[time-nuts] Help - Hope?

[John Ackermann N8UR]

Rob Seaman wrote:

> "A Thread Across the Ocean" by John Steele Gordon.  You might also  
> take a look at Neal Stephenson's excellent article in the December  
> 1996 Wired (http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ 
> ffglass_pr.html).  Wired did have a few - very few - good stories  
> over the years - for instance, liked the article comparing container  
> shipping to a packet switching network (might have been October  
> 1999).  And there was an excellent little exhibit on submarine cables  
> at the Smithsonian a half dozen years ago.

I can also recommend that book.  It's a pretty quick read and very well 
done.

If you're into deep tomes, "A Girdle Round the Earth" is a history of 
Cable & Wireless with a vast amount of detail.  From it I learned about 
the tremendous commercial tension between cable and radio services in 
the first decades of the 20th century -- fascinating stuff.  Got it at 
the Cable & Wireless museum in Porthcurno, Cornwall.

If you ever find yourself in England with a day or three to spare, a 
trip to Cornwall is well worth it for anyone interested in 
communications history.  Within a small radius are the C&W museum, the 
site of Marconi's first transatlantic transmitter, and the current 
Goonhilly Downs C&W satellite station.

The cable museum is a real treat.  It's in the tunnels dug during WW II 
to protect the spot, which was the UK termination of most of the cables 
(other than the ones to the US and Canada), from German attack.  Because 
it's underground, they're allowed to have a working spark transmitter. 
And Porthcurno is a lovely spot in its own right.

John