Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Undersea Cables

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Alex Schmidt is joined by bestselling author Jason Pargin (new novel "If This Book Exists, You’re In The Wrong Universe") for a look at why undersea cables are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Undersea Cables. Known for being long. Famous for being wet. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Undersea Cables are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. My guest today is my former colleague, my old pal, and one of my favorite authors. Jason Pargin is a New York Times bestselling novelist and a full-time novelist. His newest novel is called If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. That's the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series. It also stands on its own and explains itself. You don't need to be caught up on the canon or whatever. And it came

out just a few months ago. It is so fantastic. I am so glad you can just go out and get it. Like, go to your local bookstore or internet version of that and pick it up. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Acknowledge Jason recorded this on the traditional land of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Tsotsiyaha peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and today's episode is about undersea cables. That's a topic chosen by supporters of this podcast over at sifpod.fun. Many thanks to G. Moyer for suggesting that idea,

and to the whole audience of members who picked it back in December. Also, to be clear, we are talking about telecommunications undersea cables, the ones that go all the way underneath the Earth's oceans. There is another main kind of undersea cable that transmits electricity, but that's usually over much shorter distances. The largest one in the world only goes between the east coast of England and Norway. So that's very substantial. But this episode is about the giant, humongous, globe-spanning cables that interconnect our telecommunications and let us have, you know, a worldwide web. So please sit back or sit on a continent besides the Americas and be grateful to the cables that brought this to your ears. Either way, here's this episode of

Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Jason Pargin. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Jason, thank you so much for doing this one. Of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. So how do you feel about undersea cables? I sometimes worry that when I come on these shows, I bring down the mood by immediately talking about something that is a real bummer. No, you're good. I mean, I think when we explored barbed wire, that was a feature to me. I mean, I think when we explored barbed wire, that was a feature to me, like that barbed wire is so bad in so many circumstances. And most people just see it as kind of furniture in the world. Like, oh, it's just out there.

But this one, I feel like this topic is at its core more positive than barbed wire. Sure. So let me start by saying that the terror attack I'm about to discuss only killed one person, the terrorist. But, and this is going to seem unrelated. Don't be the laugh at the death. I just like that phrase. Yeah. This is going to seem unrelated until I explain it.

But basically, two years ago, almost to the day, I don't know when this episode is going up, but in Christmas of 2020, a truck bomb detonated in downtown Nashville and obliterated an entire city block. An incident that some of you hearing this either A, have forgotten about, or B, literally didn't know happened if you live far enough away. That's because one, the only person who was killed was the bomber, because in a really spooky scene, he had set it to announce via a voice thing with loudspeakers telling everyone to evacuate, that there's a bomb about to go off. It's like something out of a movie. This thing was sitting there at like four in the morning telling everyone, leave, this truck's about to explode. And then it did.

explode. And then it did. Well, what it did was it took out an AT&T switching station, just a little building, kind of looked like a storefront, that knocked out internet service in multiple states, knocked out cell phone service in multiple cities, knocked out 911 service in multiple cities, knocked out air traffic control at one airport, and all of this stuff stayed down for days afterward. And to me, that should have been a huge story because I did not think the average person realized that the internet and our cell service and all of this stuff we depend on, including your ability to hear this podcast, runs through these bottlenecks that in many cases are just a nondescript building that has a bunch of servers in it. And that space is rented by other services and companies. Like I said, it was an AT&T

switching center, but these other companies were basically, I guess, just renting bandwidth from them or whatever to route their traffic through it. So you had one spot that if you knocked it out, it knocked out like 15 or 20% of the country, seemingly. Now, people in the immediate aftermath of that explosion were like, oh my gosh, this guy was trying to take out our telecom network. Like, this has to be ISIS. They knew right where to hit us. No, it turned out he had no idea it was there. He was just looking for a space to detonate his truck bomb, and he drove around for a while, and he had no idea. The guy was crazy. He thought it was some UFO conspiracy.

is or seems to be, because a lot of people do not realize all of their internet travels across a big, thick wire that's just sitting on the ocean floor and covered with, like, moss and whatever's down their barnacles. That's my immediate response is, so if a boat chops us up with a propeller on accident, does that just cut off the internet for an entire continent? So that's what I'm going to be here to find out. Yeah, and I feel like it's good news that the answer is no. Mainly just because we have built so many of these cables between so many different points that, for the most part, the traffic can route around it through other totally under-the-ocean cables. It's very amazing to think about that Nashville story where so much is fragile and so much of the infrastructure can be cut off for a long period of time.

And then beneath the ocean, where humans do not belong, in my opinion, mainly because I'm afraid of sea creatures, but beneath the ocean, it's, I guess, more robust. We have a more stable system set up, even though it is a system of cables that are at the bottom of the sea, which is basically like a wet version of outer space. Listeners, do you appreciate that on the internet, the normal practice would be to save that piece of information for the very, very end. If not for the paywalled bonus show, and that the title of this episode in most hands would be, is our internet at risk from a single shark bite? Could a single angry whale take out all of the internet for the United States, leaving us vulnerable to attack from Russia? Find out. It's the very, very end of part four of this episode. We will finally tell you. And instead, Alex tells you right from the top,

no, it should be fine. Now let's get into the fascinating details of how, what is, once you hear about this cable system, it to me is like one of the seven wonders of the world. But, yeah, the key information of is this a threat to you, Alex just kicks off the show by saying, no, not really. Probably not. It's probably fine. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah. And there's a lot to this.

fine. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah. And there's a lot to this. As far as feeling good about the situation, one source is a security analyst named Doug Midori, who the Christian Science Monitor interviewed about this. He says that global internet can mostly just route traffic to the working cables if something happens to the ones that break. Also, they're getting broken and repaired pretty often. So we're kind of always dealing with that situation, but in a piecemeal way. And also, there's been like a national defense look at this lately, because along with Russia invading Ukraine, which is still going on as we tape this, the Russians sabotaged some energy pipelines. And then people said, hey, what if they sabotage communications cables? then people said, hey, what if they sabotage communications cables? And a UK defense think tank called Chatham House says, quote,

we're no longer in the position that we once were, where you cut one cable and everything goes down, end quote. So yeah, it's pretty amazing that they are down at the bottom of the seafloor and a combination of people and just being on the seafloor has not blown up that system. And I think we can talk about the details of it because on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called... Look at this load of stats. Every time I do, it makes me math.

And that name was submitted by at teenage based land on Twitter. Thank you. Teenage based land. There's a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Also, like I'm going to start doing this every week, but most weeks I say, Hey, please send them to sifpod at gmail.com or at sifpod on Twitter. I'm planning on winding down Twitter one way or another if it does not wind itself down. And so please chiefly send these to sifpod at gmail.com. Email, you know, email's great. If you send it on Twitter, I might miss it or, you know, the whole system might go down. So email's the best way to submit. Don't get us started on why Twitter is, I just, don't, we can't – we can't get off on that.

Yeah, it's a lot. If our system is vulnerable, it's more vulnerable to that kind of thing than to secretly cutting the cables. But that would be a discussion for a completely different show and one that I myself would not listen to. Yeah, you can just read all about it on Twitter. So you're all set. That's all Twitter is now is people complaining about Twitter. Nothing emphasizes what a waste of your life it is. And when you go on Twitter and the only thing you find out from being on there is what's happening with Twitter,

the business. It's like, well, that's time I'll never get back. What am I doing? I could have been talking to my family. I could have been learning a new language. I could have been doing anything, anything but that. Yeah. Let's dive under the ocean and have an adventure instead. Let's dive under the ocean and have an adventure instead. Because the first number here is 400. Simple number, 400. That's the approximate number of undersea cables for telecommunications in the world. As of November 2021, there's about 400 of them. And that number's from a book called Atlas of the Invisible, which is co-written by James Cheshire,

who's a professor of geographic information and cartography at University College London, and also by Oliver Uberti, who's a designer and former design editor for National Geographic. It's like all the maps in it, amazing. But the information about these cables, they say that, quote, the internet lives under the sea. And I feel like that's a perfect way to put a takeaway within the numbers. Takeaway number one, undersea cables are the reason there is a global internet. And I really want to highlight that because like, I think before researching this, I would have expected, especially satellites to make a lot of this go and make a lot of the situation where you in Europe or Australia or elsewhere can hear this podcast. I really thought a lot more of that

bounced above the earth. But these undersea cables are the main reason, really the entire reason, that about two-thirds of humans can go onto an internet and talk to each other across continents. to an internet and talk to each other across continents. This will also seem unrelated, but in the world of modern technology for your home, every device wants to be wireless, including keyboards and mice, for no reason. And they are all worse because there is latency. They have to be recharged, right? They have to have batteries change. And that is a case where the reason I think people are shocked to find out that the internet literally is a series of wires that attaches countries because the map of the cables,

it looks like the back of my television set where I've got all the all just just piles of wires laying down there. Yeah. And it looks very primitive, but it's like, no, the modern world still runs on cables and probably always will. And I like every time I troubleshoot the Wi-Fi on my computer, on my PlayStation, the first thing that comes up is, well, you know, you're probably getting interference from something that's blocking the Wi-Fi signal. Try running a cable to it instead and do it that way. It's like, okay, then why did you invent having everything be wireless?

Just because you think wires are unsightly? Because the performance is horrific compared to a physical cable. And as they improve the speed of Wi-Fi signals, the speed of cable signals also gets faster. So it's weird to think that 100 years from now, it may still all be cables, just slightly fancier cables. Yeah. The odd technological way I ran into that is editing this podcast

because my, it's called a DAW, but it's professional editing software for editing audio. You have to use headphones that jack into your computer because it's not able to do what it needs to do over a Bluetooth headphone, like an AirPod or something. It needs to be physically jacked in because like the entire internet across the entire earth, it just works better if there's a physical cable to run the stuff through. And we never think about this, especially with all the amazing space technology we have. And I think with our phones, too, I just think all the calls are going through space.

No, it is a set of about 400 cables. And I'm very excited to link all sorts of different maps of this, especially the colorful ones, because it looks like a fun circuit board, I guess I'd call it. But especially across the major ocean crossings, there is a thick set of cables. And that's also part of why it's hard to knock the system down by just knocking out a few cables, because there's all sorts of redundancies and across a lot of geographical directions. sorts of redundancies and across a lot of geographical directions. Yeah, and we're going to, I believe our bonus show is going to be entirely about, like, the war of cables and that kind of thing. Yeah. Which is, if you're interested in that aspect of it, that would be a very worthwhile reason

for you to subscribe. Because I think anybody wanting to write, like like a modern war scenario or a screenplay about a future war, I think you would immediately think, well, what if they took submarines and went down and just like cut off our, or because we would just be blind, you know, we would lose our ability to communicate with Europe or whatever. And that's what I would have thought until I saw this map. I mean, in theory, they could still take out, you would think they could take out enough of them, but I'm sure it would be extremely difficult. It would, yeah.

I think it would take a really comprehensive submarine, basically terrorism operation, and it would need to happen pretty much worldwide without anyone noticing, which also seems very hard to do. Because even, you know, let's say they cut all of the many cables going across the Atlantic Ocean, you know, between North America and Europe. Great. The traffic can go south through Africa to South America and back up. It can go over land and then over the Pacific. Like there's such a set of these 400 cables that were set up to cover a lot of places. The cables also run to all of the continents except Antarctica. They also connect islands as small as Hawaii, New Zealand, Tahiti, Fiji, Guam, the Marianas,

Mauritius. Like the list of places these go to is probably bigger than your knowledge of geography. I don't mean to tell you, listener, you don't know stuff, but it really covers basically everywhere where there's a significant human population. And there is satellite internet to cover the other places, but people are really aggressive about trying to link the whole world with these cables to the point where in 2021, the Australian Government's Bureau of Meteorology called for a cable to Antarctica. They say that that would provide stable, fast communications with Australian research stations in Antarctica,

and also lay groundwork for more internet connection to Antarctica, even though it's Antarctica, there are basically no people there. But we find these cables to be so useful, so handy, and so much better than satellites. And to be clear, these are fiber optic cables, right? Yeah. So it's still sending like a pulse of light down a little straw of glass, and the frequency of those pulses of light is interpreted as data.

Am I understanding how that works correctly? Yeah, that's right. And before researching this, I didn't totally know what a fiber optic cable is, but that's exactly right. It's highly refined glass. It's a thread that light goes down. Yeah. See, that's why it automatically, in my mind, sounds incredibly fragile. But I know we're going to get into it but it sounds like these would be breaking constantly and if you had gone to somebody in say 1960 or whatever some sometime pre-fiber optic and said look we think we can connect all of these new computer devices around the world but we'll need a new type of cable where it's just basically a long strip of glass and will send light down the glass. I think that would sound absurd. It'd be like,

how would that work? How would you manufacture it? How would you install it? How would it be in any way resilient to weather, temperature changes, currents, anything? Sharks biting it. I almost feel like they came up with the name fiber optic cables so they wouldn't have to call them glass cables. Because then when you're in that meeting, you sound stupid if you're like, yeah, we'll put glass under the ocean. That'll be fine. Like the other person in the meeting would be like, no, it should be made of whatever's

in Wolverine's bones or something. Obviously something very strong. I don't know why you would use glass diamonds, maybe that would be better. And in fact, I remember hearing in grade school that when they were, cause this would have been the ancient days of early, the early eighties. And it was in one of our textbooks that the world was going to run out of copper because they had done the math and like, well, by the time you hook up communications cables to all of Africa, all of China, all these developing areas that are coming online, like there's not enough copper to string phones to everybody,

let alone whatever future would come up. Well, of course, it was fiber optic that rendered that problem obsolete. We, of course, still use a whole bunch of copper, but one little strand of fiber optic can carry a much larger signal than a whole spool of copper, than tons of it. But that innovation was one of the things, one of those reasons where anytime somebody talks about a future bottleneck of what we're going to run out of blank, usually we find an alternative. And this next number plays into that because the next number is about 99%. You know, almost 100, about 99%. That is how much of international digital communication relies on undersea cables.

Phone calls and other communications use them. The main exception I could find for just any information being transmitted is satellite TV. I could find for just any information being transmitted is satellite TV. It turns out satellite TV does involve bouncing a TV signal up into a satellite in space and then back down to individual dishes. The accompanying number here is 200 terabits per second. 200 terabits per second, that's the fastest data speed of current major undersea cables. There is a cable across the Atlantic Ocean between Spain and the U.S. state of Virginia, and it can send 200 terabits of data per second. According to Atlas of the Invisible, if you want to understand that amount of data, 200 terabits, they say that in all of history,

at 200 terabits. They say that in all of history, people have purchased 280 million records by the Beatles. And if you took those 280 million records, turned all the songs on them into digital music and digital information, this Moraya cable could transmit it across the Atlantic within several seconds. Basically, all of the internet is going through these undersea cables in between the land networks we've got. And this could change in the future. If we move to a satellite-based internet, the main candidate is a service called Starlink, which is operated by SpaceX, which is privately owned by Elon Musk. There's rumors of an IPO. And it's a Musk podcast. Yeah, it's becoming a Musk podcast pretty fast.

He tricked me. Yeah. But yeah, Elon Musk, he has built this network of satellites in space for internet specifically. But also in October 2022, Musk posted a whole bunch of tweets claiming that operating Starlink was causing him huge financial losses in Ukraine. He was like, ah, I'm so noble of me to bother to do this. And then as of September 2022, US and Canada customers for Starlink are saying there's a big drop in its speed. Also, Musk said in 2019 that there would be a 2022 IPO for Starlink. But then this year, he said it would be another three or four years from then. So there could be lots of reasons for delays and issues with this existing satellite

internet business. A lot of them could be that the owner is personally unstable and blowing up all his businesses right now. But it also might be a problem that is harder to solve than we think. Like it might just be hard to get satellite internet going because undersea cables are a very robust, very fast way of doing it. Yeah, it's kind of similar, just to pick a totally unrelated example, in the way that driverless cars are a much more difficult engineering and software problem than may have been portrayed by the people promoting them as something that would be here within two years or one year. It's like, no, that's actually maybe 30 years away. Anyway, okay, we can't.

Next number here, it is a date. It is December 1988. December 1988. December 1988, that's when a branching fiber optic cable linked France and the United Kingdom to the United States. And so this cable was the first internet cable across an ocean that had never been built before December 1988. We'll talk about pre-internet telecom cables and the takeaways, but this coming December 2023 will mark 35 years of world internet cables under the sea. And the cable has a name. It's called TAT-8. It's not an amazing name, but it's finished in December 1988. It's built by a set of companies. They were led by France Telecom, British Telecom, and AT&T in the US. And so they connected those three countries. They ran a cable from the coast of Brittany in

France to the coast of Cornwall in England, and then from England all the way to the southern coast of New Jersey. And that fiber optic cable was about 7,200 kilometers long, which is about 4,500 miles. And once they finished it, it was pretty revolutionary. It carried 10 times more data than the previous telecom cables, which were made of copper. And so this was something that really facilitated the internet style experience that we have. So you have three countries, multiple companies, and who knows how many subcontractors, because I assume those companies do not manufacture their own fiber optic that comes from Corning or whatever the big glass company is that spits out that stuff. But again, the idea of saying, well, to make the future of communication work, we need you to make a hair-thin strip of glass 4,500 miles long

and lay it across the ocean floor, and that's how we'll talk to each other. I know that it's corny to be impressed with modern capitalism or whatever, and I'm going to sit here and praise AT&T and whatever, British telecom, because I've been on multiple extremely angry customer support phone calls with AT&T. I am not here to act as their PR. This is a stunning achievement. Whatever flaws there are with the modern world, and there are many, our technology and our communications technology, because remember, this is 1988. I was 13 years old in 1988. This is not ancient history.

That this is the type of thing that we can still coordinate, and it took thousands of people to make this work, and that it actually functioned once they did it, I'm sorry, that boggles the mind. And I think so much of the infrastructure that we depend on, we just don't see it. And it's boring to talk about, but it's like, man, this was a hundred years prior to that, that accomplishment would have sounded absurd. Not the concept of laying cables, because as we're going to discuss, we've been doing that for a while, but the amount of data that it was required, the type of cable, what it's intended to do, the thinking machines that it was going to connect,

that would have all been the stuff of literal science fiction. Only, I don't think any science fiction authors at the time predicted this. This goes online in December 1988. And then a few months later, IBM arranges a special dedicated circuit, which connects Cornell University in New York to the CERN laboratory in Switzerland. And one person working at CERN then uses that example and system to propose and demonstrate a data sharing system called the World Wide Web. And that guy's name was Tim Berners-Lee. If anybody is considered an inventor of the internet, it's mostly that guy. But this was revolutionary. And it was also a step beyond a long existing practice because

the first time computers connected to each other, according to Atlas of the Invisible, that was back in October 1969. UCLA and Stanford, two computers, tried to talk to each other. According to Atlas of the Invisible, that was back in October 1969. UCLA and Stanford, two computers, tried to talk to each other. So it took a full 20 years for Berners-Lee to say, hey, what if there's a World Wide Web? And this cable was sort of a missing piece to make that seem like it was possible. And it required a partnership of governments and corporations, like private and public. You can hold this up as a partnership of governments and corporations like private and public. Like you can hold this up as an example of governments accomplishing great things because this did start as like a DARPA project. And a lot of universities did the research with public funding.

And then basically these technologies got licensed to private corporations like the telecoms or whatever. Most of the big things we have in the modern world, it's that. It's a combination of private and public investment. And again, this is because IBM wanted to make a whole bunch of money off of it. This is because AT&T wanted to make a whole bunch of money off of it. I'm not trying to lavish praise on them for that. It's just that being cynical about capitalism or whatever should not rob you of the ability to marvel at what people can still accomplish. It's because this was accomplished by a whole lot of people working really, really hard, very smart people having ideas and bringing

them into the world. Yeah, 100%. And people have really run with the capitalist benefit of this kind of cable. That's how we have this stack of 400 of them now across the world. And they've also scaled that up significantly in an infrastructure way that was surprising to me, because the last number here is the biggest internet cable right now, the longest undersea cable. The number is 33, because 33 is the number of countries linked by one cable. It's a system that's about 39,000 kilometers of cable, or more than 24,000 miles, and it's a cable called C-MeWe3. Before researching this, I would have assumed the biggest cable is, I don't know, across the Pacific, you know, whatever the biggest ocean is across that. It turns out our longest undersea

cable is a set of cables working from Western Europe over to East Asia and to Australia, but going not over land, but like between all the continents, not across a big ocean. So the cable runs from Belgium and the UK, then it goes down and through the Mediterranean, the UK, then it goes down and through the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, through the Indian Ocean, and then branching to East Asia and to Australia. But we are building so many cables to build such a robust infrastructure that there's kind of a cable covering every route and direction that the seas and waterways make available to us. So it's not even just a crossing huge oceans thing.

It's a connecting everything thing. This is what I like about this. I'm looking at the map right now. I realize most of the listeners are not going to stop and look at the map, but it's just drawing a line from Europe across the top of Africa, you know, across the Middle East, all the way down through all of those waterways up under India, and then actually branches off to Australia and then up through, you know, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, and all that. It's a lot of routes that in your elementary school textbook, these lines would have been like the route these explorers tried to sail and died many times trying to like trying to find a pathway from Indonesia to Japan.

And he made it this far and then was was eaten by whales or whatever. Whereas now, like earlier this morning, I discovered a TikTok account called Stairwell Farts. Sure. And it's a man who every day in the stairwell of his large office building it's very vertical you know open structure stairwells goes very far and he will fart very loudly and it echoes up and down the entire building and then he will post these to tiktok to get like 24 million views without that cable that wouldn't exist Without that cable, that wouldn't exist.

And when you see this, like, it's easy to look at the TikToks, the stairwell farts TikTok and say, well, do we need this? It's like, yeah, but do you realize how little effort it took for this person to make something that can be seen all the way around the world? And the astonishing infrastructure it took to make that possible. And we totally take it for granted because there's a meme that I've complained about before. People who follow me have seen me complain about this, but where they will take a photo of like a cabin in the woods by a lake, like a very scenic cabin and post it on Reddit, post it on Twitter, whatever, post it on Instagram. It's like, this is all I need. Like, I wish I could abandon the rat race and just go out in the woods.

And people in the comments will say, I agree. All I would need is like, you know, just a place where I could get food nearby and Wi-Fi. Those are the simple things that I need. and Wi-Fi. Those are the simple things that I need. It's like, okay, with that second one, I'm not sure you appreciate hundreds of thousands of miles of wires and servers and routers and millions of users and employees and all that that it takes to maintain what to you is like, no, this is one of the simple things to live the simple life. All I would need is a little cabin, a pond, and just Wi-Fi, a good Wi-Fi signal. It's like, okay, you are taking for granted what a stupid achievement it was to connect all these countries. Because it was not somebody just putting up a website on a computer. It was a whole lot of backbreaking labor. All I need is a flint to make a fire

and the Artemis III mission to the moon, that spaceship. That's basically what you want if you want a cabin and Wi-Fi that interconnects the entire world. Amazing. Great. Literally multiple trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure and labor running day and night. Yeah. To allow me to live alone in the woods,

separate from this horrible society we've built that I want nothing to do with. Right. I just want to be able to browse my TikToks in peace. Off of that, we are going to a short break, followed by a whole new takeaway. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

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And remember, no running in the halls. But, and yeah, this network is set up and it begs the question of how did any of this start? Like even before that first transatlantic fiber optic cable, like how and when did people start building this? And the answer to that is takeaway number two. The first undersea cable was a mid-1800s telegraph line between Ireland and Canada. There is a specific date and cable and time when people built the very first telecommunications

cable between continents, and it was way back in 1858. 1858, they built a telegraph line. The main long part went between Western Ireland and Newfoundland, Canada. See, that seems impossible. It's between, repeat the locations again, between where and where? Yeah. And we'll have like old maps too. I love the old maps, but the main stretch is between the western coast of Ireland and the eastern coast of Newfoundland, which is part of Canada, but also an island too. So then there were smaller cables connecting Ireland to England and the rest of Europe, and then connecting Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, Canada, and then the rest of North America overland.

That was with 1850s technology, right? There were two main boats that laid this, and one of them was only partly steam-powered. They still also had sails as an option for moving their boat. And then they laid a telegraph cable across the ocean. There was such an appetite for being able to use this technology between Britain and the U.S. specifically that they were like, we just got to do it, whatever we got in the technology, we're doing it. Well, there's two ways to look at this. One is that this is such a long time ago that it's mind-boggling that they were even able to

manufacture a cable that length that had like all the stuff, the coating on it that would make it survive the saltwater, all that, that that was even available to them at the time. But the other way to look at it is how not very far you have to go back in the timeline of the species to find an era when there was no such thing as instant communication over long distances. when there was no such thing as instant communication over long distances. Yeah. Like 1858 is not that many. So like my parents were born in the late 1940s.

Their parents, you know, their grandparents would have been born in the 1800s. Like that's not that many lifetimes ago. How very recently it was that the concept of communicating instantly over distances did not exist. So, yeah, the fact that they were desperate to set this up because they were creating magic. Truly. Because it's crazy. It used to be if you were sending mail to London, they went on a steamer ship and took how long? Weeks, right? And they went on a steamer ship and took how long?

Weeks, right? By the time it actually reached the person. And to be able to instantly communicate with the other side of the planet at the speed of a signal across down a wire, it had to have seemed incredible at the time. Like, even if people didn't understand the applications of it, the sheer ability to do it had to have felt like playing God. And they truly celebrated it as something incredible. Like everybody at the time knew it. There were parades, there were fireworks shows in both the UK and the US about this because they knew how historic it was and how much of a science fiction magical leap they had taken. The key sources about it, there's digital resources from Nigel Lynch, who's a professor of telecommunications at the University

of Salford in the UK, and a piece for CNN by James Griffiths, and a PBS resource page about the life and work of Samuel Morse. Because the starting point is the telegraph. That's what this was built for. And Samuel Morse was an American inventor born in 1791. He didn't invent the electric telegraph, but he improved the machines. He also came up with a language of dots and dashes that's known as Morse code, named for Samuel Morse. And he convinced the U.S. Congress to fund major construction of telegraph lines, which also tended to follow the building of railroads in the U.S. and in the U.K. as well. Yeah, and I definitely know that the invention of the railroad was seen as almost witchcraft at the time, the speed at which goods could be moved. And I do not doubt

that there was a large population of people who was like, well, what do I, how does this help me? It's like, well, it will. Not today, but it will eventually. Yeah, like these trains were basically the Starship Enterprise. It was like you're warp speeding in a way that we didn't think humans could do. And then railroads and telegraphs kind of built each other. Like a railroad could bring a crew to build a telegraph system to talk to people, to send more people to build more railroads and more telegraphs and so on. And this technology gets going in the 1840s and is an immediate huge hit, the telegraph, in particular in the United Kingdom and the United States. You know, these are two giant empires that both speak English on top of that. And so they say,

how can we communicate with each other in spite of the whole Atlantic Ocean thing? We should just do telegraphs across it. And they came up with two potential routes for doing that. One was to go the other way. That was called the Siberian telegraph, because it would go from Europe over land going all the way east through Russia, through Siberia, eventually to Western Canada and the US. But they went with the other route, which was to build a transatlantic undersea cable. Part of the reason they did that is in 1858, Ireland and Canada were both directly ruled by the British Empire. So the other amazing thing about this cable from Ireland to Canada is it connected Britain to itself politically. And if they had gone east, they would have gone through a whole bunch of countries and they would have still needed to do a water crossing at the Bering Strait. So they said, let's just go straight under the ocean to communicate across an ocean. Let's do it.

easier to cross the ocean than to cross all of Russia. And I know that I'm picturing a lot of Russia as being like a desolate, frozen hellscape. I don't think that's totally inaccurate. It would be, yeah, it would be hard. The snow and the bears versus the crushing depths of the sea and sharks. So, you know, which team are you going to play against? But this project, it was a joint venture of the British government and the U.S. government. So this early telegraph system, it's not like these fiber optic cables were its companies. It was a huge leap forward in technology as well. Samuel Morse did some of the first trials of undersea cable under New York City's harbor in 1842. And a British engineer named Charles Wheatstone did similar tests in the harbor of Swansea, Wales in 1844. And then eventually they managed to do a first successful undersea cable across the English Channel in 1851, which was also a big achievement

in general. And that inspired businessmen and government people on both sides of the Atlantic to push for this big undersea cable. In particular, a New York businessman named Cyrus Fields. He recruited Morse and others to build a cable across the Cabot Strait, which is the water between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. They built that in 1854. And they also made a point of building that cable with the same specs as the English Channel cable, because the plan was already in place. They were thinking, let's just continue interconnecting cables. And eventually they build a cable between England and Ireland, the U.S. Navy surveys the Atlantic seafloor. a British Navy warship called the HMS Agamemnon and a U.S. Navy warship called the USS Niagara. They get together and make an attempt sailing from Ireland west to lay a cable across the whole ocean.

They have to bail on that because there's trouble with the cable and the machinery. But 1858, they came up with a strategy where both ships started in the middle of the Atlantic, sailing in opposite directions from each other and also being able to talk to each other across their cable as they laid it, because they both had an end of the cable they could send messages. And by August 1858, after a few false starts, the ship succeed, and they bring their cables to Canada and to Ireland. And after a week of getting it set up, engineers send the first transatlantic message. Not all that long. Like we talked about all the problems they had, but from idea to sending messages, not long at all, considering the era. I mean, that would be impressive today, in my opinion. Especially because looked up briefly how telephone cables

worked with this. And it took many decades between the invention of the telephone and building of telephone undersea cables. But the telegraph and later internet, those two got their undersea cables really early on and shortly after people thought of it. Yeah, people are amazing. And here's the thing. The reason I try to make myself stop and appreciate things like this, even though I know it is extremely corny. In my opinion, it wasn't the United States that did this. It wasn't the UK that did this. It wasn't whatever corporations were putting money into it that did this. It was people.

It was workers. It was laborers. It was sailors. Like, just sailing that trip across the ocean was no guarantee you weren't going to die. This is 1850s. This is very hardworking people working with their hands, putting themselves at risk to make this possible. That's who I'm celebrating, because they did this with no fanfare whatsoever. Like, they did not get a code named after them. They did not. But that's who, that's who, what's why I say like humans are amazing. That's who I'm celebrating.

It's all the, the humans that did this over the course of the years. And cause it's had to have seemed to some of them, like what they're doing is just absurd. It's like, this isn't going to work. It's like, by the time we finished laying two miles of this, something's going to break it. It's like, this is dumb. And I don't know, when the two ships started talking to each other, that had to have seemed magical. That had to have seemed like the first successful teleportation when you realize the guy just popped out of the portal.

It's like, oh my God, we did it. Yeah. We're seeing the future here. This story makes me think that when we invent teleportation, there will be an actual first person to be teleported and then like a ceremonial first famous person to do it. Because this cable, like when they finished laying it in August 1858, engineers sent the first real transatlantic message. But then a few days after that, there was a ceremonial transatlantic telegraph conversation between Britain's Queen Victoria and U.S. President James Buchanan. Like once they made sure it worked, then they did a ceremonial conversation. And Buchanan, in his reply telegraph, he says that the cable was, quote, a triumph more glorious because far more useful to mankind than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle, end quote. And like, that's when both these countries did parades and did fireworks

shows and celebrated. But, you know, as you say, Jason, like actual hardworking technical people and laborers did the real work of it. Also, if we're being picky here, this first cable kind of sort of didn't work. It was really prototype-ish because for one thing, Queen Victoria's first message through it was 98 words long, and it took 17 hours for all that information as Morse code to get across the sea. And then also within about a month, the cable broke and could not be repaired. Apparently, there was an engineer who thought that if he put more electricity through that first transatlantic cable, the information would move faster.

And instead, he overloaded it. There's a few theories, but they think that's why it broke. You know, within 10 years, they built bigger cables. They were able to send more words more quickly. It was actual technical people who laid it out and also figured out better cables after that and got it going. As quote, Buchanan's quote about this being more useful to mankind than any achievement ever won by a conqueror in the field of battle. Here's where some people, when we talked about these

dates and how being cooperation between the US and theK., that this is not that many years after those two countries were still at war with one another. Like, whatever the year, whatever year the War of 1812 happened, not that long before this. And you see all these messages of friendship. It's like we are our two countries are like brothers or whatever. That has to seem weird considering how long we hold grudges today. Like our wars last longer than that.

We still have troops in Afghanistan, I think. So I know it has to seem strange to people who only have a vague grasp of history. It's like why we became so friendly so quick. It's probably the subject of another episode. England's relation to its colonies and former colonies is a fascinating subject. There were people that still had family over there, right? Because they had so recently made the trip themselves. So it was such an unusual circumstance.

It's just one of the many side notes because this would not have been possible without that relationship, right? Like that two very close partners that were separated by, you know, an ocean. But anyway. Yeah. And also partly connecting it through places Britain was colonizing against their will. Like Ireland did not necessarily want to be part of the UK and part of a British empire, but at the time it was just fully controlled by it and supporting this cable. Like, yeah, there's a lot of occupation going on. I also, when I read that Buchanan quote where he says like, no war has ever accomplished this much, he's saying that a couple of years before a US civil war will ultimately emancipate people

who are enslaved. Like, I don't know. There's a lot going on with these people in this situation. Yeah. Let me be clear. If Alex does a show about the history of the British Empire, it will be one of the darker episodes if he's done. It is not a happy story. It is not a happy story. Right? But yeah, and this cable, it also happens, I was very surprised that this transatlantic cable happened before a transcontinental telegraph. But as Jason and I were prepping this, he pointed out that in some ways going over land across the entire North American continent was harder or trickier, especially at that time. But the future 48 U.S. states, they finished a continental telegraph link in 1861. And it was also during the Civil War,

the Union government linked up Eastern networks over land with the Union state of California. But it was a couple of years after a transatlantic cable linked up the eastern U.S., really the Union, with the U.K. Yeah, and I guess here when you start, we're going to start getting into the logistics of how this was made possible. You're going to get into a little bit of what we talked about in the barbed wire episode, that just the ability to manufacture certain materials that you think of as very boring, like wire coatings, is part of what made this possible. And it's one of those inventions where if you were out on a date

with somebody and they wanted to start talking about the history of wire coatings, you would probably think that's not a very exciting subject. But it really is that kind of boring thing that makes all of the magic happen. Yeah, because the last takeaway for the main show here, takeaway number three. Undersea cables are protected from the ocean by a little bit of plastic and metal, and were previously protected by tree resin. And this leads into the bonus show too, but this is the basics of what the cables are made of in the past and the present day. And this first transatlantic cable was wrapped up in a specific kind of tree resin that was a natural latex insulation. And they had to discover that in order to build this thing. Not just discover it, but figure out how to manufacture it, work it, ship it.

Yeah. Everything. Like it's, yeah. And the key sources here, it's PBS American Experience, also reporting for the Sydney Morning Herald by Sharon Groch and Felicity Lewis. And then the previous piece for CNN by journalist James Griffiths. Because with this first transatlantic cable, they needed like natural latex insulation. Petroleum based plastics weren't really a thing yet. What they found was something they harvested from trees in Malaysia. natural latex insulation. Petroleum-based plastics weren't really a thing yet. What they found was something they harvested from trees in Malaysia. And its discoverer,

much less famous than Samuel Morse today, it was a Portuguese engineer named José Dalmeida. And he gave a speech to the Royal Asiatic Society in London in 1843. Dalmatus said that he had found a tropical tree called the Malayan gutta tree, which, you know, people there already knew about. But he found that if you extract the sap of this tree and then you boil that sap, you got a natural hard latex that's sort of like rubber, but it's less stretchy and elastic. It was flexible while it was hot, then it hardened at room temperature. So it was very expensive to harvest and produce. It was very expensive to bring to a place like the Atlantic Ocean from Malaysia. But this substance was so useful, they did it. They named the substance gutta percha. And a few years after this talk by Dalmeida, Samuel Morse and Cyrus Field test gutta percha as protective

covering for undersea cables. And it works. It also works much better than the rubber at the time because it did not deteriorate when left exposed to seawater for long periods of time. And that 1858 transatlantic telegraph cable ends up being wrapped in 300 tons of gutta percha because there's several layers of gutta percha. Also, it's a cable across the entire ocean. And so they have to manufacture 300 tons of gutta percha covering in order to protect the cable and make the whole thing feasible. This is a weird point for somebody to make. But for example, the guy who discovered this material, that name, this is the first time I'm ever hearing that name.

But we've all heard the name Samuel Morse. If you went to school in the United States, even if you didn't know Morse code, you heard Samuel Morse because his name resonates through history as the telegraph guy. Samuel Morris's work does not count for squat without somebody else doing this much less interesting, but I would say more important work of finding a material that can do the impossible, which is protect a piece of cable across thousands of miles over the long term, holding up to a hostile ocean environment. If you dip a person into the ocean, they do not live very long. The salt water is corrosive. The currents are strong. You have drastic temperature changes. This is, for whatever reason, is the part of invention we don't celebrate.

Because everybody knows the name of the Wright brothers. Everybody knows, like Thomas Edison, like the people who in the lab had the idea. But then it's like, well, to make your grand idea work, we need to develop a whole bunch of new types of materials. Like we know the name Steve Jobs, but whoever came up with the Gorilla Glass at Corning or again, whatever, Dow, whatever company manufactured that glass that makes a modern smartphone possible, that's not the type of invention that we find exciting for whatever

reason. It's funny, I noticed that mindset in myself when a day or two before we're taping this, a story broke about a new advance in fusion, like using fusion as a way to power things. And I think I partly had a hard time following it because there wasn't one human main character. It's a bunch of teams around the world. And I was like, okay, Livermore Laboratory, Livermore Laboratory, I can wrap my head around that as a hero. But it's everybody working together. And if you want to be somebody who contributes to that kind of thing, that's really noble and cool. You don't have to be the rock band front man of this kind of stuff, because they can't do much on their own. But immediately in the aftermath of those headlines, you got all of these videos and posts and tweets and blog posts talking about, oh,

well, yeah, that sounds impressive. But in reality, like actual commercially available fusion is probably, you know, 30 to 50 years away before we'll be able to build plants economically that can generate infinite clean energy. It's like, okay, when did we start thinking that way? Where if I can't have it next year, it's just stupid? That's why I like this episode, because the work that gave us the technology that we are able to use right now to do this podcast started in 1858. That's 160 some years ago.

160 some years ago. And at the time they did it, the actual use cases were extremely limited and extremely limited to a few institutions or whatever. And then in the late 80s, when they started laying cable to connect university computers, again, that was for scientists to trade data, things like that. The use case to the average person was very, very limited. the use case to the average person was very, very limited. Well, okay, yeah, but if you fast forward, you had this whole ecosystem of the way we live has totally changed because of the work they did back then. That's how it's always worked. You have geniuses coming up with a way to make it work, and then regular old people do the work of manufacturing the stuff that will make it possible and making little improvements every year, one year at a time, one breakthrough at a time. And especially with these cables, the other breakthroughs are all interesting. Another big leap was just the development of petroleum-based plastics, such as polyethylene.

CNN says that's the main outer lining of these cables today. And that helped build a lot more of them because it took a lot of tree harvesting in specific places, specific ways before that to build the basics of the covering that protect them from the sea. With modern undersea cables, a lot of them are being built, especially by tech companies. One of them is Google, and the Sydney Morning Herald says Google is putting Kevlar into their cables now. And they also have a short video. There was video monitoring of a piece of undersea cable run by Google, and they got footage of a shark biting it. So we will link a very brief video of a shark biting an undersea cable and not biting through it.

Because not only is that built with Kevlar, but the modern cables usually have linings of plastic protection, and then some combination of mylar tape, steel wires, aluminum wrapping, copper as a covering, more plastic from there, and sometimes even petroleum jelly. It's an amazing set of construction done all sorts of different ways. What type of animal did that shark think it was eating? Oh. Because it saw this, what did it think? It was like a really fat worm that was thousands of miles long. And it's just like, I'm going to eat that whole thing. Yeah. I wonder if it's like when a dog chews up a shoe. It's just messing around, you know?

I don't know. It was bored. Bored. Animals get bored. And these cables also, they still get broken a lot. CNN cited a telecom market research firm that's called Telegeography. They claim about 200 cables experience a failure or break each year. And if you remember, there's about 400 of them total. So that would mean, you know, about half of them break every

year. And apparently it's most often due to human activities, like a fishing trawler catching one, or a ship's anchor catching one, and then breaking from there. Also, natural disasters can do this. When Hurricane Sandy hit the New York City area in 2012, this area in New York City is the landing point for a lot of transatlantic cables. And so a lot of cables got damaged by that. They also say there was a major earthquake near Taiwan in 2006, and that disrupted cables and Internet connections for all of Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. So not only do we have these cables, but there's like constant work out there for people to go and fix them. And that brings us back to the very, very beginning of the episode, right? Because

those two incidents were one was 16 years ago, one was 10 years ago. But it sounds like, to me, if you had a big enough disaster, an earthquake, something that really disrupted the coastline or whatever, that it could still, again, to repeat, the one near Taiwan in 2006 disrupted internet connections for Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea, and Philippines. Like, if that same earthquake happened today, I would assume just due to the passage of time, we have a more robust system to handle it? Yeah, we've just built more and more and more cables. And then also, we have a lot more satellite internet due to stuff like Starlink, as weird as its founder and owner is. There's more emergency service through that system. Apparently also, when the story describes internet services being disrupted, in some cases that means it got knocked out. In other cases, it means it got slowed down

or it was intermittent. And so we've built enough infrastructure, especially in the last decade, to really just kind of withstand a lot of these problems know, I do like to imagine they build that first fiber optic cable, get it going in 1988, and then like one shark disrupts Tim Berners-Lee's demo, and then nobody thinks it's a good idea anymore, you know? Like even more than 10 years ago, it seems like this system was a lot more fragile and there were a lot of ways to break it. Either way, it's, I think the best way to become optimistic about the future. And I do think there's a need for people to be optimistic about their futures. I think that's just like a basic motivational thing, whether you actually believe the future will be good or not. I think it just helps you in your life to believe that the future can be okay. Seeing what we're doing in the present is really mind-boggling. I was born in

1975. If in 1975, a president or someone had gone up on a stage and said, you know what, we need a future where every home has a computer, because back then, nobody had one, except for weirdos, where every home has a personal computer computer and all of those computers are connected using a system where if you wipe out a huge chunk of it, the rest of it keeps working. It reroutes the signal. And to do this, here's what it's going to require. We're going to need however many tens of thousands of miles

of glass cable under the ocean connecting every continent. We're going to need the same cables. We're going to need however many million routers and sub-routers and all of the switching stations and all of the companies and ISPs and all of that stuff, all the wiring to connect homes. Like when they spelled out what's required, it would have sounded stupid. Yeah. It would have sounded stupid. It would have sounded like somebody saying, hey, what we need to do is to build a gigantic net and catch the moon and drag it to earth and mine the minerals

out of it. It sounds cartoonish, what they're describing. It sounds like science fiction. And now, not only do we have it, but it's so reliable that when it goes down, we just whine instantly. It's like, it is a miracle. I have a bunch of people doing backbreaking labor for decades, and what they've built and what continues to exist and work is stunning. It's one of the wonders of the world. And I know that is the corniest possible thing for somebody to say on a podcast. But I truly believe it, especially when you look at a map like we've got here showing the sheer expanse that these things have had to cross. It's amazing.

And we never think about it. It's just down there. I think I borderline didn't know it existed before researching this because patrons asked for it. Any of this. before researching this because patrons asked for it. Any of this. I knew there were cables because I remember seeing the story about how they were afraid Russia would cut the cables or whatever. The idea, like really understanding that even remote islands

are being connected with this, it's crazy. Also, I'd like to say nuts to anybody who wants to break it. If Russia goes out there and tries to cut cables to win a war, they're also attacking, I don't want to call it like part of our heritage, but they're attacking the interconnection of humanity. I don't like it. Cut it out. That is one thing for Russia to try to cut off fossil fuels from the world and oil and

gas. Yeah. If they successfully brought down the internet for large parts of the world, hell would rain down upon them from on high. They would have unleashed wrath like anything they could have comprehended in their wildest nightmares. It's one thing to make a lot of people freeze in Europe because gas has gotten so expensive because they've cut off the shipments or whatever. This would be a whole separate deal. If I try to log into staircase

farts and just nothing comes up because Putin has decided to sever the cable, yeah, that would be his last day on earth. folks that is the main episode for this week my thanks to jason pargin for the obvious thing to call it would be a deep dive but you know what i mean for getting way into how this works also i said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is how these cables get repaired and how they can get destroyed by militaries. Visit sifpod.fun for

that bonus show, for a library of more than 10 dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring undersea cables with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, undersea cables are the reason there is a global internet. Takeaway number two, the first undersea cable was a mid-1800s telegraph line between Ireland and Canada. And takeaway number three, undersea cables are protected from the ocean by a little bit of plastic and metal, and were previously protected by tree resin. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guest. He's great.

Jason Pargin's new novel is my guest. He's great. Jason Pargin's new novel is out now. It's called If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. That's available as text and as an audiobook. It's also the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series. Jason very kindly has made it stand on its own as well. So if you're an expert in that series, you're going to get even more. If you're totally new to that series, you can jump in anywhere, including with this new book. One more time, that title is If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones.

One of them is a wonderful book to read and look at. It's called Atlas of the Invisible, co-written by James Cheshire, professor of geographic information and cartography at University College London, and also by Oliver Uberti, who's a designer and former design editor for National Geographic. I also leaned on digital resources from the UK Science Museum in London, also from Professor Nigel Linge of the University of Salford. And more great stuff from PBS, CNN, the Sydney Morning Herald. Find those and many more sources

in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. You can get that logo on a shirt at sifpod.store, a merchandising partnership with Topotico. Special thanks to

Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.