Technical Officer - (first transatlantic cable) : Pat Hastings

Transcript

In September 1956 a network was opened to America using the this newly laid trans-Atlantic cable. Now the unique thing about this particular cable system was that it had only thirty six circuits on it and it was a two cable system, one cable for each direction of transmission. The cable itself housed repeaters which were actually installed longitudinally along the length of cable so that all that happened was that the cable got fatter when it had needed a repeater and then back to its normal size. The cable of course was an armoured cable and this was laid on the sea bed across the Atlantic. I'm not sure the distance now but it was probably something like three thousand miles. The great advantage of this particular system in that the cable simply got thinner and fatter to house repeaters was that it could be laid in a continuous run by the cable ships and of course our own Post Office cable ship the Monarch was then heavily involved in laying of these cables. In the early days there were a few problems with cable failures largely because fishing boats, who were doing deep sea trawling, tended to catch hold of this cable which was only laying on the sea bed not in the deep sea portions, but in the little continental shelf areas coming off the main continents, particularly in America where the continental shelf extends I believe a hundred and fifty miles or so, and deep sea trawlers would fish up the cable and obviously get it all tangled up with their boards and what-have-you and officially they were supposed to notify the companies, that's AT&T and the Post Office what they had done, but I'm afraid they weren't always very honest and it was on one or two occasions quite obvious that the axe had come out and chopped the cable in half.