AILSA CHANG, HOST:
What powers the global internet? The answer might surprise you. It's not satellites, but hundreds of thin cables that run along the ocean floor. The roots of this crucial and often fragile oceanic infrastructure date all the way back to the mid-1800s. Throughline's Ramtin Arablouei brings us the story of the man who created the first transatlantic cable, laying the foundations for today's global communications.
RAMTIN ARABLOUEI, BYLINE: In the 1850s, if you wanted to send a letter across the Atlantic ocean, say from New York to London, it would take about two weeks, and then you'd have to wait another two weeks for a reply. One month for just one exchange. But that would all change because of one bored and wealthy man - Cyrus Field.
CYRUS W FIELD IV: I gather he was about 5'9", which may have been on the slightly tall side. Also estimated 140 pounds or so. My name is Cyrus W. Field IV.
ARABLOUEI: Yes, Cyrus Field IV. He is the great-great-grandson of the first Cyrus Field that we're talking about.
FIELD: He was extremely squirmy and always running around, very high energy. He was bright. He was good at math. At age 12, he started keeping the family books, running the finances for the family. And he was the only boy in that family that didn't go to college.
ARABLOUEI: Cyrus moved to New York from Massachusetts as a teenager and started working at a paper company. Eventually, he started his own company and made a fortune, the equivalent of about $10 million today.
FIELD: And apparently he worked all the time, except on Sundays. But it took a toll on his health. And after something like 14 years, I guess, in the paper business, his doctor told him he needed to retire.
ARABLOUEI: Which he did.
FIELD: And was apparently kind of bored.
ARABLOUEI: Until the day a stranger came knocking at his door.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING)
ARABLOUEI: The stranger was an engineer who wanted Cyrus to invest in a telegraph cable to improve communications between Newfoundland and Eastern Canada and the North American mainland. But Cyrus had a better idea.
BILL BURNS: And he had a big floor globe, which is now in the Smithsonian. And Cyrus says, well, you know, if we're going to have a connection to Newfoundland, why couldn't we just extend it across the Atlantic?
ARABLOUEI: A transatlantic cable - it had never been done before, and nobody had even attempted to do it. But if this idea was possible, it would be weeks faster than having a mail ship cross the Atlantic.
BURNS: And so Cy (ph) looks at his globe and says, why don't we do a cable?
ARABLOUEI: The idea was to have a cable line that would connect from the west coast of Ireland all the way to Newfoundland and Canada. From there, telegraph landlines would carry messages onto major cities like New York and London.
BURNS: Now Cyrus is not technical. He's in the paper business.
ARABLOUEI: This is Bill Burns.
BURNS: I'm a former BBC broadcast engineer.
ARABLOUEI: And he's the founder of the website atlantic-cable.com, which is a deep dive, so to speak, on the first transatlantic cable.
BURNS: But he's not technical at all, but he has friends who are, like Samuel Morse, for example.
ARABLOUEI: No big deal, just the inventor of the revolutionary telegraph and the Morse code. So Cyrus talks to those friends, pours a bunch of money into the project, gets investors on board and even gets two warships from the U.S. and the British government that would each carry 1,000 miles of cable. This would be a crucial part of the plan, as no single ship could carry the cable's full weight. It would take at least 30 men to coil cables onto a ship at any given moment.
BURNS: And it's a copper wire with seven strands. That is surrounded by gutta-percha, which is a tree resin. And then surrounding that is iron wire stranded around it for strength and protection.
ARABLOUEI: The whole thing was around five-eighths of an inch in diameter. That's smaller than a dime. And the plan is to drop it all 12,000 feet down to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean. Cyrus makes all the necessary preparations - crew members, machinery, food and water for the journey.
BURNS: So here we are in the summer of 1857.
ARABLOUEI: The plan was for the first ship to lay its 1,000 miles of cable, meet the second ship in the middle of the ocean, splice the cables together and let the other ship finish laying the rest. But almost as quickly as they started...
BURNS: They ran into problems with their machinery. They got about 350 miles out from Ireland, and they lost the end of the cable in much deeper water, and they could not recover the cable. And the problem was then, they really had very little slack on the cable, not enough to replace 350 miles that was lost. So they gave up for the year.
ARABLOUEI: A year after the first try, they make a second attempt. But again, it fails because of a massive storm that ends up damaging the cables on board. But just a month after that second attempt, Cyrus and the two warships head back out to sea.
BURNS: And they start again in the middle, and they sail out to both ends.
ARABLOUEI: A day passes, then two.
BURNS: They both land at about the same time. And they land the cables, and they start sending signals.
(SOUNDBITE OF MORSE CODE BEING TAPPED)
ARABLOUEI: They had done it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Reading) The Queen desires to congratulate the president upon the successful completion of this great international work.
ARABLOUEI: The Queen of England sends the first official message to the president of the United States. It's 102 words and takes almost 16 hours to send, but it's way better than two weeks. And when Cyrus returns to New York City, he gets a hero's welcome.
BURNS: They have a big celebration in Manhattan with fireworks and parades.
ARABLOUEI: And the cable starts to deliver on its promise. Hundreds of messages go back and forth. Within a decade, the transatlantic cable is on its way to becoming indispensable.
BURNS: So for $100 in gold in 1866, you could send a 20-word message across the cable. Bring that into modern money, it's hundreds and hundreds of dollars, you know, for a single message.
FIELD: Which is phenomenally expensive, but it beats, you know, boating across the ocean ever (ph).
ARABLOUEI: As for Cyrus Field, the project he spent over a decade on, invested his own fortune in, that he believed in with his whole being was finally finished. He could finally give his mind and body some rest.
FIELD: Apparently, he crossed the Atlantic over 50 times dealing with this, and he got seasick every time.
ARABLOUEI: By 1900, cables connected almost every continent.
BURNS: If you look at a present-day cable map of the world and you look at the 1902 cable map of the world, you will see those cables are on exactly the same routes, OK, worldwide, with the exception of the Pacific, which is much more heavily cabled now.
ARABLOUEI: In the 1950s, the first telephone cables were laid in the ocean, and fiber optic cables followed starting in the 1980s. Today, hundreds of undersea cables keep billions of people connected.
CHANG: That was Throughline's Ramtin Arablouei. You can hear the whole episode on NPR's Throughline podcast. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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