n2aam@overlf.UUCP (Dave Marthouse) (05/07/91)
I would like information on the first transatlantic call from North America to Europe. When was it made? What mode was used? I assume it was radio. If so, what form of modulation was used and what frequency was it on? Any other technical or historical information would be appreciated. Dave Marthouse Internet: n2aam@kb2ear.ampr.org Fidonet: dave marthouse 1:107/323 Packet ax25: n2aam @ w2emu-4.nj.usa.na
"Donald E. Kimberlin" <0004133373@mcimail.com> (05/16/91)
In Digest (vlliss346), Dave Marthouse (n2aam@overlf.UUCP) asks: > I would like information on the first transatlantic call from North > America to Europe. When was it made? What mode was used? I assume it > was radio. If so, what form of modulation was used and what frequency > was it on? Any other technical or historical information would be > appreciated. Telephone technologists were quite a bit later developing their art to ocean-spanning reach compared to telegraphers. At least one historian records the first notion of an electrical telegraph reaching back to 1558. The idea of conductive wire to transmit electrical signals evolved from early use of wet string and rope to a wire by one recorded experiment across the Thames River in July, 1747. Numerous forms of electrical signaling followed, including a variety of "telegraphs" used largely by railways in the century that preceded S.F.B. Morse's widely heralded "invention." By 1795, one historian found a Spaniard suggested that an undersea wire could be used for a conduit for telegrams. The limitation was that no one knew what material might be used for a suitable insulator. A Portugese engineer has been said to have brought specimens of a natural material called gutta percha to England in 1843, providing the needed second material. Other sources state that water crossings for telegraphic purposes had been made in 1811 in Germany, 1838 in England and 1840 in India, but the materials used are not mentioned. The era of British empire expansion seems to have been the leading force in developing most of the needed materials and substructure of technology for global telecommunications, spearheaded by the telegraph. Much of this concerned developing communications with India and is not recorded in American books. Thus, American history books tend to begin with Morse's telegraphic work beginning in 1832, patented in 1837 and fully operational between Baltimore and Washington in 1843. Similarly, little is told in American history books of the many developmental efforts of English technologists (in cooperation with and often driven by the German, Siemens) to develop submarine telegraphy. Suffice it to say in this short note that Cyrus Field, the American that U.S. history books start their submarine telegraphy history with, was a businessman, not a technologist, who learned in 1854 that the English Channel had been spanned by a commercially successful cable in 1851. By that time, the American Western Union Telegraph Company had matured to a great heyday of ambitious growth. WUTCo had plans to reach Europe, but technology that anticipated the way to do it was to go overland the long way across British Columbia and Alaska via the Aleutian Island chain, in order to require a submarine cable only across the Bering Straits, thence via Siberia to Moscow, where connections via Denmark could be had to the capitals of Europe. Field really got his technology (and eventually his capital) from England. The technological history of submarine telegraphy and the first transatlantic telegraph cable is full of tales of learning by mistake what the "basics" are. G.S. Ohm even suffered ridicule for decades, and all this development was taking place when nobody even agreed what an Ohm was! (In the 1870's, Werner von Siemens declined the honor of having the unit of resistance named after him, deferring to his friend, Ohm, who had suffered so much ridicule for decades.) Knowing so little about the electricity and materials they used, the British-backed firm called the Atlantic Telegraph Company finally made a physical connection of 1,640 nautical miles between Valentia Bay, Ireland and Trinity Bay and transmitted messages on August 17, 1858. In that event, a tradition that heads of state should exchange the first official message began with messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanon. This then, could be the first "call" across the Atlantic. Based on a plan that it ought to support transmission at <three> words per minute (that's 3/10ths of <one> character per second, folks!), the new transatlantic cable suffered such high transmission losses and similarly high earth currents that the inaugural message took sixteen hours to transmit. It wasn't going to make money. Quite a battle ensued within the Atlantic Telegraph Company between its learned advisor, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and its amateur Chief Engineer, who "raised the voltage" and blew the cable into silence in an effort to please the investors. It lasted only a few weeks, and resulted in a Parliamentary investigation, but it had in that short time saved the British Government $50,000 in one message regarding troop movements ($500,000 or more in today's inflated currency). It took until 1865 before Atlantic Telegraph made another attempt at laying another cable that broke and was lost when 1,186 miles had been laid. But, they again braved the rough North Atlantic ocean in 1866 and not only laid a complete cable, but also salvaged and used the previous year's cable. Thus, in July, 1866 two cables started up between Ireland and Newfoundland. The technology had so improved that transmission rates were more than doubled from the earlier plan, to a raging <seven> words per minute! On the strength of this, Western Union, which had abandoned its Siberian Route project on hearing of the earlier 1857 cable, bought the Atlantic Telegraph Company and took over the cable. (Today's MCII/WUI has its roots reaching to that purchase.) Following that success, submarine telegraph cables rapidly grew, largely driven by the imperial plans of England, Germany and other Europeans, to span the globe multiple times before 1900. Submarine telegraph cables were a burgeoning, leading-edge technology until well into the 20th century. Even as late as 1950, Cable and Wireless had 150,000 nautical miles of submarine telegraph cable in operation, reaching all parts of the former Empire. Radio was an infant (with some historical roots to the late 1890's in British Naval history) when Marconi succeeded in passing a telegraphic message across the Atlantic in 1901. The prehistory of radio, however, dates to at least 1865 when a Virginia dentist. Dr Mahlon Loomis, had managed to induce a current from one kite wire to another several miles distant. Loomis envisioned telegraphy spanning the Pacific by radio in his diary. Early radiotelegraphy enjoyed an explosive development and expansion, to the point that radiotelegraphers achieved their goal of "reaching the antipodes," or halfway around the Earth, meaning they could girdle the globe, in September, 1918 by reaching from England to Australia. By this time, many shorter radiotelegraph crossings of oceans were in regular use. Telephony was evolving its own use of both cable and radio techniques, but not to such leaps of oceans as the telegraphers had accomplished. In 1921, the first use of radio for telephone calls seems to have been established permanently between Santa Catalina Island and Los Angeles, 26 miles away. Over on the Atlantic seaboard, experiments with using modified radiotelegraph transmitters (in that day, actually rotating high-frequency AC generators at power levels up to 500 kilowatts!) were being made to ships at sea. One demonstration was made linking Catalina Island via the (then new) transcontinental telephone lines to Deal Beach, New Jersey (an early Bell Labs experimental station) then again via radiotelephone to a ship in the Altantic, an unspecified distance east of New York. This was as far as the telephone could reach many years after the telegraph had spanned the globe. It wasn't until nearly another decade had passed that AT&T, in cooperation with the British Post Office, spanned the Atlantic with regular telephone service. While the telegraphers had used a <radio> frequency of <sixteen> kilohertz with a power level of 540 kilowatts between Hillmorton, near Rugby and the RCA plant at Rocky point on Long Island, significant problems at modulating such a low carrier frequency with speech drove the telephone researchers all the way up to 55 kilohertz, a frequency that was quite difficult to maintain stable reception at such distances in those early days. The result was that the first commercial telephone service across Atlantic wasn't opened until October 1, 1927. The 55/60 kilohertz operation was soon supplanted by shortwave operations, something that a Cable and Wireless forebear had been spreading around the Empire by the early 1920's; largely because Marconi hadn't pressed use of these even more unpredictable "shortwave" frequencies. (Hams would have jumped for joy at the lack of QRM!) While submarine telegraphy had developed so highly that much of the needed technology was at hand for mechanics, getting a bandwidth of 3,000 Hertz out of those telegraph cables was well nigh impossible. For the next several decades, expansion of telephone service between continents was by means of shortwave radio. This mode continued (and continues today to many underdeveloped nations) well into the cable and satellite era. It took development of coaxial cable telephone carrier technology in the period surrounding World War II to get adequate bandwidth at satisfactory noise levels for a transoceanic telephone cable. Some regular twisted-pair telephone cables had been laid between Key West and Havana prior to the laying of Bell Labs' type SA submarine telephone system between the same two cities, distance of 78 miles. (This may sound strange to telephone engineers, but the complications of coldness on the ocean bottom makes wire much less conductive, thus much more lossy than up on land.) Using the successful 1950 base of the Key West - Havana coaxial telephone cable, the Atlantic was spanned in 1955-56 with the Type SB submarine telephone coaxial cable between Clarenville, Newfoundland (extended to New York) and Oban, Scotland (extended to London) and the first transatlantic phone "call" by cabled was made in September, 1956. Today, fiber optics has made bandwidths unimaginable to the early developers a commonplace, to the point we see the transatlantic rate structure crumbling this year, soon to be followed in the Pacific Basin. Bandwidth at great distances is rapidly becoming such a cheap commodity that many of us simply cannot imagine how monumental the effort of the pioneers to get little more than continuity must have been. It's almost all "obsolete" today, but virtually every technique we now use with such abandon came from their gambling with unknown, barely controllable technology. It's doubtful we'll ever again see such risk-takers providing us with something we now take so much for granted. [Moderator's Note: Thank you for an *excellent* presentation! PAT]
Wm Randolph Franklin <wrf@mab.ecse.rpi.edu> (05/20/91)
In article <telecom11.373.1@eecs.nwu.edu> 0004133373@mcimail.com (Donald E. Kimberlin) writes: > Radio was an infant (with some historical roots to the late > 1890's in British Naval history) when Marconi succeeded in passing a > telegraphic message across the Atlantic in 1901. ... and the next day the company with the government-authorized monopoly on transatlantic communications between the UK and Newfieland tried to have him legally stopped for violating their monopoly. No joke. Wm. Randolph Franklin Internet: wrf@ecse.rpi.edu (or @cs.rpi.edu) Bitnet: Wrfrankl@Rpitsmts Telephone: (518) 276-6077; Telex: 6716050 RPI TROU; Fax: (518) 276-6261 Paper: ECSE Dept., 6026 JEC, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst, Troy NY, 12180