我不是通常非常感兴趣的工作状态ngs of the telephone system. Despite the fact that my significant other runs the phones (among other things) at a local Department of Energy facility, I find it hard to concern myself with them. My telephone of choice at home is a black desktop rotary I bought when AT&T was dissolved and we had to buy phones instead of renting them. I have a cell phone (grudgingly) only because my car is nearly as old as my rotary telephone.
Yesterday, it came to my attention that there was a massive Verizon wireless outage that affected both Virginia and North Carolina. This morning, I heard that the first transcontinental telephone call occurred on today’s date in 1915. When I looked it up in Wikipedia (I know, shame on me), I saw right next to that item that rotary phone service began only 4 years later, in 1919, in Norfolk, Virginia(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_telephone). Clearly, the universe was trying to tell me something.
I reasoned that perhaps I should see if there was anything interesting in the collections here about trans-Atlantic cabling. It turns out, there is. Lots of people know about the laying of the first trans-Atlantictelegraphcable by Cyrus Fields et al., using the HMSAgamemnonand the US steam frigateNiagara. That cable was responsible for the very first trans-Atlantic electronic communication, and worked for all of 3 weeks.
Not so many people, I suspect, remember the efforts of HMSMonarch, built in 1946. It was the biggest cable-laying ship ever built at that time, with the capacity to hold 2500 nm of telegraph cable or 1500 nm of telephone cable in her 4 tanks.Monarchlaid the very first trans-Atlantic telephone cable, TAT-1, in 1955-56. You may counter that the first trans-Atlantic telephonecallwas much earlier, in 1926, and you would be right. That call, like all such calls before 1956, had an overseas radio link between the land stations. TAT-1, inaugurated on Sept. 25, 1956, also carried the hotline between Washington and Moscow during most of the Cold War(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-1).
Like most trans-Atlantic ventures,Monarch不是最顺利通过。它遇到的年代evere storms spun off of Hurricane Ione (see the photo below) off Rockall Bank. Nonetheless, she finished her work 3 months ahead of schedule. During the year after the cable was laid, telephone traffic between Europe and North America doubled over the previous 12-month period. TAT-1 revolutionized telecommunications (http://strowger-net.telefoonmuseum.com/tel_hist_tat1.html).
Enjoy these photos from our collection ofMonarchand her cable.
