A submarine communications cable is a cable laid beneath the sea to carry telecommunications between countries. The first submarine communications cables carried telegraphy traffic. Subsequent generations of cables carried first telephony traffic, then data communications traffic. All modern cables use fiber optic technology to carry digital payloads, which are then used to carry telephone traffic as well as Internet and private data traffic.
As of 2002, submarine cables link all the world's continents except Antarctica.
The first submarine communications cable was a telegraph cable laid between England and France in August 1850 by the Anglo-French Telegraph Company. In 1852 a link laid by the Submarine Telegraph Company linked London to Paris for the first time.
The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858 (Cyrus Field). It only operated for a month. Attempts in 1865 and 1866 were more successful but although a telephone cable was discussed from the 1920s it needed a number of technological advances that did not arrive until the 1940s to be practical.
TAT-1 (Transatlantic No. 1) was the first transatlantic telephone cable system. It was laid between Gallanach Bay, near Oban, Scotland and Clarenville, Newfoundland between 1955 and 1956. It was inaugurated on September 25 1956, initially carrying 36 telephone channels.
http://www.iscpc.org/ - The International Cable Protection Committee -- includes a register of submarine cables worldwide (though not always updated as often as one might hope)
Cableships of the World (http://www.iscpc.org/information/ships.htm)
FLAG telecom network summary (http://www.flagtelecom.com/network/network_chart.htm)
When the first transatlanticcable was successfully laid in the summer of 1858, two continents buzzed with the promise of instant communication.
The problem of retardation, which caused much of the delay that accompanied transmissions through the first cable, was greatly diminished by the innovations of William Thomson, and the cables of the 1860s sent signals across the Atlantic in a matter of seconds.
Telegraph messages were sent in the dots and dashes of Morse Code, and someone had to sit in a telegraph office, listen to the clicks coming through the telegraph receiver, and decipher them.
The first Transatlantictelegraphcable was a telegraphcable that crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Valentia Island, in western Ireland to Trinity Bay, in eastern Newfoundland.
The cable consisted of seven copper wires, each weighing 26 kg/km (107 pounds per nautical mile), covered with three coats of gutta-percha, weighing 64 kg/km (261 pounds/nautical mile) and wound with tarred hemp, over which a sheath of eighteen strands, each of seven iron wires, was laid in a close spiral.
The Atlantic cable was a theme for innumerable sermons and a prodigious quantity of doggerel.
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