Whitehouse disappeared into ignominy. Thomson ended up being knighted and later elevated to a baron by Queen Victoria. He became Lord Kelvin and eventually got an important unit of measurement, an even more important law of physics, and a refrigerator named after him.
Eight years after Whitehouse fried the first, a second transatlantic cable was built to Lord Kelvin's specifications with his patented mirror galvanometers at either end of it. He bought a 126-ton schooner yacht with the stupendous amount of money he made from his numerous cable-related patents, turned the ship into a floating luxury palace and laboratory for the invention of even more fantastically lucrative patents. He then spent the rest of his life tooling around the British Isles, Bay of Biscay, and western Mediterranean, frequently hosting Dukes and continental savants who all commented on the nerd-lord's tendency to stop in the middle of polite conversation to scrawl out long skeins of equations on whatever piece of paper happened to be handy.
Kelvin went on to design and patent other devices for extracting bits from the ends of cables, and other engineers went to work on the problem, too. By the 1920s, the chore of translating electrical pulses into letters had been largely automated. Now, of course, humans are completely out of the loop.
The number of people working in cable landing stations is probably about the same as it was in Kelvin's day. But now they are merely caretakers for machines that process bits about as fast as a billion telegraphers working in parallel.
The Hacker Tourist travels to the Land of the Rising Sun.
Technological wonders of modern cable stations. Why Ugandans could not place telephone calls to Seattle. Trawlers, tickler chains, teredo worms, and other hazards to undersea cables. The immense financial stakes involved - why cable owners do not care for the company of fishermen,and vice versa.
35° 17.690' N, 139° 46.328' EKDD Cable Landing Station, Ninomiya, Japan
Whether they are in Thailand, Egypt, or Japan, modern cable landing stations have much in common with each other. Shortly after touching down in Tokyo, we were standing in KDD's landing station in Ninomiya, Japan. I'll describe it to you.
A surprising amount of space in the station is devoted to electrical gear. The station must not lose power, so there are two separate, redundant emergency generators. There is also likely to be a transformer to supply power to the cable system. We think of optical fibers as delicate strands consuming negligible power, but all of those repeaters, spaced every few dozen kilometers across an ocean, end up consuming a lot of juice: for a big transoceanic cable, one or two amperes at 7,000 or so volts, for a total of something like 10,000 watts. The equipment handling that power makes a hum you can feel in your bones, kicking the power out not along wires but solid copper bars suspended from the ceiling, with occasional sections of massive braided metal ribbon so they won't snap in an earthquake.
The emergency generators are hooked into a battery farm that fills a room. The batteries are constantly trickle-charged and exist simply to provide power during an emergency - after the regular power goes out but before the generators kick in. Most of the equipment in the cable station is computer gear that demands a stable temperature, so there are two separate, redundant air-conditioning plants feeding into a big system of ventilation ducts. The equipment must not get dirty or get fried by sparks from the fingers of hacker tourists, so you leave your shoes by the door and slip into plastic antistatic flip-flops. The equipment must not get smashed up in earthquakes, so the building is built like a brick shithouse.
The station is no more than a few hundred meters from a beach. Sandy beaches in out-of-the-way areas are preferred. The cable comes in under the sand until it hits a beach manhole, where it continues through underground ducts until it comes up out of the floor of the cable station into a small, well-secured room. The cable is attached to something big and strong, such as a massive steel grid bolted into the wall. Early cable technicians were sometimes startled to see their cables suddenly jerk loose from their moorings inside the station - yanking the guts out of expensive pieces of equipment - and disappear in the direction of the ocean, where a passing ship had snagged them.
From holes in the floor, the cables pass up into boxes where all the armor and insulation are stripped away from them and where the tubular power lead surrounding the core is connected to the electrical service (7,500 volts in the case of FLAG) that powers the repeaters out in the middle of the ocean. Its innards then con-tinue, typically in some kind of overhead wiring plenum (a miniature catwalk suspended from the ceiling) into the Big Room Full of Expensive Stuff.
The Big Room Full of Expensive Stuff is at least 25 meters on a side and commonly has a floor made of removable, perforated plates covering plenums through which wires can be routed, an overhead grid of open plenums from which wires descend like jungle vines, or both. Most of the room is occupied by equipment racks arranged in parallel rows (think of the stacks at a big library). The racks are tall, well over most people's heads, and their insides are concealed and protected by face plates bearing corporate logos: AT&T, Alcatel, Fujitsu. In the case of an optical cable like FLAG, they contain the Light Terminaclass="underline" the gear that converts the 1,558-nanometer signal lasers coming down the fiber strands into digits within an electrical circuit, and vice versa. The Light Terminal is contained within a couple of racks that, taken together, are about the size of a refrigerator.
All the other racks of gear filling the room cope with the unfathomable hassles associated with trying to funnel that many bits into and out of the fiber. In the end, that gear is, of course, connected to the local telecommunications system in some way. Hence one commonly sees microwave relay towers on top of these buildings and lots of manholes in the streets around them. One does not, however, see a lot of employees, because for the most part this equipment runs itself. Every single circuit board in every slot of every level of every rack in the whole place has a pair of copper wires coming out of it to send an alarm signal in the event that the board fails. Like tiny rivulets joining together into a mighty river, these come together into bundles as thick as your leg that snake beneath the floor plates to an alarm center where they are patched into beautiful rounded clear plastic cases enclosing grids of interconnect pins. From here they are tied into communications lines that run all the way to Tokyo so that everything on the premises can be monitored remotely during nights and weekends. Ninomiya is staffed with nine employees and Miura, FLAG's other Japanese landing point, only one.
With one notable exception, the hacker tourist sees no particular evidence that any of this has the slightest thing to do with communications. It might as well be the computer room at a big university or insurance company. The one exception is a telephone handset hanging on a hook on one of the equipment racks. The handset is there, but there's no keypad. Above it is a sign bearing the name of a city far, far away. "Ha, ha!" I said, the first time I saw one of these, "that's for talking to the guy in California, right?" To my embarrassment, my tour guides nodded yes. Each cable system has something called the order wire, which enables the technicians at opposite ends of the cable to talk to each other. At a major landing station you will see several order wires labeled with the names of exotic-sounding cities on the opposite side of the nearest large body of water.
That is the bare minimum that you will see at any cable station. At Ninomiya you see a bit more, and therein lies something of a tale.