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But all becomes clear when you clamber over yet another headland and discover Porthcurno, a perfect beach of pale sand sloping gently out of clear turquoise water and giving way to a cozy valley that, a few miles inland, rises to the level of the inland plateau. To the hacker tourist, it comes as no surprise to learn that much of that valley has been owned by Cable & Wireless, or its predecessors, for more than a century. To anyone else, the only obvious hint that this place has anything to do with cables comes from the rusty yellow signs that stand above the beach proclaiming "Telephone Cable" as a feeble effort to dissuade mariners from using the bay for anchor practice.
It was here that the long-range submarine cable business, after any number of early-round knockdowns, finally dragged its bloody self up off the mat and really began to kick ass.
By the year 1870, Kelvin and others had finally worked the bugs out of the technology. A three-master anchored off this beach in that year and landed a cable that eventually ran to Lisbon, Gibraltar, Malta, Alexandria, Cairo, Suez, Aden (now part of Yemen), Bombay, over land to the east coast of India, then on to Penang, Malacca, Singapore, Batavia (later Jakarta), and finally to Darwin, Australia. It was Australia's first direct link to Great Britain and, hardly by coincidence, also connected every British outpost of importance in between. It was the spinal cord of the Empire.
The company that laid the first part of it was called the Falmouth, Gibraltar and Malta Telegraph Company, which is odd because the cable never went to Falmouth - a major port some 50 kilometers from Porthcurno. Enough anchors had hooked cables, even by that point, that "major port" and "submarine cable station" were seen to be incompatible, so the landing site was moved to Porthcurno.That was just the beginning: the company (later called the Eastern Cable Company, after all the segments between Porthcurno and Darwin merged) was every bit as conscious of the importance of redundancy as today's Internet architects - probably more so, given the unreliability of early cables. They ran another cable from Porthcurno to the Azores and then to Ascension Island, where it forked: one side headed to South America while the other went to Cape Town and then across the Indian Ocean. Subsequent transatlantic cables terminated at Porthcurno as well.
Many of the features that made Cornwall attractive to cable operators also made it a suitable place to conduct transatlantic radio experiments, and so in 1900 Guglielmo Marconi himself established a laboratory on Lizard Point, which is directly across the bay from Porthcurno, some 30 kilometers distant. Marconi had another station on the Isle of Wight, a few hundred kilometers to the east, and when he succeeded in sending messages between the two, he constructed a more powerful transmitter at the Lizard station and began trying to send messages to a receiver in Newfoundland. The competitive threat to the cable industry could hardly have been more obvious, and so the Eastern Telegraph Company raised a 60-meter mast above its Porthcurno site, hoisted an antenna, and began eavesdropping on Marconi's transmissions. A couple of decades later, after the Italian had worked the bugs out of the system, the government stepped in and arranged a merger between his company and the submarine cable companies to create a new, fully integrated communications monopoly called Cable & Wireless.
50° 2.602' N5° 39.054' WMuseum of Submarine Telegraphy, Porthcurno, Cornwall
On a sunny summer day, Porthcurno Beach was crowded with holiday makers. The vast majority of these were scantily clad and tended to face toward the sun and the sea. The fully clothed and heavily shod tourists with their backs to the water were the hacker tourists; they were headed for a tiny, windowless cement blockhouse, scarcely big enough to serve as a one-car garage, planted at the apex of the beach. There was a sign on the wall identifying it as the Museum of Submarine Telegraphy and stating that it is open only on Wednesday and Friday.
This was appalling news. We arrived on a Monday morning, and our maniacal schedule would not brook a two-day wait. Stunned, heartbroken, we walked around the thing a couple of times, which occupied about 30 seconds. The lifeguard watched us uneasily. We admired the brand-new manhole cover set into the ground in front of the hut, stamped with the year '96, which strongly suggested a connection with FLAG. We wandered up the valley for a couple of hundred meters until it opened up into a parking lot for beach-goers, surrounded by older white masonry buildings. These were well-maintained but did not seem to be used for much. We peered at a couple of these and speculated (wrongly, as it turned out) that they were the landing station for FLAG.
Tantalizing hints were everywhere: the inevitable plethora of manholes, networked to one another by long straight strips of new pavement set into the parking lot and the road. Nearby, a small junkheap containing several lengths of what to the casual visitor might look like old, dirty pipe but which on closer examination proved to be hunks of discarded coaxial cable. But all the buildings were locked and empty, and no one was around.
Our journey seemed to have culminated in failure. We then noticed that one of the white buildings had a sign on the door identifying it as The Cable Station - Free House. The sign was adorned with a painting of a Victorian shore landing in progress - a line of small boats supporting a heavy cable being payed out from a sailing ship anchored in Porthcurno Bay.
After coming all this way, it seemed criminal not to have a drink in this pub. By hacker tourist standards, a manhole cover counts as a major attraction, and so it was almost surreal to have stumbled across a place that had seemingly been conceived and built specifically for us. Indeed, we were the only customers in the place. We admired the photographs and paintings on the walls, which all had something or other to do with cables. We made friends with Sally the Dog, chatted with the proprietress, grabbed a pint, and went out into the beer garden to drown our sorrows.
Somewhat later, we unburdened ourselves to the proprietress, who looked a bit startled to learn of our strange mission, and said, "Oh, the fellows who run the museum are inside just now."
Faster than a bit speeding down an optical fiber we were back inside the pub where we discovered half a dozen distinguished gentlemen sitting around a table, finishing up their lunches. One of them, a tall, handsome, craggy sort, apologized for having ink on his fingers. We made some feeble effort to explain the concept of Wired magazine (never easy), and they jumped up from their seats, pulled key chains out of their pockets, and took us across the parking lot, through the gate, and into the museum proper. We made friends with Minnie the Cable Dog and got the tour. Our primary guides were Ron Werngren (the gent with ink on his fingers, which I will explain in a minute) and John Worrall, who is the cheerful, energetic, talkative sort who seems to be an obligatory feature of any cable-related site.
All of these men are retired Cable & Wireless employees. They sketched in for us the history of this strange compound of white buildings. Like any old-time cable station, it housed the equipment for receiving and transmitting messages as well as lodgings and support services for the telegraphers who manned it. But in addition it served as the campus of a school where Cable & Wireless foreign service staff were trained, complete with dormitories, faculty housing, gymnasium, and dining hall.