Transatlantic Fiber-Optic Expialidocious

Christopher Johnson. Hey, Christopher. Hey, Roman. So I'm in New York City as you know, and of course you are in California and we're connected over Zoom. We are. It's good to see you.

It's always good to see you and you're coming in crystal clear, which is great. And this is

especially amazing considering that my voice and my face are traveling all the way across the continent to you through wires from infrastructure. And that infrastructure uses

“fiber optics. How familiar are you with fiber optics, Roman? Well, I think I know the basics.”

It's light carrying information down class fibers. So I think I can. Yeah, like a picture. Excellent. Excellent. That's exactly right. So added simplest fiber optics involves basically translating information like our conversation right now into pulses of light. And that light zips down those long glass fibers that are finer than strands of hair. And then that light is turned back into information on the other side. And this is what carries most of our internet. A lot of people might

think that our information moves through the air, but it doesn't. That's interesting. Because I mean, it's easy to have this misconception because, you know, like even the way we talk about the internet,

“we talk about the cloud and wifi. Like it makes it feel like it's bouncing around in the sky.”

Totally. But in fact, the internet depends on a massive amount of physical fiber optics cables that are crisscrossing the globe. Some of those lines are on land, but there are also one and a

half million kilometers from the Mars of fiber optics cables stretched across the bottom

of entire oceans carrying our zoom calls and our TikToks and our ship posts all over the world. About 95% or so of intercontinental traffic goes via submarine telecommunications cable. So our conversation is definitely going through cables. This is Jane Raphino. She's a researcher studying global subsea cables. No matter how wireless your devices and no matter how wireless

“you think your connection is, there is always a wire somewhere. Now nearly all of the data”

moving around the planet, this second Roman, is traveling across the bottom of an ocean somewhere.

And the reason I'm telling you all of this is because there's about a million miles of these

submarine fiber optic cables in use today and they all owe their existence to the one, the one cable, the first, the original, the OG cable that started it all. Okay, tell me about the OG cable. It's known as the Transatlantic telephone fiber optic submarine cable 8 or TAT 8. It was the first ever fiber optic cable to cross an entire ocean and it really proved what fiber was capable of. And TAT 8 has been on an adventure. So I want to tell you how TAT 8 came to be

and how it was this huge part of a telecommunications revolution and how it paved the way for the internet that we have today. Sounds great. Let's do it. Okay, so first just a little bit of quick background. fiber optic technology did not start out as a way of communicating. Actually at first, it was basically just this Victorian era novelty. Mino is essentially like a Victorian party trick. They started to use fiber to transmit light, but it was more for like, you know,

a decorative garden or a party trick. They started having this technology and they weren't quite sure what to do with it. And then into the late 19th century, you see fiber optics getting used in medicine like doctors are using it illuminated glass to light up bodies during surgery. But it really took until the second half of the 20th century for people to see the potential of fiber optics and telecommunications. And then in the mid to late 70s, you really start to see

the first fiber optic telephone lines. And so what have they been using as telephone cables like up to this point? Basically copper. So in the 1960s, phone cables were still copper-based. And that was a problem when it came to long distance submarine cables that connected say like the U.S. and Europe. Just because those cables couldn't carry a lot of calls before the lines started

when I was very little, I do remember, especially long distance calls. They sounded long distance.

“Like you felt the physicality and the limits of the physicality of the wires. But we were just”

kind of used to it. Like those are lives. Absolutely. And fiber optics offered an alternative to that. A fiber optic line could theoretically carry way more calls more quickly with way less static. Pretty good, right? Yeah, big improvement. Yeah. And so very gradually, these old copper cables were getting replaced with the new fiber optics technology. And not just phone lines,

AT&T did the first ever live fiber optics TV transmission when it broadcasts the winter Olympics

in 1980 from Lake Placet. And then they made this little promo film to brag about it. The latest communications technology was applied in transforming Lake Placet into a global communications control center. The potential of lightweight technology inspires predictions of

“space age, home information and entertainment centers in the near future.”

Clearly, when you have ads about your backbone technology that nobody can really experience, they're like putting all their chips in on fiber optics, right? This is the moment where the

fiber optics revolution is about to happen. I mean, the new technology was impressive, but there were

also big limitations. Fiber optic lines were still only available in a few places and for relatively short distances. And all of it is terrestrial. All these fiber optics lines are on land. So it's still pretty limited. There's also this other thing that had been lurking since even before fiber optics that's kind of threatening to squash the technology before it really even took off. Oh, no. Who's this villain? Satellites wrote in Mars. Satellites.

“So as soon as satellite technology developed, as soon as they started to put satellites”

for communication and space, a lot of these cable and telephone companies said, you know, well,

we're cooked. Everything's going to be satellites. These are the last cables. We're going to go straight from telegraph cables to obsolescence. At the time, satellite technology was becoming more and more of a thing. There were already some communication satellites in use. And so when it came to global telecommunications, the assumption was that satellites were the future and that they would be the thing that fully replace those old copper cables. And so why is that? Well, for one,

satellites are in space. This was the tail end of the space race and we were still pretty obsessed with the final frontier. And so beaming phone calls, two and from satellite hovering above the earth. How cool, man. Like that was the future. Not moving stuff through boring dust-yask copper cables. Yeah. Yeah. Satellites were a genuine competitor because they could carry voice traffic a lot more cheaply because cables are incredibly expensive to build. And on top of all of that,

satellite telecommunication was just simpler, at least on a diplomatic level. These cables that go between countries had to be built with consortia. So companies from different countries had to collaborate with each other. And with a satellite, an American company could just do it. With satellites, the U.S. could build and operate its own equipment with pretty much complete autonomy, which the U.S. government preferred. Yeah. Why would prefer that, too? Yeah.

Have you ever been part of an HOA? You would prefer this, too? Yeah, I get that. And so, despite all of its promise, it wasn't a given that fiber optics would be the future for big, long distance telecommunications. But fiber did have one very big champion. AT&T was at the front of the fiber optics evolution. Mostly because they were the experts on long distance telecom cables. They've been laying subsea cables all over the planet for nearly

like 100 years. They had all the know how they had all of the equipment. They were deep on cables. And so, as satellites were kind of threatening cables, researchers at Bell Labs, which was a part of AT&T, they went hard on developing fiber optics. They teamed up with telecom companies in the UK and in France, and they formed this consortium, and then they came up with this plan. They said, "Hey, y'all, let's build a massive submarine fiber optic cable and run it from the

to cross a whole ocean. Super ambitious." There's a big difference between doing it on land and

“doing it at sea across almost 4,000 miles. And the idea that you would innovate with something”

that goes into the sea is not obvious. So, this was really untested. OK, so the researchers in scientists, they're going to make this leap that they want to prove. They need to prove that fiber optics cables are better than satellites. And so they start building

this cable that's kind of never been done before, like an undersea fiber optic cable. They've

done copper wires across the Atlantic, but never fiber optics. So, how are they going to go about doing that? I mean, basically, they just pulled out all the stops. In the early 1980s, they started doing all of these stress tests around the world. They dropped some simulation cables into the North Atlantic to see how things like temperature and pressure change affected signal transmission, to see if laying and recovering the cable caused any breaks in the fiber. Pretty fundamental stuff.

Yeah. They also built a thing that's called the ocean simulation facility, to see if deep sea conditions mess with the cable's ability to transmit light across all that distance. And that was at the Bell Labs Homedale Complex, which by the way is where they now film severates. Oh, cool. Yeah. And so things are going pretty well for Bell Labs. Until during one of their tests, they discovered breaks in the cable's electrical signal. And this was maybe something that could

derail the entire project. And that is where we get to the famous story that the Subsea cable industry gets there. They get very nervous when you mention the S word, and that is sharks. Oh, man. Yep. Sorry for coming. According to Jane, one of the lead researchers at Bell Labs had the shark teeth that had been pulled from the glitchy cable, like literal shark teeth from the

bars. That's amazing. I mean, can you imagine you've been running all these tests and

hidden and yawn over the planet to test this thing out. You've got simulations going to make sure that this first ever Subsea cable will be completely foolproof. And you've got to get it right. You test for temperature, pressure, tension. And here comes the job.

“Yeah. I mean, sharks weren't really the thing back then. If you remember, I could barely”

go into an actual pool in the backyard because of jaws. But we're sharks like a real problem. That seems like even if, I don't know, an occasional shark bit an occasional cable. Is this a real problem? I mean, in terms of finding actual teeth in the cable. Okay. I shrug. There are competing story shall we say around this. In terms of the faults in the cable, Jane says that those were probably abrasions from the sea floor. But with the stress and the high stakes and they don't want

to take any chances with this thing. The engineers and researchers start doing all of these kind of hilariously thorough tests to figure out how to shark prove this cable. For example, they go to aquariums in Connecticut and in Florida and they put these cables into the shark tanks

“and they dangled them like a toy right in the shark's faces. And really the only way”

that they could get the sharks to go anywhere near the cables is, you know, they wrapped it in fish.

So basically, like, oh, my dog needs to take a pill and I'm going to hide it in some cheese.

And there was just like there was no correlation. There was no pattern, no evidence that sharks are particularly attracted to the cables. I mean, what I love about this is that this is a scientific test that a third grader would devise. So it's so understandable. It's so great. I love it. And the good thing about all of these tests is that they made engineers add these extra layers of protection and insulation to the cable, which in 1986 they started to lay across the floor of the

Atlantic. I mean, in some places, they're dropping the cable to more than 26,000 feet down. AT&T actually ran this pretty cool TV ad that showed their crews at sea, unspooling the cable, and dropping it off the ships. But today we're no longer just a phone company or just a telephone

cable was such an incredible leap in global communications.

Supported by a worldwide intelligent network, there was some day make it possible for people anywhere at any time to be able to send or receive information. The cable ran from England and France across to a town called Tuckerton on the Jersey Shore, not too far from Atlantic City. By the way, there's even a plaque there now, and it marks the U.S.

“Terminal for the Transatlantic telephone fiber-optic submarine cable 8, aka Tat 8. Wait, why 8?”

Well, because there were already seven Transatlantic cables, but they were all copper-based. Okay, got it. So then in December 1988, they finally switched on this new first of its kind, state-of-the-art cable, and it worked. And AT&T decides to get Isaac Azimoff to launch the cable to kind of make the first call. So they have a video call between Paris, London, and New York, and Isaac Azimoff sends the first message and he talks about, you know, welcome everyone to this

maiden voyage on a beam of light. I mean, it's really beautiful opening statement.

I love it. I love that they always had this notion of the science fiction nature of their science.

You know what you mean? Like having someone like Azimoff like on the ready for these things, just added some grandeur to all this stuff. Yeah. Okay, so they lay it down, and they introduce it with all this pomp and circumstance, and you have Isaac Azimoff there with his mutton chops and everything. I mean, you know, but then in the end, did Teddy end up truly revolutionizing telecommunications? Oh, it absolutely did. I mean, first of all, it was a quantum leap

in capacity. Tat-8 could carry 40,000 phone calls at once. That's 10 times the capacity of its predecessor, which was a copper-based cable. And then there's the whole cable versus satellite debate. But when

“Tat-8 was switched on, the superiority of subsea fiber optics became very clear. How so?”

Well, satellites had this pernicious problem with latency, where the time it took for a signal to go up in the space and come back down and calls delays. Now, they were tiny, but they were enough to drive you absolutely nuts. And signal quality was only kind of so, so, but with Tat-8, things were immediately so much better. And Tat-8 proved that submarine fiber cables could actually be cheaper to make, to install, to fix, and data was way more secure, and fiber's bandwidth was way

higher. And also, Tat-8 was coming into use just as the World Wide Web was taking off. So, it was also perfectly positioned to fill the immediate demand for infrastructure that could move all this information all over the world quickly. So, Tat-8 showed the world of international

“telecom that a long-distance subsea fiber optics cable could really basically crush it. In fact,”

it worked so well that engineers at the time were positive that this would be the first and the last cable like this that they would ever have to install. When it was launched, there was this belief that this is going to be so much capacity. We're not going to need anything else ever. I swear,

I'll never ask for any more capacity. And it was full within 18 months, because, of course,

you know, just like when you build a highway, it increases traffic, you build a cable and it increases traffic. So, it's full to capacity within 18 months, which, you know, it's not a huge problem, because more cables come after it. So, once Tat-8 proved the concept of international submarine lines, the FCC invested more and more in fiber optics cables. And so, by the 1990s, the capacity of fiber optics overtook satellites, and it just kept growing from there. To the point that today,

we are completely reliant on this technology with hundreds and hundreds of those sprawling subsea cables that are emceeing the planet right now. I mean, it's, it's really amazing to think about it and to picture it. But I do want to go back to the satellites for a second, because they obviously didn't go away. So, if most of the global internet infrastructure is fiber optic cables, where do the satellites actually fit into that? So, today, satellites only carry a

teensy amount of global internet traffic, but they are still a huge part of our internet ecosystem. And this is especially true for remote low connectivity places that don't have their own fiber

disaster say, and in places like that, satellites are a lifeline for connection and for redundancy.

But when it comes to total data capacity, it's not even close. Today, fiber optics are the way of the world. Well, this brings up another question for me, because who owns all these subsea

“cables that were reliant on that crisscrossed the globe and circled and send all the traffic around?”

I mean, you know, that one tat eight was a consortium of US and AT&T in France and stuff like this. Are there still like cooperative international consortia to make everything else happen? Mostly no. There are still some cables that are built or owned like that, but most submarine cables today won't surprise you or in private hands. For example, a small handful of companies install most of the world's subsea cables. And when it comes to ownership, the usual suspects,

Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon together, they either own or they lease half of all the bandwidth across the world's subsea cables. And now, thanks to AI, we are in the middle of a subsea cable boom. All of these tech giants need wires that connect all those data centers around the world, and so they're investing more and more in subsea cables. So for example, there's a project underway right now to build what will be the world's single longest submarine cable connecting

five continents. Now, as for tat eight, even though it revolutionized global telecom and it played this huge role in the birth of the internet, tat eight won't be part of this AI explosion. What? What? We'll talk about that after the break.

“OK, Roman, we are back. We are back. And now I think it's time to have maybe a little”

retirement party for tat eight. Retirement, OK. Because for as much as tat eight, revolutionized telecommunication, the cable itself didn't actually work for all that long. It was switched on in 1988, and it stopped working in 2002. What? 14 years later, I know. Wow, OK. All right, p, tat eight. Yeah, it was just it was just sitting there. It's carcass. It's just been sitting there, dead. Yeah, it's just been sitting there chilling at the bottom of the Atlantic. And now,

almost 40 years after it was installed, tat eight is finally being pulled out. So why are they bothering

to pull it up now? Like 40 years later? Like, it's been there so long. Why not just leave it? Well, ordinarily, that's exactly what they do. They would just leave the cables down there. Yeah. They don't want to mess with the C-bed and recovery can be expensive and it's labor intensive. And there's sharks down there. They're sharks down there. But now there are so many cables running along the bottom of our oceans and seas. And as vast as those oceans and seas are,

there are actually limited ideal routes that we can run when you account for protected areas, military areas. So there's all this competition for C-bed use, which means that now to make room, they've got to start pulling up some of those old lines like tat eight. Also, the tat eight cable is made of all these pretty valuable components and those parts are getting stripped and recycled. That makes sense. That makes sense. So what does this process like? It sounds

incredibly hard. I am so glad you asked because this is probably my favorite part of this story.

“I mean, I think it is just so, so cool how they do this. Partly because even though our”

internet is based on this incredibly fast, efficient technology, it still takes so much labor and human hands to deal with this infrastructure from installing it to maintaining it and now recovering it. And I talked to Jane about this because she actually met some of the crew of a recovery ship. The ship itself can carry a crew of 14 people. There's a captain. There are the coilers. There are a standard ships engineer and they come from all around the world and they go out

to see for two to two and a half months at a time. So they basically go out. They collect a section of

and snacks. Maybe get some rest. And then they head back out to pick up where they left off.

“They use a set of coordinates to find and pick up the cable where they left off. They get out to”

where they generally think that the cable is based off this data. And then they take this flat grapple hook. They call it a flatfish, which is attached to a long, long rope. And they throw it into the water to around where they think they can snag the cable. There are some sections that are really deep. So like three miles. Three miles even just like a three mile long rope is actually quite difficult to imagine because you can't see it all. And they're trying to catch a cable that

is helping? The deep sea portion of tat eight at least is exactly the diameter of like a candle that you would stick in a candlestick on your table. And I know that because I keep my tat eight samples in an IKEA candlestick in my office. Oh, I was not picturing something with a candle. I was picturing like maybe like sort of a arm length diameter. Like if you put your arms in a circle,

“I thought that was the cable we're talking about. So how do they hook it? How do they get it on board?”

I don't even understand. So they throw the hook off the ship. And then they slowly drag the hook across the bottom of the sea until like a like you're fishing. They get a bite. They get a snag and then they start winching the cable into one of the ship's cable tanks. Where are these guys called coilers waiting to get to work? And at sea, it's part of their job to stand in the tank and grab the cable as it comes through the hatch. And they walk backwards

and slow circles to coil the cable. And this is all just so fascinating to me because they have to walk backwards in these slow circles, coiling the cable just right. And they do this for eight whole hours. Oh, my lord. Yeah, and because this could make you hell at Izzy, they have to take breaks. They have to break it up into half hour shifts. One of the coilers describes the shifts as 14 cigarettes long. So you walk backwards for 30 minutes. You climb up the

ladder, which is about 10 meters back to the deck. You have your two cigarettes and back down into the hold for another 30 minutes. That sounds rolling. Oh, it gets so much worse. They are out in the open ocean. Three meter swells. They're down in the hold of the ship, pulling in cable that could be 30 degrees Celsius down there. And you're being tossed around 30 degrees Celsius. That's pushing 90 degrees Fahrenheit. And they still have to pull in the cable, stack it just so. And in the mean

time, they're making sure that they're not sailing right into like a hurricane. Because that is the reality, especially in the mid to late summer in the Atlantic. And of course, in the colder

months you're dealing with sea ice. I mean, the ocean is the ocean. True words are never

spoken. The ocean is the ocean. Ocean going ocean rolling. Okay. So the parts they've recovered that they've pulled up from the ocean. What happens to it from there? Okay. So they can recover and bring back like 1,000 kilometers of tat eight cable at a time. Sometimes more. Oh, wow. And they take tat eight to a port. We're then it gets stripped apart and it gets recycled

“basically. The only thing they can't really reuse are those long blast fibers. But there's also”

copper in the cables. And that's really valuable right now because there's a global copper shortage. There's also steel in tat eight. And that gets pulled out and turned into fencing. And the plastic gets turned into consumer goods. So when next time you're washing your hair, you can imagine

that you could be squeezing your shampoo from part of what used to be the first fiber optic

transatlantic cable. It's true downcycling right there. Like a revolutionized communications is now a shampoo bottle. That is hilarious. It's ironic to me that the thing that made it, this technological leap, the glass fibers, are useless and all the stuff that's around it, is what is harvested and turned into. All that shockproof thing. Yeah, all that shockproofing is why it's valuable. And why it can now hold your shampoo. I can think of no noble or a fate.

We salute you, tat eight. Thank you for your service, tat eight.

“99% invisible was reported and produced this week by Christopher Johnson and edited by Kelly Prime,”

mixed by Martín Gonzalez, music by Swan Rail and George Langford.

Fact-checking by Graham Haitia. Jane Raphino's story about tat eight appears in the may-june

“issue of wired magazine. It's got lots of cool pictures from the recovery ship. Go check it out.”

Well, a link in the show notes. Special thanks this week to a story in Bill, the cable guy burns

and Jeff Hecht. Kathy Two is our executive producer, Kirk Kolstead is the digital director,

“Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of team includes Chris Baroube, Jason Delion,”

Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lei, Losh Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, talent and rain-stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Series XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sciences well as around discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of

the 99% at the 99% dot org.