Transatlantic Fiber-Optic Expialidocious
99% Invisible - Roman Mars
This episode explores the history and impact of TAT-8, the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable, highlighting its role in revolutionizing global communications. It details the challenges of laying submarine cables, incl
Key takeaways
- TAT-8 was the world's first transatlantic fiber-optic cable
Transcript preview
This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars and I'm here with 99PI producer and reporter Christopher Johnson. Hey Christopher. Hey Roman, so I am in New York City as you know and of course you are in California and we're connected over Zoom. We are it's good to see you. It's always good to see you. And you're coming in crystal clear which is great and this is especially amazing considering that my voice and my face and my face are traveling the way across the continent to you through wires, Roman. Infrastructure. And that infrastructure uses fiber optics. How familiar are you with fiber optics, Roman? Well, I think I know the basics. It's light carrying information down glass fibers. I think I can, yeah, I can picture it. Excellent, excellent. That's exactly right. So at its simplest, fiber optics involves basically translating information. like our conversation right now into pulses of light and that light zips down those long glass fibers that are finer than strands of hair and then that light is turned back into information on the other side and this is what carries most of our internet a lot of people might think that our information moves through the air but it doesn't. That's interesting because I mean it's easy to have this misconception because you know like even the way we talk about the cloud and Wi-Fi, like it makes it feel like it's bouncing around in the sky. Totally, but in fact the internet depends on a massive amount of physical fiber optics cables that are crisscrossing the globe. Some of those lines are on land, but there are also one and a half million kilometers from in Mars of fiber optics cables stretched across the bottom of entire oceans carrying our Zoom calls and our tic-toc and our shit posts all over the world. About 95% or so of intercontinental traffic goes via submarine telecommunications cables. So our conversation is definitely going through cables. This is Jane Raffino. She's a researcher studying global subsea cables. No matter how wireless, you're and no matter how wireless you think your connection is, there is always a wire somewhere. Now nearly all of the data moving around the planet, this second Roman, is traveling across the bottom of an ocean somewhere. And the reason I'm telling you all of this is because there's about a million miles of these submarine fiber optic cables in use today and they all owe their existence to the one. the O.G cable that started it all. Okay, tell me about the O. G. cable. It's known as the Transatlantic Telephone Fiber Optics submarine cable 8 or TAT 8. It was the first ever fiber optic cable to cross an entire ocean and it really proved what fiber was capable of and TAT 8 has been on an adventure. So I want to tell you how T8 came to be and how it was this huge part of a telecommunications revolution and how it paved the way for the internet that we have today. Sounds great, let's do it. Okay, so first just a little bit of quick background. Fiber optic technology did not start out as a way of communicating. Actually at first it was basically just this Victorian era novelty. it was essentially like a Victorian party trick. They started to use fiber to transmit light, but it was more for like a decorative garden or a party trick. They sort of had this technology and they weren't quite sure what to do with it. And then into the late 19th century, you see fiber optics getting used in medicine, like doctors are using illuminated glass to light up bodies during surgery. And then into the late 19th century, you see fiber optics getting used in medicine, for people to see the potential of fiber optics and telecommunications. And then in the mid to late 70s, you really start to see the first fiber optic telephone lines. And so what had they been using as telephone cables like up to this point? Basically, copper. So in the 1960s, phone cables were still copper-based. And that was a problem when it came to long distance submarine cables that connected, say, like the US. and Europe just because those cables couldn't carry a lot of calls before the line started to sound basically like shit or it just became too busy for more phone traffic. Yeah, yeah. I mean when I was very little I do remember especially long distance calls. They sounded long distance like you felt the physicality and the limits of the physicality of the wires but we were just kind of used to it like that was that was just our lives. Absolutely. And fiber optics offered an alternative. to that a fiber optic line could theoretically carry way more calls more quickly with way less static. Pretty good, right? Yeah, big improvement, yeah. And so very gradually these old copper cables were getting replaced with the new fiber optics technology and not just phone lines AT&T did the first ever live fiber optics transmission when it broadcast the Winter Olympics in 1980s. from Lake Placid. And then they made this little promo film to brag about it. The latest communications technology was applied in transforming Lake Placid into a global communications control center. The potential of lightwave technology inspires predictions of space age home information and entertainment centers in the near future. Clearly when you have ads about your backbone technology that nobody can really experience. They're like putting all their chips in on fiber optics, right? This is the moment, this is the moment where the fiber optic right. This is the moment is the moment, this is the moment, this is the moment where the moment, this is the moment, this is the moment, this is the moment, this is the moment, this is the moment, revolution is about to happen. I mean the new technology was impressive but there were also big limitations. Fiber optic lines were still only available in a few places and for relatively short distances and all of it is terrestrial all these fiber optics lines are on land so it's still pretty limited. There's also this other thing that had been lurking since even before fiber optics that's kind of threatening to squash the technology. before it really even took off. Oh no, who's this villain? Satellites, Roman Mars, satellites. So as soon as satellite technology developed, as soon as they started to put satellites for communication in space, a lot of these cable and telephone companies said, you know, well, we're cooked, everything's going to be satellites. These are the last cables. We're going to go straight from telegraph cables to obsolescence. satellite technology was becoming more and more of a thing. There were already some communication satellites in use. And so when it came to global telecommunications, the assumption was that satellites were the future and that they would be the thing that fully replaced those old copper cables. And so why is that? Well for one, satellites