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Show Telephone Co. Plans Laying Of Transatlantic Telephone Cable History was made last week when the Long Lines Department of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company announced plans to construct the first telephone tele-phone cable system across the Atlantic At-lantic Ocean. It will be by far the longest underseas cable in the world and the first laid at depths found in mid-ocean. The announcement stated that an agreement had been signed, for construction of the cable, by the A.T.&T. Company, the British Post Office, which organization provides telephone service in Great Britain, and the Canadian Overseas Over-seas Telecommunication Corporation, Corpora-tion, which furnishes overseas communications for Canada. It will be owned jointly by these three organizations. Simultaneous announcements an-nouncements were made by the appropriate agencies in Great Britain and Canada. Developmental and research work on such a cable has been going go-ing on for 25 years. The project will take three years to complete and will cost $35,000,000.' This cable will mean greater reliability in transatlantic telephone tele-phone conversations and greatly expanded facilities. It will provide physical telephone connection between be-tween the United States and the British Isles to supplement radio circuits now in use, and will have three times present circuit capacity. cap-acity. The submarine telephone cable system will contain a group of telephone tele-phone circuits between New York and London, and another group between Montreal and London. At the gateway cities the circuits will connect with the telephone systems of the respective countries. Spanning the Atlantic with a cable system capable of carrying telephone conversations will be the achievement of a goal visualized many years ago. Many technical and economic problems had to be solved before construction could be undertaken. Developments of the past few years in the art of telephony and the growing demand for overseas service have now made it technically and economically econom-ically feasible to proceed. The transatlantic portion of the system, with its many vacuum tube repeaters, will be 2,000 nautical miles in length and will be laid in depths up to three miles on the ocean floor between Scotland and Newfoundland. It will then connect with another submarine cable extending ex-tending 300 miles westward to Nova Scotia. From there, a 350 mile overland microwave radio-relay radio-relay system will be built to carry the transatlantic circuits to the United States border where connections con-nections will be made with the Bell System network. Development of the technical design de-sign for the deep sea section of the cable project has been under way in the Bell Telephone Laboratories Labor-atories for several years. Research by British telephone engineers has produced the design for the Newfoundland-Nova Scotia section of the submarine cable. As the result, the project will make use of the experience of both the Bell System and the British Post Office. The announcement also covered many of the technical problems faced by telephone engineers in providing a transatlantic telephone cable. For example, amplifiers had to be developed which could be laid successfully from a cable ship, and which would operate satisfactorily satisfac-torily without attention under the great pressures existing on the Atlantic floor. Such devices were developed several years ago and have undergone successful trial between be-tween Key West, Florida, and Havana, Ha-vana, Cuba, since 1950. There will be over 100 underwater repeaters on the transatlantic segment of the proposed system. The vacuum tubes used in these amplifiers have been under development for years and have withstood both laboratory and underwater tests of the severest kind. The voice currents cur-rents will travel along coaxial conductors con-ductors which will be insulated by a solid layer of polyethylene. Power Pow-er to operate the vacuum tubes on the ocean bed will be fed in from both ends of the cable along the, same coaxial conductor. The cable will be protected by a wrapping wrap-ping of copper foil, over which there will be a heavy cover of jute and steel wires. Bell System overseas service opened op-ened on January 7, 1927, with a single radiotelephone circuit connecting con-necting New York and London. During the first year, service rapidly rap-idly expanded between the two countries and nearly 2,500 calls were completed. Since then, the service demand to Great Britain has multiplied more than 30 times. Last year, for example, some 75,000 conversations were completed complet-ed to Great Britain. The Bell System Sys-tem now furnishes telephone service ser-vice to 102 foreign countries and annually handles about 1,000,000 overseas messages. |