A Technological Appendix to Postblogging, May 1954: Transatlantic Conversation, Hurrah!

 

This is actually going back a bit, but Mossad has done a naughty telephone thing this week, and while Teleanswerphone was operating a pager system in New York in 1954, we're still six years away from the Motorola transistorised pager that made the technology ubiquitous. It's not interesting or significant, so how do I jump on that bandwagon? With something momentous that is also happening this spring, which is TAT-1, the first coaxial transatlantic telephone cable, which I've admittedly talked about around here in connection with the first announcement last December. I believe I've noticed the cablelaying vessel Monarch and also the technical details of the cable involved, and, no, I'm not going to hit my head on the Blogspot search function to find the entry, even if it is good for the blog's statistics. 

(He finally starts talking about the telephone cable around 20:00.)

This is a much more useful link. I was tempted to steal some graphics, but I think I've got enough of my own in this post already. 

Fans of old time science fiction will recognise the title as a pastiche of Harry Harrison's Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah, which, while a bit sentimental for the acidulous Harrison, was a fun romp, so let's take a moment to remember the author of Bill the Galactic Hero in the Age of Baen. Obviously running trains under the Atlantic is a lot harder than routing conversations through it, but even that's a pretty big deal. Like the ad says, it is accomplished mainly, per Bell, but 51 electronic repeaters (a total of 300 tubes) at 37 mile intervals boosting the signal. While that seems like a lot of error, on the American side the far end of the Cabot Strait was linked to the Bell continental network by a microwave tower relay line, which seems even crazier from the point of view of added distortion. People sure had some utopian ideas about what you could do with spoken communications in 1954!

I should be clear here that by "repeater" is here meant an amplifier, and that an amplifier doesn't, as the name implies, amplify an existing signal, but rather modulates a higher-power current into a replica of the original signal. These would evidently have been transitron oscillators, definitely an exercise in high technology to get around distortion effects, but still probably not exactly generation a crystal-clear performance when Paul Robeson sang over the cable because communism is bad. (Here's a selection from the the second concert.) People sure had some unrealistic expectations about the progress of technology back in the day! An interesting tidbit from the atlantic-cable.com site is an embedded history of STC's role in building the "fixed" repeaters of the 330 mile Cabot Strait interval, so-called because they rested on the seabed, as opposed to the Bell flexible repeaters on the transatlantic section. STC had previously made repeaters for cables between Sweden and Denmark, and then across the North Sea, but the interesting bit is that they had to build one of the earliest "clean room" facilities, the so-called "Dairy" at their North Woolwich works to keep dust out of the 21 repeaters for the Cabot length. This appears to have been transferred to a factory/laboratory at Enfield in the late Fifties, where clean room manufacturing was carried over to the making of first germanium, and then silicon transistors.  Minimum distortion! 

 

I couldn't resist ending with thisi unintentionally funny ad. "Linguists predict that within three to five years, electronic translators will be making sizable inroads on the staggering mass of Soviet writings now confronting the relatively few American translators." Cold War excesses have already come up twice in this post, first in the introduction to the video allegedly on TAT-1, which re-enacts the hotline conversation between the President and the General Secretary in Dr. Strangelove, and next with Paul Robeson's concert, the context of which is explained by the head of the NUM at the link. Being a bit more obscure, I will mention for those who do not want to follow the link that Robeson, like many other performers, particularly Black ones, was denied a passport on various grounds until a 1958 Supreme Court decision established the right of American citizens to leave the country if they choose. (I keep feeling like  my childhood education on the differences between East and West was incomplete somehow. Tell me when I turn into a tankie.)  I see surprisingly little Communism-fighting in the field of telephone cablry, but maybe the literally hundreds of conversations carried by TAT-1 every day brought down the Iron Curtain.