Submarine Cable System History

150 Year History of Submarine Cables

Copyright © 2012 Bill Burns - All rights reserved



Laying and maintaining long undersea cables has now been a routine operation for almost 150 years, but when New York businessman Cyrus Field proposed an Atlantic cable in 1854, it was only four years since the first-ever cable had been laid between England and France, a mere 20 miles. The quality of the materials used to make the first cables was inconsistent, their theory of operation was unwritten, and the transmitting and receiving instruments were primitive.

Yet only a few years after that first cable, financiers and engineers were plotting a route across the Atlantic from Ireland to Newfoundland, a run one hundred times longer than that first cable to Europe. Just four years later, in 1858, the project achieved its first success, and in 2008 we celebrated the 150th anniversary of the first Atlantic cable.



"Atlantic Telegraph Cable Map"



With the limited technology of the time, how did the early cable engineers determine the best route, design their very long cable (the first of its kind), and get it safely to the sea bed? And in the 150 years from those first attempts to today’s routine cable laying expeditions, what has changed and what has stayed the same?

It’s generally accepted that the possibility of an Atlantic telegraph cable was first raised in 1843, when Samuel Morse, in a totally unwarranted yet eventually accurate fit of optimism, wrote "... a telegraphic communication on the electromagnetic plan may with certainty be established across the Atlantic Ocean! Startling as this may now seem, I am confident the time will come when this project will be realized."

Perhaps it was just that the time was right, but the beginnings of the submarine cable industry came about in the late 1840s from a series of unrelated events. Copper wire to conduct the signals was readily available, although of uncertain quality. For underwater use an insulator was needed, and gutta percha, the rubber-like sap of a tree found only in the British Empire and introduced to Britain a few years earlier, was the perfect material. The method of armoring the cable to give it strength during laying and protection afterwards was adapted from the recently introduced iron wire ropes developed to work the hoisting machinery in Germany’s deep mines. And in 1849, American naval vessels began systematic deep-sea soundings in the Atlantic. Based on their findings hydrographer Mathew Fontaine Maury, Superintendent of the Naval Observatory, suggested that there was an undersea plateau between Newfoundland and Ireland which would be the ideal route for laying a telegraph cable.



Custom-built cable ships have been used since 1874, when the Faraday was launched by Siemens Brothers. These highly specialized vessels are instantly recognizable by the cable sheaves at the bow and/or stern, over which the cable descends to the depths, and the elaborate machinery used to control the paying out of the cable. Before that, standard merchant ships were adapted for cable use, the very first cable ship being a small paddle steamer named Goliath, which with a drum of cable mounted on deck laid the cross-Channel cable of 1850. At the other end of the spectrum, the Great Eastern, the largest ship ever built at the time, was used for the Atlantic cables of 1865 and future years.







"Goliath laying the 1850 Channel submarine cable" "Goliath laying the 1850 Channel submarine cable"

For the first Atlantic cable expeditions of 1857 and 1858 the British government lent HMS Agamemnon and the US government provided its new warship USS Niagara. These were fitted with cable gear designed largely by trial and error, from which has evolved the paying out gear used today. The experience gained in laying cables on the three Atlantic expeditions of 1857/58 was used to good effect in adapting the Great Eastern for its cable voyages in the 1860s and beyond.

The cable expeditions of the 1850s were dogged by repeated failures, particularly in the attempts to lay long cables such as the Atlantic run, but each time more money was raised and new expeditions mounted. The 1858 Atlantic cable, successfully laid on its third attempt, worked for only a few weeks, and there was another expensive failure on a different route the next year. Part of the problem was that insufficient attention had been paid to the design and manufacturing of long cables, and their operation was not based on any sound theory.





"Agamemnon laying the 1858 Atlantic submarine cable" "Agamemnon laying the 1858 Atlantic submarine cable"



Despite its early failure, the 1858 Atlantic cable was a significant milestone. It showed that a long cable could be successfully laid and operated, and proved it could be financially viable. Even with the cable’s very slow transmission speed of just a few words per hour at best, messages sent by the British Government to its commanders in Canada countermanding orders for regiments to return to England saved the Government over £50,000, and the commercial possibilities of instant messages between New York and London were obvious to every international trader. The publication in 1861 of the report of a government enquiry into the failure of the 1858 cable marked a turning point, and led to the beginnings of the modern cable industry. The importance was realized of using high quality materials and carefully controlled manufacturing and storage of the cable, the theory of signal transmission on long cables was worked out, and instruments and techniques for efficiently sending messages were devised.



Further work on the Atlantic cable was hindered by the Civil War in America, but in 1865 the

Great Eastern was converted for cable laying, a new cable designed and manufactured on more rigorous principles was ordered, and the adventure was resumed. Despite a setback that year when the cable broke just 600 miles from Newfoundland and was lost in 12,000 feet of water, it was obvious that complete success was in reach. A second Great Eastern expedition in 1866 not only laid the cable without incident from Ireland to Newfoundland, but recovered and completed the lost cable of the previous year, providing two circuits for messages between Europe and America.