you route them? Did they expect that previous undersea cables would squiggle around for thousands of miles undersea the fun of it? Or connect desert to desert instead of population center to population center?

Also, there are huge changes in comparison to modern undersea lines. The majority of connectivity on the Pacific rim, a huge factor in the modern Internet, and all the Pacific undersea cables are all absent from the historical map. If we talk about the big land cables, you'd see a lot of changes there too, some of which actually have to do with geopolitical changes! This only discusses underseas cables with an Atlantic focused view, which is all pretty similar.

This was my reaction too.

"Early dirt roads followed strikingly similar paths to today's paved highways..."

For a first hand account of the telegraph revolution, I enjoyed reading this state-of-the-art report from 1860:

https://archive.org/details/historytheorypra00presrich

I don't see why this would be surprising. Politics and geography haven't changed that much in the last 150 years. The telegraph cables linked up the technically advanced population centers, and fiber optic cables do the same thing now. The technically advanced population centers are more or less the same now as they were then, so it makes sense the maps are similar.

Exactly. My thought when I read the headline was "Well, the cities haven't moved have they?" If you're going from New York to Boston or Boston to London you're going to follow a similar route no matter what kind of cable you are putting down.

I recall reading some magazine article in the 90's about some entrepreneurs who bought rights of way from railroads to lay fiber optic lines and then sold the package to someone like global crossing for a mint - point being is that i suspect even on land, major internet infrastructure in one way or another piggybacked on the vestiges of another age...

The telegraph was simultaneously strung right alongside the intercontinental railroad as it was built. The railroad route is still used today for railroads and highways, it only makes sense that the cables follow the same economics.

There was an earlier transcontinental telegraph along a different route. Once the railroad was built that one was abandoned since the one along the railroad route was easier to maintain.

I think it may have been this article: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/6.05/qwest.html

Or at least that's what popped into my mind from your description.

Here in Chicago, fiber is either tied to the 100+ year old L tracks or run through the more recent L tunnels. The L has a system length of just a tad over 100 miles and covers a good part of the city. Makes perfect sense to run everything through there. The only downside I see is that its within easy each of vandals in some locations, especially where the L tracks start descending into tunnels.

There was an article not too long ago about how some parts of India still rely on telegraph for any sort of communication and the government's plan to modernize it all. I'm a little surprised no one has figured out a DSL-like technology to use existing telegraph lines for high speed data. According to wikipedia the German postoffice had a 50 baud link working in 1933 using teleprinters. Even a 512kb link would be of use, assuming we can beat those speeds by 10x 80 years later.

Something to think about WRT India is the telegraph wiring was designed for non-electrified areas, it works fine with one giant chemical battery in the main office, basically all the keys and sounders are in electrical series. Old fashioned copper gravity batteries instead of modern power supplies and things like that. Some rural areas of India are only 80% electrified. I suspect power could be an issue.

In the US, power companies love pulling in fiber with their cables, both for internal SCADA control and resale. No point sending out two cabling crews along two paths... so places that tend to have power tend to have fiber connectivity. It might be similar in India. So no fiber because its a rural area with no power lines and eventually they'll get both at the same time.

You have something similar with POTS. There the phones are powered from the switches, complete with x days of UPS mandated by law (thus even if your area lose power, you can still call for help).

But this is expensive to maintain for the telcos (all that copper wiring etc) so increasingly they want to replace it all with mobile networks.

The Great Western did it first in the 1830s...

"In 1839 the world’s first commercial telegraph line using the Cooke and Wheatstone five-needle system was commissioned by the Great Western Railway and built between Paddington and West Drayton, a distance of 13 miles."

And later:

"British Rail Telecommunications was created by British Rail (BR). It was the largest private telecoms network in Britain, consisting of 17,000 route kilometres of fibre optic and copper cable which connected every major city and town in the country and provided links to continental Europe through the Channel Tunnel.[1]"

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

The railroad companies did some of this themselves -- the SPR in Sprint stands for Southern Pacific Railroad.

Exactly true. Railroad companies maintain their own "right of way", which is the tracks plus the margin of land on either side. Since railroads depend heavily on communications, they maintain their own poles/trenches and cables etc. Their telecommunications infrastructure is an integral part of their rail infrastructure. And yes, they make lots of money by leasing bandwidth and resources to telecoms. (I used to work for Burlington Northern Railroad).

Dunno how it is in the US, but in other parts of the world power companies has gotten into the "ISP" business.

This by running fiber along their existing power cables, originally to allow remote monitoring and control of transformers etc.

A map of relative population changes over the last 150 years or so would be informative WRT the original topic.

I suspect the relative population has changed quite a bit more in Las Vegas than NYC for example. Or even regionally, look at the recent growth of the south, after the invention of air conditioning.

Centers of commerce will buy you more than population. Stunning correspondence between solar and data flows.

Damn you autocorrect. "dollar", not "solar".

'A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable' chronicles the technical and business aspects of laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable.

http://amzn.com/0060524464

A simple, intuitive algorithm for connecting many sites using the minimum wire exists.

Same problem, likely same solution: Minimum Spanning Trees.

But how will your algorithm negotiate with the governments of countries to put cables through their borders at specific points.

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