I’m reading a book about the Aldrich Ames spy case in which they communicate between embassies by sending and receiving “cables”. Most of the activity takes place in the 1970s and 1980s which is before the internet, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t use regular telephones or Western Union as they aren’t secure. So, what is a cable?
For many years the term cable referred to the formal telegrams that consular staffers would send across the oceans and around the world in Morse code. Employees on the other end would decipher the pulses coming through their headphones or decode printed sheets of dots and dashes. (As recently as the Cuban Missile Crisis, American and Soviet diplomats were sending urgent messages via Western Union.) But in more recent times, the cable started to function almost exactly like an e-mail, and as of 2008, the State Department handles both modes of communication with the same Microsoft Outlook-based computer system.
Stranger
Hmmm…interesting. It looks like back then they were indeed telegrams.
I am guessing they are called “cables” because communication across oceans literally traveled on cables laid across the ocean bottom. Then we got satellites so some communications went that way (ok, a lot). But in the old days your message had to travel via cable so the nickname stuck.
But the cables are still very much there and, indeed, quite extensive. If you are hitting a server in a foreign country (say, Germany from the US) then your signal is almost certainly transmitted via ocean cable.
(As an aside…where is that blue cable going to from the top of Norway? Also, Alaska has one not connected to anything.)
Map of undersea communication cables:
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1682/4231/articles/eo6248sth0pz_1600x.png
Here is what one looks like. They are not small:
And one with fiber optics:
Svalbard Satellite Station where it can transmit communications to and from polar orbiting satellites.
I always learned that if you sent a telegram between two places on your own continent, it was called a wire: “I’ll send a wire to Los Angeles when I get to New York,” or “I’ll wire Chicago from Toronto.”
However, if your telegram message was to go overseas, it was called a cable: “I’ll cable London from New York,” or “I’ll cable Sydney from Montreal.”
You could be pretty sure that anything sensitive was encrypted in some manner. The quality of encryption would vary. The very best would use a one time pad (literally a paper pad of sheets of codes that you used once and discarded), these are unbreakable, or code books where there were word substitutions, those are subject to attack. You could use the equivalent of an Enigma machine, and for a time many countries did. The Brits kept Colossus and the breaking of the Lorentz codes secret for decades for just this reason, they could crack them, and they didn’t want anyone to know. Lots of options.
https://qexpressnet.com/system/
Looks like its purpose is to provide internet access to ports along the northern coast. There’s an overland line from Prudhoe Bay to Fairbanks that connects it to the main network.
And you have thousands of miles of undersea cables - all of which must be laid by ship. (are they actually laid on the bottom - possibly thousands of feet down - or simply stretched between two high points (here ans there) like a clothesline?). One false move and the cable breaks - making it difficult - if not impossible - to avoid the wastage of miles of cable. Or - having laid all the cable - a test message fails to be received at the other end.
A brief history of the first trans-Atlantic cable starting in 1858: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/heroic-failures/the-first-transatlantic-telegraph-cable-was-a-bold-beautiful-failure
They are laid on the bottom like a very long rope. The first one was laid in 1850 between England and France. The first (successful) transatlantic cable was laid in 1866 between Newfoundland and Ireland.
There is a rift in the center of the trans-atlantic ridge. My geography is poor to non-existent: did they avoid the ridge?
The presence of the rift was not known at the time of the first cables (and was rejected/denied when first documented)