Text 1: The internet is a hosepipe on the seabed, by Ingrid Fazackerley

An original contemporary blog.

Here is something I did not know until three weeks ago: almost all intercontinental internet traffic travels under the sea. Not through space, not through some invisible cloud, but along cables about as thick as a garden hose, lying on the seabed between countries and continents. I know this now because I have spent the last twenty-one days on a ship laying one.

The Northern Reach is a hundred and forty metres long and carries, coiled in two vast tanks in her belly, four hundred kilometres of cable. At its heart are a few strands of glass, wrapped in steel wire and plastic. Each strand can carry millions of conversations at once, though nobody on board seemed to find this as astonishing as I did.

Laying it is a slow, careful business. The ship moves at about the speed of a brisk walk, day and night, while the cable feeds out over the stern into a yellow underwater plough the size of a van. The plough is towed along the seabed, cutting a trench and burying the cable as it goes, so that fishing trawlers will not snag it. In the control room, engineers watch its progress on screens, steering it around rocks they will never see.

For days nothing much happens, which is exactly what everyone wants. The crew work twelve hours on and twelve off, eat enormous breakfasts and talk about football. When something does happen, it is quiet and urgent. On day nine a trawler wandered towards our route, and the bridge spent an hour on the radio persuading it, politely, to go somewhere else. On day fourteen a section of cable failed a test, and two technicians spent nineteen hours in a spotless white room, joining glass fibres thinner than a hair under a microscope.

I was seasick for the first four days, and homesick for most of the rest. Last night, from my bunk, I sent my daughter a photo of the sunset over the stern. Her reply arrived in under a second. Somewhere beneath me, I suppose, it was travelling home along a cable very like ours.

Text 2: Paying out the island cable, by Arthur Kilner

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this journal, written in 1869, an electrician describes laying a telegraph cable across the sea to an island.

June 12th. We began paying out at six this morning from the shore end at Carrick Point. The cable runs from the great tank in the hold, up over a wheel upon the deck and out over the stern, and it makes, as it goes, a low groaning upon the iron which I think I shall hear for the rest of my life. Captain Boyd has ordered that no man shall whistle, sing, or speak above a murmur within ten yards of the paying-out machinery.

June 13th. Steady progress. My duty is to sit in the testing-room below, which is kept dark, and watch a tiny spot of light thrown by a mirror upon a scale. So long as the spot holds still, the cable is sound from end to end, and we are in speech with the shore. I have stared at it for so many hours that I see it when I shut my eyes.

June 14th. At twenty minutes past two this morning the spot of light swung violently and fell dead. I cannot describe the silence that followed. The ship was stopped. The engineers began, inch by inch, to haul the cable back out of the sea, for somewhere in all those miles there was a fault, and until it was found every fathom we had laid was worthless. For eleven hours no one slept and hardly anyone spoke. At last a single wire was found, driven through the outer covering like a needle, and the joint was made afresh by lamplight. When I sat down again before the scale, my hands were shaking so that I could scarcely adjust the mirror. The spot held.

June 16th. We sighted the island at noon, and the shore end was landed by evening, carried up the beach by thirty fishermen wading to their waists while the women and children cheered from the rocks. At nine o’clock the first message passed, a greeting from the island to the mainland, and in four minutes the answer came back. The fishermen, who had never seen such a thing, would not believe it until the minister read it to them aloud.

Both of these texts are about laying communication cables under the sea.

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