Copper Links in An Empire- Wide Chain

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 566, 19 January 1929, Page 17

Copper Links in An EmpireWide Chain

Undersea Cables That Cross and Recross the Pacific \ at Many Fathoms Depth .. . Famous for Their Re- \ liability, They Have Given New Zealand an \ Uninterrupted Service for More Than 25 Years. \

(Written -for, THE SUN by

MAX P. WHATMAN)

==S]XLY SO years old, the romance of submarine cable ■; IQ one of the most ===l tangible monuments to the progress of science during the last halfcentury. The faith and inventive genius of such men as Lord Kelvin and Mr. Cyrus Field have brought the service to a state of efficiency that is now taken so much for granted that its short but remarkable history is quite lost sight of.

The discovery of gutta-percha by an English surgeon in India made possible the insulation of conductors for use under sea as recently as 1542. and it is certain that the widespread use of submarine cables would have been postponed for many years had this substance remained unknown. The first real attempt to lay an undersea cable, following on this discovery, was made in 1850 when a line was laid across the English Channel. Being unprotected by any armour, it lasted but a day. The feasibility of the project was proved, however, and, in the following year, a cable protected by heavy iron wires was laid from Dover to Calais and communication was established between England and the Continent.

Britain’s splendid isolation being now a thing of the past, engineers turned their attention to the gigantic task of linking the old world with the new by laying a cable across the Atlantic. The financial difficulties were soon overcome, but technical problems were formidable and the first transatlantic cable, laid in 1858, after gasp-' ing for breath for a few short weeks, soon lay dumb for ever at the bottom of the sea. Seven years later, difficulties that formerly seemed insuperable having been dissipated, an efficient service was founded between America and Europe and the cable system was an accomplished fact. Of the cable of ISSB, Lord Kelvin wrote: “As much iron as would make a cube 20 feet wide was drawn into wire long enough to extend from the earth to the moon and encircle each globe several times. The wire was made into 126 lengths each of 2,500 miles and spun into IS strands of seven wires each. A single strand of seven

copper wires of the same length was three times coated with gutta-percha to an entire outer thickness of nearly half an inch and this was served outside with 240 tons of tarred yarn. It was laid over with the 18 strands of iron wire in long contiguous spirals and passed through a bath of melted pitch.”

Compare this short-lived line with the modern cable, which has an approximate life of 50 years. Although its construction is very similar to the cable of 70 years ago. the latest product is built from raw material specially constructed for the purpose and of the highest degree of efficiency. It weighs two tons to the mile, though the cable used in shallow water is more than twice as heavy, being heavily armoured to counteract the effect of wave and wind. Apart from necessary repairs to the shore end after the destruction of the Fanning Island station by the German’s in 1914. the cattle from Suva to Fanning, laid in 1902, has never developed a fault.

Cables, then, having been proved an efficient link between countries fardistant from one another, it occurred to Sir Sandford Fleming, Chief Engineer of the Canadian Government Railways, to suggest the laying of a cable to bind more closely the widely-sev-ered States of the British Empire in the Pacific.

Following the discussion of the project at Post and Telegraph and Colonial Conferences, a Pacific Cable Board was appointed in 1896: agreement was reached between the lour Governments concerned and the, Pacific Cable Act was passed in 1901. |

No time was lost in bringing the scheme into effect and the line was opened for traffic in 1902. It was recognised that no private company, even if subsidised, could find the capital for such a tremendous venture, and the control of the service was vested in the interested Governments in the following proportions: The Imperial Government, five-eighteenths; Canada, five-eighteenths; New Zealand, twoeighteenths; New South Wales, Vic-

toria and Queensland, six-eighteenths. The management of the cable was vested in a board consisting of two representatives from each of the interested countries except New Zealand, which was allowed only one. The Dominion’s present representative is Sir James Parr.

The cable runs from Vancouver to Australia and New Zealand via Fanning Island, Norfolk Island and Suva, and its total length is more than 11,000 miles.

In the first year of its existence the Pacific cables handled 228,354 words.

And Now To-day

The business of the cable made steady progress from the beginning, but it was not until the outbreak of

war that the full value of an enterprise which provided an alternative ‘•all-red’' route to the Pacific was recognised. The number of messages carried increased enormously, Government communications, Press messages and news of war casualties being mainly responsible. The enemy made attempts to isolate Great Britain from her possessions in the South, but, though raiders were successful in putting both the Pacific and the Eastern services out of commission at different times, there was always one slender in operation and the necessity for the duplicated Pacific routes was proved beyond all doubt. The value of the cable service being

realised, the amount ot business handled did not decrease at the close of hostilities and last year 9,200,000 words were handled by the board’s stations.

In Auckland 32 men and eight girls are on the board’s staff, exclusive of the officers and crew of the Iris. Mr. A. E. T. Langford, who has been five years in Auckland, is superintendent of the station. Mr. G. B. Winkfield is the board’s chief electrician for all its

services; Mr. W. G. Adams is clerk in charge, and the superintendents are Mr. A. Smith and Mr. S. H. Morris.

New Zealand is also served by the Eastern Extension Company, a private service with its headquarters in Wellington. This company will be absorbed In the Cables-Wireless Company when the merger takes effect in the Dominion.

Via Pacific

In keeping with a complacent tendency to take things for granted, possibly not one man in a hundred who uses the “All Red Route” knows what happens to his message after it has been poked at a post office clerk through, a metal grille. Let us trace the progress of a cablegram after the receiving clerk has pushed it Into a chute whence it is whisked up to the

operating-room of the Cable Board on the top floor of the Chief Post Office. No noise from the busy street below disturbs the operators who tap out long messages uninterrupted save by the busy ticking of their own instruments. The message is first transcribed on an automatic perforator. This instrument records the written word in morse symbols. It has a keyboard similar to that of a typewriter and the message appears on a paper tape, the dots being on one side, and the dashes on the other, of a regular line of perforations running up the middle of the tape. From the perforator the tape is drawn through

a transmitter which attains a speed of 250 letters a minute.

To obtain the maximum amount of service from tine cable, so that messages may be dispatched and received along the same conductor, an artificial cable is balanced against the actual line. An electrical equivalent of the 1,200 miles of cable between Auckland and Sydney is set up in a number of large wooden cabinets. All the electrical conditions of the real cable are imitated in a series of coils which correspond to the cable conductor. Cable work aims at pushing up the working speed of the system, and, though the receiving instruments eofild be made so sensitive that their speed could he greatly increased, the difficulty is to keep a perfect balance between the artificial and actual

cables. The more sensitive the receiving instruments, the more troublesome are varying conditions such as temperature and static disturbances which must be accounted for. Much of this difficulty is avoided by the use of selenium amplifiers, which increase the power of signals made feeble and attenuated by the tremendously retarding effect of over a thousand miles of cable. The amplifiers, of which Auckland has three, work by means of a mirror that vibrates under the influence of the incoming signals and reflects the light of a powerful electric bulb on to a selenium cell. Selenium is capable of magnifying the

vibrations from one to ten thousand times, the ratio used in practice being about 250. The signals, being amplified, are first seen in a form intelligible to the operators, though certainly not to a casual observer, by means of a Kelvin siphon recorder. This, the moist interesting instrument in the cable room, was invented by Lord Kelvin nearly 60 years ago. It transmits incoming messages, which are in the form of positive and negative currents corresponding to dots and dashes, on to a paper tape. The tape passes through the recorder and a tiny glass siphon, which has its source in an ink bath, writes away recording whole ranges of what look like miniature mountain peaks. Occasionally the siphon ceases its agitated movement and traces a straight line along the middle of the tape until Sydney, Norfolk Island or Suva sends a further message. The rows of tiny peaks are read into words and typed by a morse expert, over whose typewriter runs the slender tape. The form is handed over for delivery and the communication circle is thus completed. At one time a Creed printer was used which automatically transformed the curious symbols into typewritten words. This machine has been abandoned in Auck-

ENGLAND WINS ! —The news New Zealand eagerly awaited. The undulating line is as the message was received from Australia, and the perforated strip .is similar to that fed into the transmitter at Sydney.

land as it is economically efficient only in a station putting through messages continuously. Supplementary instruments abound and, until the veil of mystery is lifted by a simple explanation, one can only roam about the room, bewildered, yet realising that these apparently complicated machines represent the perfection of mechanical adjustment evolved in two or three decades from the comparatively crude means used in the first system of communication by cable. Additional improvements which will increase present efficiency to a considerable degree, are already accomplished facts, and not the least of these is the re-transmitter which will obviate the necessity of double handling of messages in junction stations. Errors, which have greatly decreased in number since the laying of the new loaded cables in 1926, are traced by an infallible system direct to the operator concerned. Little fault, however, can be found with the efficiency of the service, and the mistakes detected in the whole system now are only as many as those made in one station ten years ago.

H.M. Cable Ship Iris

Tasman for the Eastern Extension, but, prior to that, the ship had not put to sea for nine months. While in port the Iris is manned by a skeleton crew of 36 men who scrub and scour to keep their vessel as much like a yacht as her graceful lines would suggest. On board the ship is all the most modern equipment which enables the cable experts to work in depths up to 4,000 fathoms, the stretch of cable between Fanning Island and Bamfield being the longest stretch of cable in the world and laid in the deepest water. All the officers are cable experts as well as navigators and Commander W. H. Hughes, who has been 26 years on the iris, coming out to the Pacific with the vessel when it was first commissioned, describes the manner in which a fault is remedied as follows: “We work out the approxi-

So long anchored off Devonport that she has come to be regarded almost as a fixture and part of the waterfront scenery, H.M. Cable Ship Iris is nevertheless always prepared to leave at short notice for any part of the Pacific. The Iris, on which depends the efficiency of all the Pacific Cable Board’s lines and those of the Eastern Extension in the Pacific, was built specially for the board in 1902. She is of 2,253 tons and, when cruising, carries a crew of 86 men. So serviceable, however, are the cable lines that the Iris is rarely called on. About ten days ago she returned to Auckland after repairing a break in mid-

\ Shipmates for Ozer 25 Years \ On board the Iris are five shipmates who have completed more i than 25 years' service together. They are Chief Cable Joiner J. R. King, Paymaster R. Bannister, Chief Engineer J. D. S. Fleming. ; Cable Foreman J. Cookham and Commander H. F. Hughes. This - quintet has set a record for the Pacific services. s s

mate position of the break, and having arrived in the zone, drop a mark buoy to distinguish the place. The cable is then grappled for by dragging across its track. It is hauled on board and tests are made in either direction. “If it is a trans-Tasman cable we are repairing, for example, we test for Auckland and Sydney. The good end is buoyed and we work back along the cable until we strike another clear contact, the two good ends are joined and the line is dropped again.’’ The speed of the work depends largely on the weather, but in favourable circumstances the Iris has been able to repair breaks in 24 hours. In the ship's tanks are 200 miles of cable and all is in readiness for any conceivable emergency. Apart from the romance attached to her duties as a cable repair ship, the Iris has prohably figured in as many exciting episodes as any other ship in the Pacific. She was chased by the German raider Nurnberg shortly before the wrecking of the station at Fanning Island. Then, changing her r6le to that of hunter, the Iris pursued and captured Count Von Luckner when he escaped from Motuihi in the scow Moa.

Merger With Beam

In April, 1927, the Marconi Beam Service to Australia was inaugurated and it was suggested that the cable could not survive competition with the wireless undertaking. Consequently an Imperial Conference was

called to examine the situation and a merger between the cabie and wireless was suggested. The new CablesWireiess Merger Company is to take over the Pacific Cable Board’s debt of «£ 1,233,514 and assets, valued at £5,000,000. For thia it will pav £517,000 to the partner governments with the understanding that, in time of emergency, the governments may assume supreme control of all com munication systems merged in the new company. The effect that this move will have on the Pacific Cable Board in New Zealand can only be J surmised, as the board's employees have as yet received no hint of future 1 changes. The legislation necessary to approve the merger has, after some j opposition by the Labour Party, passed through the House of Commons I and is now being considered by the Lords. Beam not yet being established in New Zealand, it is fairly safe t"> imagine that the merger will have little effect on the present organisation and that apart from the probable loss of the board's status as a semiGovernment institution, there will be little to attract public attention to the fact that there has been a change!