Today, I heard the news of Margaret Thatcher's passing and
thought how we take for granted how easy it is to communicate
around the world.
Just for fun, I looked up the first transatlantic cable which
is one of those game changers we don't think much about but it
shortened the time it took for a message to get from the US to the UK
from ten days at best to minutes.
You can read about it in wikipedia, but the basic story was
that there had been several attempts in the 1850's to string a
line from extreme Eastern Canada to extreme Western Ireland and the
attempt in 1855-1856 finally worked for a few weeks.
Queen Victoria and our president at the time exchanged
greetings and the cable was used for message traffic but it took
longer and longer to send or receive anything due to the failure of
the insulation of the cable.
The cable represented the best technology of the time but it
was no match for sea water and human mishandling.
It took about 2 minutes just to send one Morse character.
Those of us who are radio amateurs know that is extremely slow.
Continuous runs of wire that long really don't work that well.
It had lots of resistance, inductance and capacitance
so a clear crisp dot or dash at one end would end up looking like a gentle
rise and fall in voltages at the far end.
One thing I learned from somewhere was that the cable had only
one conductor inside it and that the sea was used as ground. that
conductor was 7 strands of copper twisted together and covered with
rubber and other substances that were thought to be resistant to sea
water.
About ten years later, a couple more cables made of better
material were run and service was restored.
If you read about the early cable, you find a lot of human
intrigue and ego problems just like today so it's either glad to know
or frustrating to know, depending on your perspective that nothing
much has changed in that regard.
We sometimes think that back in the old days, people were
somehow more pure in spirit than today but they were just as mercenary
and cut-throat as folks are today.
A fellow named Whitehouse was the chief electrician on
the first cable and he, not knowing about inductance and
capacitance, thought all that was needed to do was to send
higher voltages down the line to get nice clear telegraphy at
the other end.
All that did was to destroy the insulation and hasten
the demise of the wire. He was ultimately blamed for it's
failure, but the really sad part was that nobody appeared to
gain any fundamental understanding of why very long wires behave
in this way.
The newer cables were stronger and lasted longer, but
they still were slow and dodgy.
Martin
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