In 1825 the American painter Samuel Morse was working in Washington when a message delivered on horseback informed him that his wife was ill. Morse rushed home to Connecticut, but by the time he got there she had died and been buried. From then on Morse dedicated his life to the advancement of long-distance communication. By 1836 he and two scientists had invented the electric telegraph system – and he had designed his eponymous alphabetized code. Realizing that telegraph wires would need to be laid underwater in order to connect continents, in 1842 Morse coated a cable with hemp and rubber, submerged it in New York Harbor, and succeeded in conveying a message in electromagnetic pulses from one end to the other.
But further development was slow. Despite the success of the prototype, the first commercial transatlantic telegraph line, lain in an arduous process in 1858, failed after only a month. Transmissions were sluggish, maxing out at 10 to 12 words per minute and there was continuous difficulty involved in installing and repairing undersea cable systems.
It took another century for the intercontinental telephone system to arrive in the mid-1950s, and fiber-optic cables that would enable an intercontinental computerized internet weren’t developed until the late 1980s.
To conceive of a time before international phone lines or the internet is to acknowledge the physicality of the system upon which it relies. Our daily screen-based experience is so estranged from the physical realities of information transfer that the image of a ship passing along a coastline unrolling a spool of the internet into the ocean seems totally surreal.
The West Africa Cable System [WACS], launched on May 2012, was the first to bring broadband internet to many parts of the African continent via a 14,000-kilometer undersea fiber-optic network. This was no small advance. If access to knowledge is power in the information age, then the connectivity afforded by submarine cables is a crucial part of shifting global power relations. Whether or not we realize it, the immaterial internet is still largely reliant on material infrastructure; a firewall is no less potent than a stone wall. That’s why contemporary geopolitics may be visualized best with a map of the myriad algae-coated cables snaking through the depths of the sea.
(ew)
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