cableguy

Some years ago I was contacted by the descendants of an English engineer who was working at the Long Island NY cable station of the German Atlantic cable via the Azores at the start of WWI.

Back in the 1950s a family member had recorded him on open reel tape reminiscing about his experiences, and this was later converted to audio cassettes. They sent me the tapes, and I cleaned up the audio for them, and they gave me permission to post the transcription and audio on my site.

Turned out he was actually watching the signals coming in from a German operator when the cable was cut by the Brits, and he talks about this on one of the tapes.

The story and short audio file are on my site: https://atlantic-cable.com/CableStories/Claypoole/index.htm

This cable industry site regularly publishes an Almanac of all current active cables with maps and details for each one: https://issuu.com/subtelforum/docs/subtel_forum_almanac_issu...

There are high voltage submarine cables for electrical power - these are used to cross rivers and lakes, for example. International cables, like the ones between the UK and the European mainland, are used for load balancing. As it's difficult technically to transmit electrical power over a subsea cable (and exponentially more difficult at the length increases), these cables have limited application. There's over a million kilometers (~600,000 miles) of fiber optic communications cable around the world right now, and perhaps a thousand or so miles of power cable, so "submarine cable" without any qualifier almost always refers to communications cables.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable#Operatio...

This was long before there were any electronic devices to amplify or otherwise manipulate the signal. The telegraph signals were just short electrical pulses representing Morse code, with a positive voltage for a dot and a negative voltage for a dash. The lines could only be worked in one direction at a time for many years, but eventually circuits were used at each end to "duplex" the cable, allowing messages to be sent in both directions at the same tim.

Copper communications cable were in use from 1850 until the 1980s, when they were replaced one by one with fiber. Almost all the copper cables ever laid are still in the depths of the ocean, as it's not worth salvaging them except near shore. A few of the more recent copper cables are still operational, but they are used only for scientific research.

All the way back to the early days of the cable industry in the 1800s, it was easier and safer to lay a cable along the coast of undeveloped countries than to try and run a landline on poles across rugged terrain. Both coasts of Central and South America had telegraph cables running down them, with spurs for inland connections. Same with Africa. Here's a map on my cable history website showing the network in 1902: https://atlantic-cable.com/Maps/1901-Berne-Map-BPL-Leventhal...

Also cables laid underwater are better protected from theft and vandalism than those on land in possibly hostile territories.

A short timeline:

1850 - first telegraph cable laid across the English Channel between England and France.

1858 - first Atlantic telegraph cable between Ireland and Newfoundland.

1866 - first permanently successful Atlantic telegraph cable.

1891 - first telephone cable laid across the English Channel.

1902 - two telegraph cables laid across the Pacific Ocean.

1956 - first telephone cable across the Atlantic.

1988 - first fiber optic cable across the Atlantic.

My cable history website has records of over 2,200 telegraph, telephone and fiber optic cables laid worldwide between 1850 and 2021: https://atlantic-cable.com/Cables/CableTimeLine/index.htm

The front page of the site links to over a thousand individual pages on cable history: https://atlantic-cable.com