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Show first Telephone Cable System To Span Atlantic Ocean En Kear Future; i Jew York, London Mill Beswe fearer j jjjstory was made when the i i Tnnj Lines Department of the j ! American Telephone and Tele- i i'V'raph Co. announced plans to f Listruct the first- telephone ! Lhp system across the Atlantic I Ocean- It will be by far the I longest underseas voice cable he world and the first laid at depths found in mid-ocean. The announcement stated that agreement had been signed, tnr construction of the cable, j the A. T. & T, Co., the S "British Post Office, which or- oaization provides telephone ser-J ser-J vice in Great Britain, and the i Canadian Overseas Telecommun-i Telecommun-i ication Corporation, which fur-' fur-' nishes overseas communications for Canada. It will 'be owned J j0intly by these three organiza-jj organiza-jj tions. 3 Simultaneous announcements j were made by the appropriate i agencies in Great Britain and ! (Developmental an(j researcrl 5 work on such a cable has been going on for 25 years. The project pro-ject will take three years to complete and will cost $35,000,- This cable will mean greater great-er reliability in transatlantic telephone conversations and greatly expanded facilities. It will provide physical telephone connection between the United States and the British Isles to supplement radio circuits now in use, and will have three times present circuit capacity. The submarine telephone cable cab-le system will contain a group of telephone circuits between New York and London, and another an-other 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 carry-ing telephone conversations will be the achievement of a goal visualized many years ago. Many technical and enconomic problems had to be solved before be-fore construction could be undertaken. un-dertaken. Developments of the past few years in the art of telephony and the growing demand de-mand for overseas service have now made it technically and economically feasible to proceed. pro-ceed. The transatlantic portion of the system, with its many vac uum 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 con-nect with another submarine cable extending 300 miles westward west-ward to Nova Scotia. From there, a 350 mile overland microwave mic-rowave radio-relay system will be built to carry the transatlantic transatlan-tic circuits to the United States border where connections will be made with the Bell System network. Development of the technical design for the deep sea section of the cable project has been underway in the Bell Telephone Laboratories for several years Research by British telephone engineers has produced the design de-sign for the Newfoundland -Nova Scotia section of the submarine sub-marine cable. As a result, the project will make use of the experience of both the Bell System Sys-tem and the British Post Office. The announcement also covered cov-ered many of the technical problems faced by telephone engineers en-gineers in providing a transatlantic transat-lantic telephone cable. For example, ex-ample, amplifiers had to be developed de-veloped which could be laid successfully from a cable ship, and which would operate satisfactorily satis-factorily without attention Under Un-der the great pressures existing on the Atlantic floor. Such devices de-vices were developed several years ago and have undergone successful trial between Key West, Florida, and Havana, Cuba, since 1950. There will be over 100 underwater repeaters on the transatlantic segment of the proposed system. The vacuum vac-uum tubes used in these amplifiers ampli-fiers have been under development develop-ment for years and have withstood with-stood both laboratory and underwater un-derwater operating tests of the severest kind. The voice currents cur-rents will travel along1 coaxial conductors which will be insulated insu-lated by a solid layer of polyethylene. polye-thylene. Power 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 of copper foil, over which there will be a heavy cover of jute and steel wires. Bell system overseas service opened on January 7, 1927, with a single radiotelephone circuit connecting New York to' London. Lon-don. During the first year, service ser-vice rapidly expanded between the two countries and nearly 2,500 calls were completed. Since then, the service demand to Great Britain has multiplied by more than 30 times. Last year, for example, some 75,-000 75,-000 conversations were complet ed to' Great Britain. The Bell System now furnishes telephone service to 102 foreign countries and annually handles about 1,-000,000 1,-000,000 messages. |