The Undersea Cable That Linked The World
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ธ.ค. 2024
- The dawn of instant global communication can be traced back to entrepreneur Cyrus West Field and his long-shot experiment to link the United States and Europe by telegraph in the 1850s.
Video by Raymond Schillinger
Graphics by Christian Capestany
Series by Neville Gillett and Tom Gibson
Archival Footage Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center
Special Thanks to Bill Burns, Creator of www.atlantic-ca...
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If you are watching this video outside of the US this video data was probably in an undersea cable. Feels weird right?
Canada mexico Latin America (up to Darrin gap)
Well they can do that with satellites too but undersea cable is faster
@@pitma1734 until starlink comes
Nope, Google has many local data centres around the world. You automatically connect to the closest one, which could be just a few miles away from you.
not really. I'm old.
What I learned is that there are always doubters when new ideas are coming up. In life there are talkers and doers since a long time it seems
Doers are nothing with doubters to filter out the bad ideas, and doubters are nothing without doers to drive innovation...
All of them are very important for the development and deployment of new, innovative tech.
I'm sorry but there is this third group of people... we call them Whiners.
You are free to tell me it is impossible. Just keep out of my way as I do the impossible.
and then there are lazy folks who create a market for all this tech to make our lives easier, like ordering some Chipotle on my $1000 iPhone while i lay in bed watching my smart TV
4:46 that’s a really cool image, the lion of Britain and eagle of the US linked for the first time
Thought this was Vox
Better than vox
They just look up to them :)
Lmao same I was confused at the end of the video when I scroll down and saw that it was Bloomberg
Wait this isn’t vox?
Lord Luke Lightbringer Vox is extremely biased
Yet one second of lag when playing a video game with someone on the other side of the world is still frustrating.
Playing with 1 sec lag would be 1000ms ping and its nearly impossible to play with 200+ms Ping.
@@n3gi_ Lately I've been playing on a Minecraft server that occasionally has over a second of lag. A little frustrating but not unplayable.
Okay, besides all the porn comments can we take a moment to recognize how well this video and the contents inside are presented?
NO
NEVER
High % of thumbs down, = Mr treacle voice that take ages to get to the point.
123 likes
“Has it banished any evil, mitigating and sorrow?” Lmao
It has.
Great video. Still it’s missing something, I think Bloomberg should have mentioned it. The undersea cables were not only capable of sending just messages, but they also made it possible for New York and London to directly trade the dollar against the pound, in the 19th century (just like onshore telegraph networks at the time provided connection and price data transfers between stock exchanges). That’s why the GBPUSD cross is called “the cable”.
That's an interesting fact - thanks for sharing!
Bloomberg k
Well, it's a 5 minute clip. Not an hour long documentary. Since you know all about it I'm sure you'll mention it in your own production on this topic. You can actually go in to great depth, since you're so smart.
Mtdmpls I understand you are frustrated around people you think are smart. You should just go back to watch videos on your “Wendy Car Toys” subscription to make frustration go away. However, I am not even that smart as you claim: the bit of info I dared to add in a comment to this video is something I think I heard or read on Bloomberg once, so the source of my deep knowledge is also BBG. this is why I wondered why it is not mentioned (still a great video, though)
@@Mtdmpls so someone sharing something informational and knowledgeable u chose to be cynical about it? U must be those people who thrive on compliments by doing absolutely nothing. Narcicist
I would love to see the last few minutes of this expanded to explore the effects of Amazon and other large companies owning this band with . What happens if those companies break up? What are the legal ramifications on who gets how much bandwidth as the laws change? How is privacy regulated on privately owned cable communication? So many questions...
"That it will be of qreat use cannot be questioned, but how will its uses add to the happiness of mankind? Has the land telegraph done any good? Has it banished any evil, mitigating and sorrow?" - a time traveling philosopher.
Like legit that could not be more true today with with social media, texting and email and the internet. We have lost the ability to not be reached and have instant access to all kinds of information. Honestly being slightly behind on news is not such a bad thing and if I already know what you did on your trip how are we supposed to have a conversation?
My Pomeranian (dog) told me to pretty much ignore anything that is not 3-dimensional and local. He told me unless I can see it, feel it, hear it, smell it, or taste it using my native senses .... then it is most likely irrelevant. To set an example for us all, I played a couple 'dog barking' vids to him. He perked up and barked a few times and went looking for his dog-friends. He quickly found the source, the speaker on my computer. He sniffed it a couple times and he went back to sleep... disappointed.
Dog imitates life. Life imitates Dog. 🐶
Well ssid.
I can learn almost anything I want without leaving my bed. I guess our definitions of happiness are different. You can’t be truly happy if you don’t know the world. The internet allows me to learn everyday! I think you’re mistaking social media for the internet..
@@madhououinkyoma I think you are mistaking my comment for talking about the internet. I never said that there was no benefit to the internet.
Just simply fantastic. Interesting how even the telegraph was initially mocked before mainstream adoption.
This was enormous both economically and
For the battlefield.
"Want to get dinner?"
"Sure lemme just hop on this plane, im in new york rn"
Dam, things we take for granted
True so many are there
actually, I hate to spill the beans Jose, but these guys exaggerate things, as we don't live on a "spherical ball" and the distance between Beijing and Los Angeles, for example, is a lot shorter and no cables or airplanes go under or over the Pacific Ocean - They just travel in a straight line, on a flat earth - notice how when you travel on planes , you see a graphic of the direction the plane is heading on the monitor, and it NEVER flies over the pacific but instead in a fake "curve" going north east and then south east, over Siberia, Alaska, and Canada. So as you can see, these under ocean cables only exist from northwest Europe to Eastern American coast, as the other cables from the Far East Asia to North America runs the same path as the airplanes above. Same with the shipping tankers that ship all the electronics and computers from China to America, follow the same path as they travel along the coasts of again, Siberia, Alaska, and Canada, never "across" the Pacific, because if you do travel east in perpendicular Beijing or west in perpendicular from California, you will hit, gulp, Antarctica, which might not be a "continent", but very well be an electromagnetic shield that blocks us from "outer space" yes outer space aint' planets in "space" as above the skies but outer space as the space outside of this electromagnetic shield and we are in the inner space. Well. that's what I think anyways, peace. That said, just google an image of the flat earth and you will see how we all live pretty close to each other, as only Australia and s. America are further away from each other.
@@ww387gr wat the fuck?
Imagine some country declared war before 19th century and it takes so long for the other country to reply they just forgot about it.
Then the other country received it and suddenly attacked.
Bloomberg with some of the best short documentaries
The Atlantic Telegraph Company tried in 1857, but the cable broke. They tried in 1858, and it worked for 23 days (Queen Victoria said 'Hello' and US President James Buchanan said 'Hi' back), before failing. They had to wait until after the American Civil War to try again in 1865. That one failed, as well. Then, in 1866, they tried yet again and THIS TIME it worked, and went on working. The whole thing cost a fortune, but made several fortunes.
Just proves that if you have a great idea and enough people agree with you, and the stubbornness to carry on trying, the future can be yours.
Truly, deeply inspiring; in world-class dimensions. Thanks a trillion: Cyrus West Field; for your unwavering human spirit of valuable, impactful achievement in vital global communications. Humankind is grateful.
Yeah right, he was in it for the money helping humanity was just aside effect 😝
My grandmother worked at the station in newfoundland way back in the day. Her job was to decipher some of the Morse code messages being received from Europe
I’ll bet those polite Canadians celebrated too, albeit quietly.
Ok, joke is old, is it the only Canadian reference you guys have?
Well actually at the time Newfoundland wasn't part of Canada.
Canadians brought the house down and you know it *fistpump*
man, canadians are desperate for any kind of attention
Dude we weren’t even Canadians we were still British
Imagine if this project wasnt made, you're sending a courier to send a porn video who lives at the other continent.
Argon wait... Why are you sending a porno internationally? And why only 1 video? And you mean like a VHS?? What decade are we in? If we're saying we didn't do this project you wouldnt have porn do your premise is flawed.
Imagine it?.... Nope.... No I can't
Happy day when the porn pidgeon arrives.
"Good morning thine mailman, please tell my customer the follow: "*thrusting sounds*, *moaning sounds*""
@@kp5602 woah......
You would have to go see them in person
Thank you for pointing out correctly that the firs trans -Atlantic telegraph line was extremely slow;
It did in in fact take a very long time to transmit a simple message because at the time they were using a paper tape mechanism that would respond to the telegraph key, or sender so after a bit of a lag time from when the operator or sender would press on their key from across the ocean the receiving equipment over here in the states would make marks on the paper tape and that equipment took a long time to respond to the telegraph signals were extremely weak due to the very long length of the first cable and it was a risky proposition to try and up the voltage because you could run the risk of burning up the cable over at the sending end of the cable , if there was a defect in the insulation and a super hi voltage could burn up the cable if it started to conduct electricity with the ocean waters;
However they eventually improved every thing and setup various relay points throughout Canada that would make this whole process more efficient and definitely quicker
But Business needs definitely drove development and innovations
So how fast did the message travel
interwebtubes
Not to
Mention the technology advancement of time transfer. Pre radio, allowing Greenwich time sync with the US naval observatory was a big deal. And that Greenwich Time sync went around the world by ocean cable. A huge advancement in geodesy.
I have the NY Times from the day after the first message was sent. It's a fascinating read. I actually bought it at a baseball card shop. He was selling it for $5 because it had a baseball box score in it. I quickly read the cover headlines and realized that it was not saved by someone 150 years ago for the silly box score.
the most famous person from my hometown in Wicklow, Ireland was Captain Robert Halpin. He was the captain of one these ships that laid the early cables.
Waiting for Flat-Earthers to come.
I came to put this same msg here.
Flat-Earther: if 99% of data comes through under water cables, where are the suposed satellites?
@@regularguy3253 HAHAHAHAHAHA 😂
He actually said 99%comms via undersea cables... Why have sattilites!!
They wouldn't click this video. They only watch corrective history and anti-educational alternate reality.
Dumb fucks. Why do we let them vote
sunsetlights100 transoceanic comms. Not all comms. Even ignoring their immense use for communication, satellites are still very helpful for collecting information about world-scale phenomenon like weather, allowing experimentation in micro-gravity, and observing the solar system and beyond.
You can actually still see part of the cable in Valentia island off the coast of Kerry, it's really cool
So much fun to learn how the first telegraph was a huge success even though it failed soon after the installation. And the layout of the first cables aren't much different than the ones we use today.
(I wrote this a while back. It will probably get more views here than gathering dust on my hard-drive.)
1857
It was a Wednesday morning in August, the height of summer. Crowds gathered to watch the two ships set sail, navy vessels from both sides of the Atlantic, the Niagara from America and the British Agamemnon, tasked to make history, to knit two continents back together for the first time in 200 million years. The yarn that they used was made of copper, and as thick as a man’s leg. One end was attached to Valentia Harbour, the rest was spooled out to sea, sinking below the green waves. The ships sailed in tandem. The crew watched meteorites flare across the balmy night sky. For six days they sailed, covering 380 miles then disaster struck. The cable snapped. Snapped and sank down into the green Atlantic’s depths where it still lies today.
A second attempt was made the following summer. The same ships, each carrying huge spools of cable manufactured by Glass Elliot &Co near Greenwich in London.
, this time sailing from both sides of the ocean to meet at midpoint. The cables were spliced together, and each ship set courses to return the direction from where they came. Almost immediately the cable snapped. Reversing their course the ships came together again. A second splice was made and off they set. This time the distance between them stretched to forty miles. Again the cable gave way under the strain. They tried again. Forty miles passed without incident. Fifty. Seventy. One hundred. One hundred and forty six miles was as far as they got. The ships cut their losses, which included a considerable amount of cable, and set parallel courses for Ireland. There they took stock and found that there was still enough cable for another attempt. Back across the Atlantic they set, stopping once more at the mid-point. It was the 29th of July. The days were still long, the nights were short. A week later the Agamemnon landed in Valentia Harbour again, while on the same day the Niagara docked at Newfoundland’s Trinity Bay. The cable had held. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will to men,” was the first message sent. The cable had been tested successfully with low voltages, but for some reason an engineer in charge decided to increase the voltage. By early September the cable was blown and the historic connection that had been made was now broken.
Seven years passed. This time just one ship was used, the colossal Great Eastern. No one on Valentia, or anywhere else in the world, had ever seen a ship as big. It made good time and good use of the mildness of summer, reaching the mid-point and beyond, but 800 miles shy of its destination the cable snapped, and despite attempts to retrieve it, sank to the ocean floor.
The following summer the Great Eastern set off again, leaving Foilhommerum Bay on Valentia Island, sailing at a clip of 120 miles a day, to land the cable in a Newfoundland fishing village called Heart’s Content on the 27th of July 1866. “A treaty of peace has been signed between Austria and Prussia,” was the first message sent, soon followed by another from Queen Victoria to US president Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln, murdered in a Washington D.C. theatre the year before. “The Queen congratulates the President on the successful completion of an undertaking which she hopes may serve as an additional bond of Union between the United States and England.”
Having carried words, messages, meanings back and forth across the wide ocean for an entire century, almost to the day the transatlantic cable was finally decommissioned in 1966, superseded by communication satellites, hovering in geostationary orbit 35,000 kilometres above the earth, tethered only by gravity.
LOVE
I’m from Newfoundland and I’ve been to signal hill it’s very important historically but the view is also incredible it’s my favorite place on the whole island
LUCKY 777'S I’d say the Tablelands in Grosn Morne are my favourite, however ya knows how cracked it is to drive all the way out there from St. John’s. Cheers from CBS me buddy!
The view is also amazing on the other side valentia island in Ireland
Vox called , They want their style back.
Everyone's been doing it lately, it seems, not just Bloomberg.
👍
Bless the people who created Internet. It is a tool for empowerment for the most vulnerable people in Society. I cannot stress enough how much it is helping every second
the invention that has changed the world the most ever
Why didn't we learn about this in school, seems pretty important...
It’s insane how much we take for granted in our time
I live about 10 km from valencia in Ireland where the cable was
I drove out to Hearts Content last summer and visited the IK Brunel museum in Bristol in the fall. It’s amazing how few people here ( Newfoundland) know this story. A lot more is made of Marconi and Signal Hill in St John’s.
The museum in Bristol is truly fantastic. Especially if you go by the Great Western Railway from St Pancras to Temple Meads. The ingenuity and effort of people in those days was outstanding. It was really a time when Britain could claim to be Great
I’ve always been mightily impressed by this diminutive man. Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
Quality production Bloomberg!
I'm surprised a movie has never been made about this.
Learning something new every day. Thanks 🙋♂️
I’ve always wondered this topic! Great video!
This is so amazing. Thank you for this concise history
Dear Americans, the UK is an Island off the coast of Europe, not an island in it. We are different. We wouldnt call someone from buffalo a Canadian.
grateful for these videos!
*Fun Fact: My Nigeria's telecom company, Globacom, is the first private company in the world to setup it's own fibre optic cable across the ocean, at a cost of $1 billion.*
I am trying to remit part the $1 billion to Nigeria but I have the money in a credit union here in the USA and they do not handle international business. I will transfer the $11.2 million USD using my Paypal Account. In order for Nigeria to receive the $11.2 million, Paypal requires a 10% deposit to defray their costs of the complex movement of funds from USA to the Nigerians. Accordingly, please deposit $1.2 million into my Paypal account so that the remainder of the $11.2 million can be sent. Please notice my Avatar is the Supreme Court and I hereby order you to deposit those funds to avoid seizure of the Nigerian Embassy and Consulate Buildings in Washington DC and NY. Thank you kindly and I look forward to working with Nigeria !
Greetings, Nigeria ! We received notice that you are under Supreme Court order to receive $11.2 million USD and TheNewWellsFargo will deposit the funds immediately upon receipt of the 10% processing deposit to the Paypal account referred to by the Supreme Court. In order for us to immediately remit those funds, please furnish us with the SWIFT routing number of the Nigerian bank accounts. We are under extreme pressure from our government to remit $11.2 million to prevent US nuclear retaliation against Nigeria. In order to save your homeland, please deposit $1.2 million in the Supreme Court Paypal account. Thank you kindly.
Hey can I get some of that cash too?
@@SunriseLAW *I wish I could understand the basis of your comment.*
@@TheNewWellsFargo *Good luck to you.*
how will its uses add to the happiness of mankind? i think its a very relevant question.
Better communication, more thoughts and ideas spread, technology, medicine and democracy increase hundreds of fold over ~200 years, infant mortality plummets and life expectancy explodes, pretty good invention
Who can be truly happy even though they might die any day now..?
This is a temporary world do the best you can helping others to live the best life they can before they pass and be patient until your day comes as well.
Life itsself revolves around death.
"it takes weeks to tell your friend youll die" thats sad
I was surprised that 99% of current data is still transmitted by cable. You just assume, in today’s age, most is transmitted by satellite.
A lot of times US is criticized, and in some cases it is warranted. However when I look back and see these great contributions US has made to the development of mankind, my confidence grows even stronger when I refer US as the best country the world has ever had yet. It's definitely okay if you disagree with me on this but that is just my opinion and we can always disagree as grown ups..
You have missed out on an important detail of this project - Oliver Heaviside - The Telegrapher’s equation. This person solves a very important technical challenge. This equations he devised during the process of laying this transatlantic cable still help high-speed signal design engineers.
That's so crazy & fascinating. I had to pause my homework reading on the gilded age to research more about this.
When the Titanic sank the debris fell on & around these underground telegraph cables. It was mentioned in a lecture video on the titanic debris feild.
They Never Mentioned Valentia Island Once. Valentia is the place that the cable was brought to from new foundland. The cable stations around Kerry stayed open till the late 1800s
Exactly
Thanks Cyrus, good chap
this is quite fascinating, very cool to see.
Thanks Bloomberg I’m Surprised They Let You Post This. 😎
WHAT???
This was actually done??
How?? So many sea creatures, uneven ocean floor with abiss and mountains!! How??
Because technology.
Because we do live on a solid surface crazy isn't it or did you think the ocean floor was made of marshmallow 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Great work!
The overall is perfect work, first is it ocean bed or floor? also some sentences are quite high quality, while the majority are modern low quality, the closeness between two continents do show the reason behind first travelers across the ocean. thanks
Thank you Michael Bloomberg for Making this information possible to us ☺
If you want to know about Cyrus Field and the Transatlantic Cable I would recommend reading: A Thread Across the Ocean by John Steele Gordon. It was a great read that digs into the history of this moonshot of the 19th century!
Fascinating, isn't it??
It was Lord Kelvin (of electricity and thermodynamics fame, and the Kelvin whom the Kelvin temperature scale is named after) who did the actual work on the Atlantic cable. There's a statue of him near where I live.
ok
Mathieu Hendey Lord Kelvin did the second version, which actually worked and was the reason for his Lordship iirc
Kelvin is one of only two persons to have one of the seven fundamental S.I. Measurement units named after him.
why would someone in Ireland want to go to dinner with someone in Canada
ExtermiNATE in hopes of running into trailer park boys
Because Canadian bacon is better than potatoes.
Thank you
Hmmmmm, now where have I seen a video similar to this recently....?
I actually thought of that too, I went back in my history just to check when you posted your video on this so I could confirm this was probably ripped off of you
Awesome video.
Great job
is the original fist telegraph cable still at the bottom of the atlantic?
Indeed marvelous!
There’s a wonderful museum in Heart’s Content, NL about the cable. Still has the original cables coming out of the ocean. Currently going through UNESCO approval process.
My grandmother worked there many a year ago. We went there and she gave me her own personal tour of what everything was for, where she use to sit and what it was she use to do.
Fun facts (or conversation killer depending on how you look at it) the nickname for the USD/GBP pair in the FX market is "cable" , sometimes also called, used Cockney rhyming slang, "Betty" as in Betty Grable = Cable. The undersea cable has also had a small time advantage over using satellites, I don't know if that's still the case though.
It is also why Canada and Jamaica are on our area code system.
Nice informative video.
Thank you for your idea make the world better
Definitely the best achievement of mankind
Good video !!
Why would someone across the sea ask you if you are free for dinner?
Theblackknight 70 because you're Oprah and want Italian and wanna see if your girl Patrice wanna come with
Theblackknight 70 rhetorical question
London as the HUB of International Commerce.
God Bless America!
I heard of this. I know this because a Arthur came to our school. She made a book talking about this line
I literally never knew that there was a wire underneath the sea from America to the U.K.! Could someone go under the ocean and just cut the cables?
great video
wow i didn’t know about wires under the sea. thank you mr. field. may your soul rest in peace 🙏
Are we just gonna ignore how he says “entrepreneurs”??? 4:14
That event will have changed humans more then any other
Super communication ! ;)
Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in sending the first radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean, disproving detractors who told him that the curvature of the earth would limit transmission to 200 miles or less. Looks like, there's no curvature.
In Newfoundland, Canada Marconi received the message, simply the Morse Code signal for the letter S, after it traveled over 2,000 miles from Cornwall, England. Marconi’s earlier wireless efforts went largely unappreciated. After his transatlantic transmission, his discoveries received world attention. In 1909, he received the Nobel Prize in physics.
Wow, they basically just straight up stole the idea for this video and deleted 3/4 of the information from nostalgia nerd
Gotta love these corporate channels.
The SS Great Eastern laid the first successful atlantic cable. It was a massive ship in it's day and never turned a profit. At least it was able to make history.
Something interesting about cable loss per unit distance. Let's say you selected a very low loss RF cable, only 0.1dB of loss per 100 feet. So to span 1600 miles across the Atlantic, you have about 8600dB of loss, which is a number so vast that most calculators cannot even display it. Better use radio, or fiberoptic lines instead.
One thing about telegraph messages. They didn't have annoying background "music."
As a Newfoundlander this makes me proud that our island got mentioned, however I’m saddened by how much ye fellas at Bloomberg got this wrong. Not to mention you pronounced “Newfoundland” wrong which was like chalk being scratched on the wall to me ears. Nonetheless, nothing is perfect so I’d say ya did a fair job with it. Cheers from a Newfoundlander. Not a Canadian.
Like a BOSS!!!
Mysteries of the Museum talks about this. It was insane!!
Nobody ever pronounces "Newfoundland" correctly.
It's noo-fn-land.
You pronounce the "land" part just like the word "land"... it's not the same "lund" sound that is used in the words "Ireland" or "Scotland".
Burial IKR!! I live here in mount pearl and it’s so annoying....
Sorry for reading words the way they logically would be pronounced.
Oh crap i was pronouncing it "Nyew-Fauwnd-Land"
@@blackbacon08
Many words in English are not pronounced the way that they're spelled, especially place names.
We say something like scot-lund or scot-lind and not scot-land, as I mentioned.
100 years later you can take minute to transfer data from titan to earth.
that's impossible because the maximum speed data can travel is the speed of light so for example to transfer data from earth to mars it can take anywhere from 3-20minutes
@@moneymoney3780 light is the fastest speed that we know of not necessarily that exists
Nick Bruce true it’s like saying it’s impossible to travel light speed. We can’t travel light speed with the current technology but in (x) amount of time, there could be a technology that could make that feat possible.
“Sure how about next year” . Damn! 😂
thats nuts to think about the fact they had to drag a cable across the ocean for this, i can just imagine the wtf faces fishes made when they encountered it
Crazy that it's literally a cable stretching the entire ocean
I don’t know if it’s true but I’ve heard the ancient Roman use to use signal fires to pass information of across large distances in a method similar to morse code.
It is a bit strange how this video was posted just few days after a great video about the exact same topic by 'Nostalgia Nerd'