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A short timeline: 1850 - first telegraph cable laid across the English Channel between England and France. 1858 - first Atlantic telegraph cable between Irela
by cableguy 5y ago
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 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 https://atlantic-cable.com
- jrsdav 5y agoI'm a bit curious about something that I've never thought about before -- how were telegraph signals routed? Was it just a one way street, or did they have a frequency range to work with?
- cableguy 5y agoThis 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.