The Cable that Changed the World: How Instant Global Communication Began in 1858

The word wire­less is going the way of com­put­er­ized and portable, and for much the same rea­sons. We no longer regard wire­less devices that require no phys­i­cal con­nec­tions to any­thing else as mar­vels, but as some­thing close to neces­si­ties. But our age, with its increas­ing­ly com­mon assump­tions that infor­ma­tion just trav­els through the air, owes its exis­tence to wires — and, in a his­tor­i­cal sense, to one set of wires in par­tic­u­lar, whose sto­ry is told in the Pri­mal Space video above. Woven into a mighty 2,000-mile-long cable, it was laid across the Atlantic Ocean 168 years ago, enabling the first direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion link between North Amer­i­ca and Europe. Not that inter­con­ti­nen­tal video shar­ing was just around the cor­ner.

No, the height of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy at the time was the tele­graph: the Vic­to­ri­an Inter­net, if you like, to bor­row the title of the book by Econ­o­mist edi­tor Tom Standage that inspired the video. As a tech­nol­o­gy, teleg­ra­phy itself is quite a bit old­er than the afore­men­tioned transat­lantic cable. One pos­si­ble start­ing point is 1746, when sci­en­tist Jean-Antoine Nol­let man­aged to send a jolt of sta­t­ic elec­tric­i­ty all the way down a line of 200 monks.

Anoth­er is 1792, when inven­tor Claude Chappe’s sys­tem of sem­a­phor­ic tow­ers was first imple­ment­ed. Though described as a tele­graph, it used no elec­tric­i­ty: if a human oper­a­tor up in one of the tow­ers spot­ted a change in the sig­nal of the pre­vi­ous one, he’d rearrange his own sem­a­phores to match it, and so on down the line. In 1800, Alessan­dro Vol­ta’s chem­i­cal bat­tery helped make the elec­tric tele­graph viable, but nobody was sure how best to trans­mit intel­li­gi­ble mes­sages in the form of elec­tri­cal puls­es.

Nobody was sure, that is, until the eigh­teen-thir­ties, when a painter named Samuel Morse came up with the dot-and-dash code that now bears his name, as well as the devices used to encode and decode com­mu­ni­ca­tions made with it. At the same time, Eng­lish inven­tors William Cooke and Charles Wheat­stone had come up with their own tele­graph sys­tem that did­n’t require a code­book, though its five wires made it more expen­sive and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly com­plex. With­in a few years, the U.S. and the U.K. had inde­pen­dent­ly built thou­sands of miles of tele­graph lines, mak­ing the next step of link­ing them togeth­er obvi­ous, if eas­i­er said than done. Though the cable laid in 1858 failed with­in months, its basic con­cept has proven unusu­al­ly robust. With­out the rough­ly 600 under­sea cables through which glob­al inter­net traf­fic now flows, after all, you would­n’t be read­ing this post — to say noth­ing of watch­ing the video.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Mun­da­neum, an Ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry “Inter­net” That Put the World’s Knowl­edge on Mil­lions of Index Cards

What the Entire Inter­net Looked Like in 1973: An Old Map Gets Found in a Pile of Research Papers

A Fas­ci­nat­ing 3D Ani­ma­tion Shows the Depths of the Ocean

Mark Twain Pre­dicts the Inter­net in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Sto­ry, “From The ‘Lon­don Times’ in 1904”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.