When Captain Arthur Phillip RN, on a summer's day in 1788, chose the wooded shores of Sydney Cove as the site for the first British settlement in Australia, he knew that he and his party were cut off from civilisation and had no hope of communicating with home for years to come. The voyage out had taken eight months. The first ship to reach the colony after its establishment, the Lady Juliana, arrived two-and-a-half years later, having taken eleven months from Plymouth. The mail it carried was already a year or more old and the recipients had not been in touch with the writers for more than three years.

This fixed relationship between distance and communication had existed since time immemorial. It was one of life's constants, like the daily rising of the sun. The thought could not have occurred to Phillip, or the politicians in Westminster who had sent him, that within fifty years this relationship would have been shattered - or that, within a little more than eighty years, people at Sydney Cove would be in daily communication with people in London.

Amid the eighteenth-century courtliness and rustic torpor of the England they had left behind, all unsuspected by these complacent gentlemen in their frock coats and breeches, the Industrial Revolution had already begun. Their predictable, ordered world of sailing ships and sealing wax was about to be swept away on a great tidal wave of change. The skilled ironworkers of Birmingham had already started manufacturing James Watt's steam engine. John Wilkinson had built the first iron boat in 1787. The character of the English countryside was undergoing metamorphosis as villages grew into industrial towns, their skylines dominated by tall factory chimneys, as iron bridges leapt across river gorges, as canals and paved roads cut through the green meadows. And a few far-seeing individuals were already seeking ways of harnessing the magical 'fluid', electricity, and utilising it for communication.

The first published suggestion for a system of electric telegraphy had appeared in the Scots Magazine thirty-five years before, on February 17, 1753. The author, Charles Marshall, proposed a system using twenty-six wires 'extended horizontally between two given places, parallel to one another and each of them about an inch distant from the next.' A ball hanging from the end of each wire at the receiving end would attract a piece of paper placed beneath it when energised with electricity, this being achieved by connecting the other end of the wire to a hand-operated frictional machine. If each piece of paper were inscribed with a particular letter of the alphabet, messages could be sent.

Telegraphic messages were actually sent experimentally in 1787, by means of a system using static electricity, over wires stretched between Madrid and Aranjuez, in Spain. The Spanish showed great interest in this new technology, setting up another line over the same 42km route in 1798 for the private use of the Royal Family.

The experiments of Galvani and Volta, in Italy, were extending man's understanding of electricity and pointing the way to new methods of producing electric current. About the time that a party of soldiers and convicts from Sydney began felling trees and building huts for a new settlement, to be named Hobart Town, in wild Van Diemen's Land, the Spanish nobleman who had designed the Madrid-Aranjuez telegraph proposed using an electro-chemical system, in which the operator at the receiving end knew which line was live - and, therefore, which letter to record - by observing the rise of hydrogen bubbles in a jar of water.

During the early years of the nineteenth century the nations of Europe, plagued by the ambitious Napoleon, found themselves continuously preoccupied with the business of war. Yet a number of scientifically minded gentlemen continued to entertain themselves and their friends by experimenting with home-made systems of electrical telegraphy. One of these, S.T. von Sommering, demonstrated an electro-chemical telegraph to the Munich Academy of Science in 1809. His contribution to the art is worthy of note because his demonstrations inspired a Russian nobleman, Baron Schilling, to take a lifelong interest in the subject. The work of Schilling, in turn, prompted William Cooke twenty-seven years later to stake everything on turning electrical telegraphy into a commercial system.

Schilling had, by then, refined his receiving equipment so as to utilise the ability of an electric current to deflect a compass needle, a property first observed by Professor Oersted, of the University of Copenhagen, in 1820. Schilling had also developed a signalling code based on combinations of black and white, the needle swinging so as to point to either a black or a white card. This technique removed the need to have as many wires as letters in the alphabet, and foreshadowed the more celebrated Morse Code, A being represented by black-white, B by black-black-black, C by black-white-white, and so on.

William Fothergill Cooke was just thirty years old when, in March 1836, he saw a copy of Schilling's telegraph. Recently invalided out of the East Indian Army, he had gone to Heidelberg to study medicine. He seems to have realised immediately the potential value of Schilling's idea. (The Baron himself died in that same year.) Within a month, the young Englishman had abandoned his medical studies and returned to England to devote himself to the development of electric telegraphy.

First railway

The story of Cooke's success is a story of a need and the technology to satisfy that need arriving together. England was ripe for the development. The first railway, between Stockton and Darlington, had opened in 1825. Stephenson's engine, The Rocket, had amazed the world by reaching 44 miles per hour when hauling a thirteen-ton train. Capitalists were eager to subscribe to new railway ventures. And railway company directors were anxious to have some reliable high-speed system of sending messages between railway stations ahead of the trains.

Cooke, encountering technical difficulties, formed a partnership with Charles Wheatstone, a man four years his senior, who was Professor of Natural Philosophy at King's College, London. In June 1837 they were granted their first patent. Soon afterwards they demonstrated their 5- needle electromagnetic telegraph system to the directors of the new London-Birmingham Railway. Although this test, conducted between Euston and Camden Town stations, proved the effectiveness of the system, the company chose not to place an order. However, the directors of the Great Western Railway were impressed and invited the partners to install a telegraph between Paddington, their London terminus, and West Drayton, 21km away. This, the world's first commercial electric telegraph, came into operation on July 9, 1839.

Left: Cook & Wheatstone's Needle Telegraph. The wires of Cooke and Wheatstone's telegraph spread rapidly throughout Britain along with the railways. Improvements in the system reduced the number of needles on each receiving instrument first to two, later to just one. By 1845 the partners were well on the way to becoming wealthy men through royalties received from railway companies.

On the first day of 1845 the usefulness of the telegraph was demonstrated in an incident which caught the attention of the newspapers and soon had all London talking about it. The operator at Paddington received a message from Slough informing him that a murder suspect had boarded the 7.42 train and was sitting in the last compartment of the second first-class carriage. Policemen met the train at Paddington and arrested the man, John Tawell, who later suffered the ultimate punishment for his crime.

While the telegraph flourished in England through private enterprise, the American inventor, Samuel Morse, spent several frustrating years striving in vain to obtain financial backing from the U.S. Government for his own proposed system. Morse, a portrait painter, had first sketched his ideas for an electric telegraph whilst on a voyage home from Europe in 1832. The distinctive feature of his concept was that it used the deflections of a magnet to move a pen across a moving strip of paper. After his appointment as Professor of the Literature of Arts and Design at the newly founded University of New York, in 1835, Morse devoted his spare time to perfecting his idea. In 1837, he took on a partner, Alfred Vail. In the following January he gave the first demonstration, in his studio at the University, of the transmission and reception of messages in the code of dots and dashes which he and his partner had devised.

Morse's contribution to the new art was immense. His system needed only one wire, the return circuit being provided by the earth. Transmission of the signals was affected simply by tapping a key so as to make and break the connection. The pen and moving strip of paper were later discarded, for it was found in practice that operators could read the messages at the receiving end by listening to the long and short buzzing sounds made by the instruments. Key transmission and the code of dots and dashes survive to this day. (See also the unofficial Telstra Australian Coastal Radio Service site at http://members.tripod.com/coastradio/History.htm).

The other great innovation introduced by Morse was the automatic relay, a device which enabled the telegraph to transmit messages over great distances without the need for reception and retransmission by operators at intermediate stations. This device played a vital part in the development of telegraphy, especially in its spread across the American continent. The relay functioned by using the current in one section of line to operate a make-and-break device in another section of line powered by a separate set of batteries, thus causing the same sequence of long and short pulses of current to be sent down the distant line.

Not until 1843 did Congress approve the expenditure of money on the U.S.A.'s first telegraph line, to link Washington and Baltimore. Morse, appointed Superintendent of U.S. Telegraphs, supervised its construction. The line came into operation on January 1, 1845, when Morse sent his famous inaugural message, 'What hath God wrought.' (President Kennedy used the same phrase, over a century later, during the first trans-Atlantic telephone conversation between heads of government via a satellite circuit.)

International telegrams

After the railways, the electric telegraph was the great marvel of the age. Networks of telegraph lines spread rapidly throughout Britain, the countries of Continental Europe, and the settled areas of the United States. The obvious social and commercial utility of this new communication system soon led to a widening of its use and the introduction of public telegram services. In Europe, the system quickly became international. A treaty signed in 1849 by Prussia and Austria, for example, provided for the connection of Berlin to Vienna by a line which followed the railway track. On even dates, telegrams from Austria had precedence; on odd dates, telegrams from Prussia. Government messages had first priority, messages concerning railway operations came second, and public correspondence came last.

Australia got its first telegraph line, between Melbourne and Williamstown, in 1854, the year of the Eureka Stockade revolt. Victoria, only recently granted independent colonial status, was then experiencing a gold rush. The new colony's population had been expanded by a great influx of fortune seekers from many parts of the world and Melbourne had become Australia's most important city. Within four years the telegraph wires reached all the way to Sydney and westward as far as Adelaide, to enable the three capitals to keep in touch by Morse Code.

The idea of linking the nations of the world by running telegraph wires beneath the seas had excited imaginative minds ever since the first discussions of electric telegraphy. By 1850, there seemed to be no great obstacle to be overcome. All that was needed, surely, was effective insulation of the wire. But the pioneers were to discover - as pioneers usually do - that there were more difficulties in the way of progress than they could have dreamed. Samuel Morse, having experimentally laid a rubber-insulated cable across a section of New York Harbour in 1842, found himself the butt of public derision when the line went dead even before the official opening ceremony. A fisherman, finding the cable fouling his anchor, had angrily chopped through it, letting the severed ends drop back to the bottom of the harbour.

Despite this experience, Morse remained optimistic about the prospects for submarine telegraphy. He expressed the conviction, in 1843, that 'telegraph communication may with certainty be established across the Atlantic Ocean.'

In England, Professor Wheatstone had put forward a proposal for a cross-Channel telegraph as early as 1840 in a submission to a House of Commons Committee. The first actual attempt to lay a telegraph cable across the Channel came ten years later. It was a private commercial venture. It failed.

The man behind this scheme to link Britain to Europe by wire was a 45-year-old retired antique dealer, John Watkins Brett. He formed a company with his younger brother Jacob, calling it the General Oceanic and Subterranean Electric Printing Telegraph Company. The cable, manufactured by the Gutta Percha Company, consisted of a single copper wire surrounded by a quarter-inch thickness of gutta-percha insulation. This natural thermo-plastic obtained from the gum of certain Malayan trees was at that time enjoying a great vogue in Victorian England. Manufacturers of such advanced products as ear trumpets (for the hard of hearing) and speaking tubes (for installation in private residences or in gentlemen's carriages) proudly advertised their wares as being made entirely of this remarkable substance. Gutta-percha is still in use today in some insulation applications - and in golf balls.

A small steam tug, the Goliath, paid out the twenty-five miles of cable from a huge drum on its after-deck throughout the day of August 28, 1850. The end was safely landed at Cape Gris Nez that evening and connected to the Brett's automatic printer. John Brett, in England, attempted to send a message of greeting to Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, but the receiving equipment recorded only an unintelligible jumble of characters. Efforts to send messages in both directions continued for some hours but only a few words got through. By the next morning the line was lifeless. A French fisherman had hauled the cable inboard and cut a section from it, believing it to be some strange kind of seaweed with a gold core.

The Bretts tried again, this time with the support and guidance of a railway engineer, Thomas Crampton, who subscribed half the £15,000 capital for the project. Crampton also designed a new cable consisting of four conductors, each insulated with gutta-percha, contained in a protective sheath of tarred hemp and galvanised iron wires. Laid on September 25,1851, this second Channel cable proved successful. For the first time, two countries separated by sea could correspond by means of the electric telegraph.

A boom in the production and laying of submarine cables now followed. Over the next few years, cables went into operation across the Irish Sea, the North Sea, the Mediterranean and even the Black Sea. The latter cable, laid in 1855, was installed specifically to assist Britain's military operations in the Crimea. It performed its task adequately, though it lasted less than a year. In 1857, India and Ceylon were linked. And in 1859 a cable across Bass Strait joined the telegraph systems of Tasmania and the Australian mainland colonies.

Laying the first Atlantic telegraph cable

Right: HMS Agamemnon.

One of the most heroic sagas of all telecommunications history is found in the story of the first bridging of the Atlantic by the telegraph. It is a story of ten years of continuous, courageous effort in the face of repeated failure, of fortunes being gambled on what must have seemed to most a lost cause, of men braving great physical dangers as well as public ridicule time and time again, and persisting until success was at last achieved.

The project brought together some of the most remarkable men of a remarkable era. The promoter of the scheme and the main driving force behind it was an American, Cyrus Field. Although only thirty-four years old when he first became fired with the ambition to link the USA and Britain by submarine telegraph, he had already retired from the New York business world with a comfortable fortune. In 1856, having been persuaded to buy up the assets of the bankrupt Newfoundland Electric Telegraph Company, he took passage to England in search of backers and practical support for his bold scheme. There he met the leading submarine cable experts of the day, including John Brett of Channel cable fame.

He talked, also, with one of the outstanding personalities of the Victorian age, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, celebrated builder of the Great Western Railway. This visionary engineer who, in the words of Kenneth Clark, 'remained all his life in love with the impossible,' no doubt encouraged Field to cling resolutely to his own impossible dream. Brunel's mighty ship the Great Eastern, then in course of construction, would later play a decisive role in bringing Field's enterprise to a successful conclusion.

Left: Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The odds against success were great and were made even greater by the haste with which the over-eager directors pushed the project forward. The first meeting of the Atlantic Telegraph Company took place at Liverpool on November 12, 1856. Within a few days, £350,000 had been subscribed, mostly by British investors. By the following August, 2,500 miles of cable had been manufactured and loaded into two specially converted warships, one British and one American. No ship then afloat could have carried the whole cable. Laying, from the USS Niagara, steaming slowly westward from the coast of Ireland, lasted only a few days. After 300 miles the cable snapped, the end disappearing into the ocean depths,

After raising more capital, Field persuaded the British and American navies to assist him again the following June. This time, Niagara and the old wooden warship HMS Agamemnon, started in mid-Atlantic, splicing the ends of their respective halves of the cable together and steaming in opposite directions. Three times in two days they came together, spliced ends and commenced laying. Each time, the cable failed electrically, or parted. On the third day the break came after 200 miles had been paid out. Foiled once more, the fleet returned again to port.

Field, refusing to be beaten, asked his directors to back another attempt. Several resigned. But the ships were back in mid-Atlantic by July 29th. This time, after many setbacks - including some very rough weather, which imposed great strain on both cable and crews - the operation ended successfully. On August 5,1858, the first telegraph message crossed the Atlantic. From Agamemnon, at her anchorage in Valentia Bay, Ireland, to Niagara, anchored in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, it reported that the shore end had been safely landed.

Although a further ten days passed before the line handled any traffic, wild enthusiasm greeted the news of its completion. The newspapers talked of the British and the Americans once again becoming one people. Queen Victoria telegraphed congratulations to President Buchanan (it is recorded that transmission of this message took sixteen hours.) Charles Bright, the Atlantic Telegraph Company's 26-year-old Chief Engineer, received a knighthood. A banquet in New York honoured Cyrus Field.

The rejoicing, however, proved to be premature. A message addressed to Field from London on the very day of the banquet turned out to be the last one carried by the cable. The line died on September 1st. Another eight years would pass before England and America communicated by telegraph once more.

A committee appointed jointly by the British Government and the Atlantic Telegraph Company conducted a lengthy enquiry into the whole problem of submarine cable failures. The Government had become involved since sinking £800,000 of public money into a cable laid through the Red Sea to India, which had also failed. The simple truth was that the engineers were having to build up their knowledge of this new technology by a process of trial and error.

Considering the primitive state of electrical science at that time, it is amazing that telegraphic messages had been transmitted across the Atlantic at all. Few of those who worked with electricity had more than a superficial understanding of its properties. No agreed units existed for measuring current, potential difference, or resistance. George Ohm had recently died (1854), bequeathing to the world his law on the constant relationship between these three characteristics of an electrical circuit, but the law was not generally known. One of the 'expert' witnesses who addressed the committee of enquiry stated that he 'dissented entirely' from the 'theory of circuits.'

The American States, between 1861 and 1865, passed through the agony of the Civil War. Still, the indefatigable Cyrus Field pressed on, shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic, talking investors into putting up more money, directing the design and manufacture of a new cable, making shipping and naval support arrangements for a fourth expedition. Towards the end of June 1865 (a few weeks after the assassination of President Lincoln), the Great Eastern left England carrying another 2,600 miles' length of cable.

The great iron ship, with its 58ft paddle wheels and 24ft screw, was the biggest and most manoeuvrable ocean-going vessel afloat. Conversion of this leviathan into a cable layer rescued both its owners and the cable promoters from embarrassment. Since its launching, the ship had steadily lost money for a succession of owners. Yet its availability at this time came as a great stroke of luck for the Atlantic Telegraph Company. It was the only ship of the day which could have carried the complete cable. The necessity for bringing two ships together in mid-ocean to splice cable ends was thus removed.

Much had been learnt by the engineers.

This 1865 cable was the heaviest so far made, more than an inch thick and heavily armoured. Yet further lessons remained to be learnt. Further disappointments lay ahead.

Left: Great Eastern Cable Tank. Several electrical faults were found during paying out. Each one necessitated stopping the ship, laboriously manhandling the suspended cable around from the stern to the bow, turning the ship about and steaming in the reverse direction, heaving cable inboard until the fault had been brought in. Several times, a spike of iron was discovered embedded in the cable, arousing the suspicion that someone among the crew was a saboteur. Later, the spikes were found to be pieces of the armouring wire from the cable itself, broken off and driven through the insulation by the motion of the ship and the shifting of the heavy coils of cable in the storage tank.

With two-thirds of the distance covered and only 700 nautical miles left to go, a fault was observed. The procedure of picking up cable, by now regarded as routine, turned difficult as the huge ship began to veer in a wind. The cable snapped. The end sank from sight into two thousand fathoms of water.

Valiant efforts were made to raise the lost wire, using a five-pronged grapnel on an improvised five-mile length of line. For nine days the ship drifted silently with the mid-ocean breeze, shifted position and drifted again, dragging the grapnel along the ocean bottom. Fogs and unfavourable winds caused long interruptions. Three times the long probe encountered something on the sea-bed, hauling in began -- and the rope broke. After the third attempt, with insufficient rope left to reach bottom, Chief Engineer Canning admitted defeat. The expedition returned to Ireland.

A year later, in July 1866, Great Eastern and her escorts sailed westward once more carrying yet another improved cable, festooning it along the Atlantic bed as they went. Aboard the ship, sharing the nerve- wracking tension, as on all the earlier expeditions, were Cyrus Field and one of his co-directors, Professor William Thomson of Glasgow University (later to become Lord Kelvin). After a fortnight's voyage without incident, the great ship anchored in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, on July 27th. The end was hauled ashore at a place appropriately called Heart's Content. Two days later, New York and London were linked by wire and exchanging messages. This time, the operation had succeeded splendidly. Never again would the two sides of the North Atlantic be remote from one another.

The trans-Atlantic telegraph cable earned £1,000 on its first day of operation. And it continued to operate for five years, with high efficiency, before it needed any repair. Soon, groups of British businessmen were forming companies to lay cables to the farthest corners of the earth. In 1870, the Great Eastern laid a cable across the Indian Ocean which linked Suez and Bombay. Further cables laid in that same year joined Madras (connected to Bombay by the Indian landline), Penang and Singapore. The British Australian Telegraph Company, formed in London in January 1870, put a cable between Singapore and Batavia (present-day Jakarta). Australia's long isolation was about to be ended.

During the years of the struggle to establish the Atlantic telegraph, explorers in Australia were giving their lives to find ways across the inhospitable inland of the empty continent. Burke and Wills perished on their way back to Melbourne from the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1861. Scotsman John McDouall Stuart, who had made a profession of exploring, set out upon the first of his three epic journeys to find away from south to north in 1858 - just as Englishmen on the far side of the world were loading cable into the Niagara and the Agamemnon. On April 22, 1860, Stuart wrote in his diary: 'I am now camped in the centre of Australia. I have marked a tree and planted the British flag.' In 1862, his ambition achieved, he was carried back to South Australia on a stretcher by his companions. Blind and ailing, but triumphant, he retired to England where he died two years later.

Within another ten years, a telegraph wire followed the route blazed by Stuart, reaching all the way from Port Augusta across the Centre to Port Darwin. There the wire met a submarine cable laid across the Timor Sea in 1871 by ships under contract to the British Australian Telegraph Co. This thousand-mile cable extended to Banjoiewangi, at the eastern tip of Java, from where Dutch landlines ran to Batavia. So, in the eighty-fourth year since the founding of the settlement at Sydney Cove, Australia became linked with the outside world by telegraph.

The overland telegraph line from South Australia to the shore of Port Darwin took two years to build and cost six men's lives. The history of its construction is another of the great sagas of the nineteenth century, a story characteristic of that age of heroes and adventurers who boldly risked all to lend a hand with the work of reshaping the world.

The citizens of the major cities of the southern and eastern colonies found themselves able to communicate by telegram direct with England and most other principal overseas countries from October 1872. Messages could now be exchanged with London in hours instead of weeks. This liberation from 'the tyranny of distance' (to borrow a vivid phrase from author Geoffrey Blainey) was greeted with great excitement and rejoicing. Businessmen, newspapermen and administrators hailed the advent of the international telegraph as though it marked the dawn of the millennium. Typically, a speaker at an official banquet in Sydney on November 15th referred to the opening of the line three weeks before as '...the greatest and by far the most wonderful event that has ever occurred in the history of this country.'

Sir Hercules Robinson, Governor of New South Wales, in his address on that same occasion told his audience: 'The earth has been girdled, as it were, with a magic chain, which practically enables us to converse with our friends in England, and brings us also within speaking distance of every important post in Europe, Asia and America. Our daily papers now contain intelligence of every important political or commercial event which may have taken place within the previous forty-eight hours throughout the whole of the civilised world.'

Four years later, Australia and New Zealand were linked by telegraph cable. That was 1876, the year in which Alexander Graham Bell patented and demonstrated his telephone. Before long, the cable engineers were thinking in terms of girdling the earth with a magic chain that could carry speech. But another three-quarters of a century would pass before this became possible.

Right: Landing cable at Anson Bay, Norfolk Island (c1902), site of the present cable station.

Whilst the use of the telephone grew very rapidly, especially in America, Britain and the countries of Europe, development of a satisfactory submarine telephone cable to span all but the shortest underwater distances proved enormously difficult. Not until the arrival of the electronic age did the engineers have any means of overcoming the major problem, which was loss of signal strength over long lengths of cable (known technically as attenuation). The first trans-oceanic telephone circuits were radio circuits, opened in the late 1920s and early '30s. But research engineers within two great organisations on opposite sides of the Atlantic were by this time patiently working, in co-operation with British and American manufacturing concerns, on the invention which was to make long-distance submarine telephony possible: the submersible repeater.

No longer is the story of communications technology a romantic legend of individual achievement, as in the days of the nineteenth-century pioneers. No longer is it a game for the dedicated amateur working in a back room with little capital and some makeshift equipment, guided by the spark of genius. Now we step into the present-day world of the professional communications engineer. The two bodies mainly responsible for the successful development of the submarine telephone cable were the U.S.A.'s Bell Telephone Laboratories and the British Post Office. These two institutions, after years of research, and many trials with repeatered telephone cables in their respective home waters, pooled their technological resources in the 1950s to design a cable that would carry speech across the Atlantic. This cable, TAT-1, came into operation on September 25, 1956 - just ninety years and two months after the opening of the first commercially successful trans-Atlantic telegraph cable.

Nowadays, of course, we take for granted the ease with which we can pick up a telephone and, within moments, be in conversation with someone in Britain or virtually any other country. Because the procedure is so simple and the result usually so clear and trouble free, we seldom pause to think of the thousands of miles of wire which link us with the other party, or of the miraculous feats of engineering which have made our across-the-world conversation possible.

Submersible repeaters, like the coaxial submarine cables into which they are spliced, must be as near to flawless as it is possible for human skills to make them. They must operate continuously, with complete reliability, whilst lying on the ocean floor for periods of twenty years or more. Throughout that time they must function with unflagging efficiency, each one amplifying the signals in the line several thousand times, so that the sound of each speaker's voice is received at the other end undistorted, without fading, sounding utterly natural.

The advent of high-quality trans-oceanic telephony triggered an explosion in public demand for international telecommunications facilities which continues to test the resourcefulness of national administrations throughout the world - as it does the ingenuity of the engineers. To enable international networks to keep pace with demand, it has been necessary for submarine cables of ever greater capacity to be produced.

The record is astonishing. That first Atlantic telephone cable, TAT-1 (actually two separate cables, one working in each direction), initially led the field with 36 two-way voice circuits. The first cables of the British Commonwealth submarine telephone cable network were designed to carry 80 two-way voice circuits. These included CANTAT-A, between Britain and Canada, opened December 1961, and COMPAC joining Canada, New Zealand and Australia, opened December 1963. CANTAT-2, laid in 1974, has 1,840 voice circuits. This year, a cable will be laid across the Atlantic providing 4,000 circuits. And another, planned for laying in the 1980s, may be able to handle 16,000 simultaneous telephone conversations.

Truly, the world has changed beyond the imaginings of those gentlemen of George III's time who led the European settlement of this country. Submarine cables, channelling great volumes of information daily between all the inhabited continents, have become an important, if generally unseen, feature of our present-day civilisation. Indeed, the character of our civilisation owes much to the development of the cable - what the Postmaster-General of New South Wales of 1872 called 'the wonder-working wire'. That dignitary closed his speech to the banquet of November 15, 1872, by quoting from a topical verse, the final couplet of which expresses very neatly a proper sense of wonder at the miracle wrought by telecommunications:

In 1975 the 480 circuit TASMAN Cable was completed to Australia. ANZCAN Cable, which replaced COMPAC Cable, was the last of the Pacific Ocean analogue cables to be installed to Australia. A-I-S Cable which lands at Perth, WA is of the same design as ANZCAN Cable and was the last of Telstra's analogue cables to be installed. All cables installed since A-I-S have been of fibre optic design. A-I-S Cable was taken out of service in 1999 when it was replaced by SEA-ME-WE 3 Cable.

With the exception of the last paragraph, the above information was reproduced from Contact magazine, March 1976, the house journal of OTC Australia. It is believed to have been written by Lawrence Durrant, author of The Seawatchers, a history of the Coast Radio Service

Return to IN&T's Home Page