Clouth company premisesKabelwerke Land & See Kabel Cologne and Norddeutsche Seekabelwerke

Anglo-American Telegraph Co.

The English and Americans were the first in the Atlantic cable laying. Germany came to the idea with the creation of own colonies, Franz Clouth was already prepared

Land- und Seekabelwerke AG

founded by Franz Clouth

The cable division, which was legally separate from Clouth Gummiwerken, quickly expanded into an area of 20,000 square meters with 600 employees due to the production process. On May 11, 1898, it was outsourced to Land- und Seekabelwerke AG, which was specifically founded for this purpose. Franz Clouth was right at an early stage that the cable layouts in the context of state and continental development would be explosive and financially interesting. Why just for him? Cable laying nationally and internationally found urgent interest. Interestingly, the continents that come closer together due to cable laying. The British and the Americans were the first to enter the race because of colonial questions and the possibility of intercontinental communication. Partly because of cable breaks in the first passages with high financial damages. The fact that all the cables had to be well insulated, especially for years in salt water, was decisive for Clouth. These conditions could only be met by means of gutta-percha coats of the sea cables, and Franz Clouth knew perfectly well. While simpler conditions, as well as manageable conditions and risks in the production and laying of land cables were given, the sea cable laying, as in the attempts of the English and Americans at the latest by 1866 became clear, was put at risk. Legal advice can therefore only have contributed to the decision to make the land and sea cables legally independent. Risks could therefore be limited to this company.

In the year 1901, the main company was transformed into a limited liability company (Rheinische Gummiwarenfabrik Franz Clouth GmbH), and therefore had nothing to do with liability issues with sea cable production and cable laying. Owners remained Franz Clouth and son Max.
Land and Seekabel AG was already able to catch up with a spectacular order with the laying of the first sea cable from Emden to New York. This project, which was carried out within the framework of the German-Atlantic Telegraph Society, was put into operation on 1 September 1900. Another order was the laying of cables 1898 in St. Petersburg, which were only replaced in 2001. The installation of an underwater cable between Wangerooge and the lighthouse Rotersand and the wiring of the North Sea Canal can also be seen. The capital requirements of the maritime cable works were so large that the leading Cologne and Berlin banks (Bankhaus A. Levy & Co., Cologne, Dresdner Bank AG, Diskonto-Gesellschaft, Privatbanken Bankhaus S. Bleichröder and Born & Busse [2]) became a bank consortium Of 50 percent, which they transferred 1901 to the Cologne cable manufacturer Felten & Guilleaume. F & G took over from the Clouth family the remaining 50 percent in 1904, so that the land and sea cables no longer belonged to the Clouth family.
With the Podbielski cable ship, the Norddeutsche Seekabelwerke 1904 laid an almost 8,000 km-long communication cable from Borkum across the Azores to New York.

 

(Today NSW = Norddeutsche Seekabelwerke / subsidiary of General Cable Corporation(USA))

150 Year transatlantic cable

 

On the occasion of the anniversary, Facebook and Microsoft will put the first cable over the Atlantic, which will control neither the telecoms nor the carriers, but the two internet groups.In August 2016 the laying work for a new fiber optic cable across the Atlantic began. With a transmission capacity of 160 terabits per second, "Marea" is not only the most powerful cable between Europe and the US, it is also the first cable that is not controlled by telecoms or carriers, but by Internet groups. Marea is a joint venture between Facebook and Microsoft, the third one, the Spanish Telefonica, is only involved through its subsidiary Telxius, which is responsible for the transfer and operational management of "Marea"

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Four steam engines propelled the paddle wheels of the Great Eastern, the fifth the ship's screw. Together this resulted in the 8,000 hp. Six sail masts were added. On Friday. July 13th, the Great Eastern, then the largest shipping ship Valentia / Ireland, with 2,730 nautical miles of cables in the cargo bay, left the ship at 2,730 nautical miles. Fifteen days later, after cable laying of 1,852 miles on the ocean floor, she anchored in Newfoundland / Trinity Bay and brought the old one And the new world in terms of telegraphic communication.
This new connection is shifted - coincidentally or not - exactly 150 years after the first between the two continents, as the first transatlantic cable went into operation in 1866. While the laying of a sea cable is today a routine and is carried out by specialized ships, a converted passenger steamer was used in 1866. The "Great Eastern", built in Great Britain in 1854, was 211 meters long and was then one of the largest steamboats ever. This first functional cable ran along the shortest possible route between Newfoundland and the southern tip of Ireland.

Longer cable, accelerated transport

The new high-performance connection from Facebook and Microsoft from Virginia Beach to Bilbao is unusual, because it is the only one further south than all other cables between Europe and the USA. With 6,600 kilometers it is also significantly longer than all other connections, the copper cable laid in 1866 was only 3.400 km long. The theoretical signal propagation times are almost the same in copper and glass fibers, since the signals propagate approximately with light velocity, copper cables are far more susceptible to interference and have a higher attenuation. This results in higher error rates, which can be corrected by error correction protocols, but the transmission rate is naturally braked.

Fight the latencies

The inevitable attenuation of the signal is compensated by small amplifiers, which are located in distances of several tens of kilometers in the cable itself. These amplifiers are supplied with power via a thin copper tube, which simultaneously serves to physically protect the glass fiber bundles. The so-called neutral, ie the second pole, which is necessary for the current flow, forms the salt water. The copper tube is shielded from the penetration of water by several insulating layers and braided protective sheaths. The data stream is hardly braked by these optical amplifiers, which have an extremely low current requirement, measurable delays occur only during switching in the data centers. Even if the switches are based on the same optical transmission technology, there are latencies that add up with each of these redirects.
In the copper cable of 1866 were not yet amplifiers, because they were not yet invented. The signal propagation times were then not the problem, but the readability of the extremely weak signals. These first transmissions were as in the decades afterwards coded as morse characters. The overriding protocol for receipt acknowledgments or requests for repetition was not used. The protocol may well have resembled the Q-Code, which has been in use since 1909 in various variants in civil aviation, at sea, radio amateurs and military.Archaische Fehlerkorrekturen

Beginning with "Q", the code for the British navy, which has been created for the British navy, consists of three letters, which contain radio or geographic information, but also provides feedback on error correction and control commands. "QRV" as well as the identification of the own station means for example "I am ready to receive", without the own identification it is a question to the other station. "QQ" is the noise component, "QSL" is the acknowledgment of receipt, and so on. "QRO" is denoted according to the same pattern "I increase the transmit power" or is a prompt for "QSB".

"Point to Point"-Duplex, as usual

The metadata of the analog communication have been exchanged, so to speak, by the operators on both sides, so to speak. Due to the strong attenuation of the signal, the cable was extremely noisy and subjected to heavy fading. The transmission of a telegram in Morse code could take several hours, including "error correction". The exorbitant prices of $ 10 per word, exorbitant at that time, ensured that only large corporations and state institutions used transatlantic telegram services during the first decades. In digital data traffic, this task is done by machines, but technically and structurally it is still the same duplex method as today for the data exchange in the "point to point" traffic.

Strategy behind "Marea"

In the case of "Marea", these two points are Bilbao in Spain and Virginia Beach. In the same US state, Microsoft has been building one of its largest modular data centers since 2010, and the current investment volume in Boydton, VA is at least $ 850 million. Facebook is also represented in Virginia with a large data center on the east coast, in both cases they act as "slaves" of the data centers on the west coast of the USA, where both corporations have their headquarters. These centers are therefore connected to Bilbao in Spain via only two "hops", and the transmission protocols are under the control of the two Internet groups on the entire, almost 7,000-kilometer-long data route.
From Bilbao, London is only a "hop" away, from there, Microsoft currently handles most of its European data traffic. In Bilbao, the world-wide fiber-optic network of the Indian carrier Tata is also terminating. The point of view in Northern Spain also shows that Facebook and Microsoft are likely to set up large data centers in order to link Southern Europe and the growth regions in North Africa and the Middle East free from delays. Especially in the latter regions, where comparatively weakly dimensioned regional and local networks and correspondingly high latencies are the rule, is the condition to handle real-time services without dropouts or even timeouts. Leviathan und die Weltkommunikation

The "Great Eastern" was originally called "Leviathan" and was renamed after a Kesselexplosion with several deaths. Already there had been two dead in the run-up, the first owner and construction manager of the ship, who had been a bankruptcy day after a bankruptcy, and a sailor, when an anchor chain snapped. This was followed by a series of accidents and a further collapse because the cost of passenger traffic between the continents exceeded revenues. Only then was the Great Eastern converted to a cable car, which was to mark the beginning of the era of world networking.