undersea cable

Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things

by Alasdair Gilchrist  · 27 Jun 2016

the major cloud providers,Amazon, Microsoft and Google provide potentially millions of concurrent connections, and Google run their own fiber optic network, including their own under-sea cables. The cloud is a huge enabler for the Industrial Internet as it provides the infrastructure and performance that industry requires but is at the same

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and financial data. Financial institutions and banks have been analyzing this type of data at velocity, even going to the lengths of running a private submarine cable between exchanges in London and New York in order to shave a millisecond of the handling time of this valuable high-velocity Big Data. Data

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans

by David Abulafia  · 2 Oct 2019  · 1,993pp  · 478,072 words

454 , 839 , 880 , 891 , 892 , 896 , 897 ; docks 904 post-war recovery 897 Royal African Company 760 Royal Exchange 669 Royal Society 792 , 820 and under-sea cables 864 Sephardim 701 Spaniards in 455 Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue 700 , 838 Steelyard and the Hansard Kontor 447–8 , 453 tax exemptions 455 Viking raid

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth

by Guillaume Pitron  · 14 Jun 2023  · 271pp  · 79,355 words

into the intermediary levels of the net (data link, network, transport, etc) until it reaches the first physical layer of the internet — the application — comprising undersea cables. From sender to receiver, the notification uses the 4G antenna of a mobile operator or a cable modem, and runs the length of the building

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stretch further still the limits of the grid, our attention to red and blue, driverless cars, passive funds, and artificial intelligence. That invention was the undersea cable. CHAPTER NINE Twenty thousand tentacles under the sea NEITHER TECHNICAL LIMITATIONS NOR PHYSICAL BOUNDARIES TODAY seem able to impede our quest for virtuality. The production

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named ‘bowels of the net … the parallel with sewers is interesting: not terribly glamourous, barely visible, and yet indispensable’, explains a telecommunications professional.5 The undersea cables are made of fine metal encased in polyethylene (plastic), and these enclose the fibre-optic pairs — that is, glass-fibre strands — through which coded information

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of Tonga, isolated in the middle of the Pacific, who, in 2019, were plunged into a digital blackout after the archipelago’s one-and-only undersea cable was severed. The country was ‘cut off from the rest of the world’, recalls a specialist.11 For some, never had the expression ‘life hanging

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, or 30 times the Earth’s circumference, could potentially refloor the ocean bottoms.12 This backbone of the net thrives particularly in water. Laying an undersea cable may well cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but it is still 10 times less expensive than digging trenches on land. An atlas of information

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39,000 kilometres between Northern Europe and Australia. The network is growing, and it is unstoppable.13 While these lines were being written, dozens of undersea cables were in the process of being laid on the ocean floor. At this rate, there could be a thousand in operation by 2030. Hence this

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mayor. ‘I wonder if they’ll realise the holiday snaps they’re sending are travelling below their feet.’ Some weeks earlier, everyone in the European undersea cable industry, from engineers to sales reps, consultants to strategists, met at a huge conference centre in Islington in the centre of London.15 Courtesy of

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has taken hold of the architects of the net. The industry prefers to keep a low profile. ‘One of the best ways of protecting an undersea cable is to not talk about it’, says one of its engineers. But I learn that the sector is structured around the owners of the cables

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install and repair the infrastructure (Global Marine Systems Ltd, in particular). Of note: given their strategy of vertical integration, the FAANGs now have their own undersea cables — a serious disruption for telecom operators. This is the case for Facebook, which has formed its own team dedicated to its subsea foundations. And for

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.21 A year later, a dozen countries in West Africa saw their connection slow down for 10 days after the ACE (Africa Coast to Europe) undersea cable was damaged by a fishing trawler.22 According to research, the anchors of fishing boats, and cargo ships, are the number-one threat to internet

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traffic. ‘If cable ships weren’t spending their time repairing them, the world’s internet would be down in barely a few months’, warned an undersea cable specialist.30 The worst cable? Perhaps the one belonging to Orange — 30 metres deep and keeping close company with the Belgian city of Ostend. ‘We

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is a solution: to get in Ottawa’s good graces, Wilkie hires two members of the tribe.41 Once the plans were approved, the future undersea cable’s path had to be clear of the 82 old, abandoned cables; should these come loose from the ocean floor, they could take the Hibernia

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know this better than the architects of the web. But have they considered these impacts of its tentacles on the environment? The second life of undersea cables Curious operations are taking place this morning in November 2020 on quay number 2 of the Port of Leixões, north of Porto (Portugal). Moored three

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Greenpeace or a marine animal-rights group who wouldn’t understand that cables are not toxic, we wouldn’t see the end of it’, an undersea cable specialist told me in confidence. None of this rules out the question set to become all the more relevant as we colonise every crevice of

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and more of them’, agreed another expert. ‘So there’s no need for them to set themselves a limit.’58 The pollution caused directly by undersea cables is insignificant, but they are allowing the digital universe to expand, bringing with it more devices, data centres, and energy infrastructure. When Covid locked us

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to cool down the networks.59 ‘In ten years’ time, we’ll spend the next pandemic wearing virtual reality headsets!’ predicted a professional from the undersea cable industry.60 ‘Because consumers will want to, but mostly because technological advances in communication will mean they can.’ Yet back in 2015, Andrew Ellis, professor

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exceed the system’s capacity in eight years’ time — that is, in 2023.61 The term he used was ‘capacity crunch’. Echoing these statements, the undersea cable industry recognises that we are approaching what is known as the ‘Shannon Limit’, which is the maximum quantity of information that optical fibres can send

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have continental, if not global, consequences. This is the case for the Brazilian city of Fortaleza. ‘It is a single point of failure for all undersea cables from Brazil to the United States’, wrote an academic. ‘If Fortaleza were shut down, all data traffic that flows north and south would come to

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money to cross the 200 kilometres of Egypt landline as it does to lay the fibre from Singapore to France’, grumbled an expert from the undersea cable industry, probably exaggerating the numbers.3 But to route the Blue-Raman cable, as Google plans to do, through Israel — a state not recognised by

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) cable, operated by Vodafone, among others, will pass though Iran, again drawing the ire of Cairo. (See appendix 12.) Thus the redrawn world map of undersea cables exposes new geopolitics, whereby regions and states stand to gain from advantageous positioning: the Suez Canal, but also Great Britain, the Strait of Malacca, Djibouti

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cloud computing.23 China plans to invest $79 billion to install telephone and surveillance technology equipment, build smart cities, and, of course, lay an ambitious undersea cable network. Beijing is believed to have put into service — or is currently laying — fibre-optic networks in 76 countries, from its nearby neighbours to as

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per cent of fibre-optic cable installation costs: cable ships. Well into the 2000s, Huawei approached the UK company Global Marine — one of the biggest undersea cable installers in the world. Huawei pitched its ambitions in internet cable installation, and its expertise in fibre-optic systems. Global Marine had its eye on

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European asset is a decisive factor for not depending on a non-European cable ship that could impose its own law’, a director of an undersea cable company warned. Paris is nevertheless aware of what’s at stake. ‘Quite clearly, the company is being monitored’, a specialist told me. As for France

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the websites Quora, Ohloh, Wired & press report, 2020. APPENDIX 9 Cross-section of a fibre-optic cable Source : SciencePost APPENDIX 10 World map of undersea cables Source : Submarine Cable Map, 2022. APPENDIX 11 Route of the Hibernia Express cable Source : submarinenetworks.com APPENDIX 12 Route of future cables Europe-Persia Express Gateway (EPEG) and

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2020), which the Viettel group is connecting Vietnam, China, Japan, and Thailand (Asia Direct Cable, see ‘Asia Direct Cable Consortium to build new Asia Pacific submarine cable’, nec.com, 11 June 2020). 14 The cable went into service in February 2021. Read ‘The Dunant subsea cable, connecting the US and mainland Europe

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le monde? [‘The geopolitics of the internet. Who governs the world?’], Economica, 2013. ‘Submarine Cables and the Oceans: connecting the world’, International Cable Protection Committee, United Nations Environment Programme, World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), December 2009. 20 See ‘Undersea cables: indispensable, insecure’, Policy Exchange, 2017. 21 ‘Internet, un monde bien réel’ [‘The internet

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, a physical reality’], La Croix, 24 April 2018. 22 ‘A broken submarine cable knocked a country off the internet for two days’, The Verge, 8 April

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2018. 23 ‘Submarine cables and the oceans: connecting the world’, op. cit. 24 ‘Sécurité, pêche … Une enquête publique lancée sur le plus

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grand câble sous-marin du monde qui passe par la Côte d’Opale’ [‘Security, fishing … A public equity is opened on the world’s biggest undersea cable that crosses the Opal

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Coast’], France Info, 18 November 2019. 25 Interview with Antony Viera, general secretary of the Regional Committee of Marine Fisheries and Marine Farming (CRPMEM), Hauts-de-France, 2020. 26 ‘Submarine cables and the oceans: connecting the world’, op. cit

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. 27 Ibid. 28 ‘Vandals blamed for phone and Internet outage’, CNET, 10 April 2009. 29 ‘Vietnam’s submarine cable “lost” and “found’”, LIRNEasia, 2 June 2007. This is not an isolated event: in the article, the Vietnamese coastguard explains that it has already seized

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cables: billions of gigabytes under the sea’], Le Monde, 24 June 2018. 32 Of which fourteen are for New Zealand, and three for Australia. 33 ‘Undersea cables: indispensable, insecure’, Policy Exchange, 1 December 2017. 34 Kim Nguyen, The Hummingbird Project, 111 min, Belga Production/Item 7, 2018. 35 Before the Hibernia Express

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OpticalCloudInfra and consultant with Pioneer Consulting, 2020. 51 ‘L’Ifremer mesure l’impact des câbles sous-marins’ [‘Ifremer measures the impact of undersea cables’], Mer et Marine, 25 June 2019. 52 ‘Submarine cables and the oceans: Connecting the world’, op. cit. 53 Ibid. 54 Interview with Alwyn du Plessis, CEO of Mertech Marine, 2020

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. 64 Namely, FLAG (Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe), SEA-ME-WE 1, SEA-ME-WE 2, SEA-ME-WE 3, and AFRICA-1. See ‘Undersea cables: Indispensable, insecure’, op. cit. 65 James Cowie, ‘Syrian web outage no surprise’, Renesys Blog, 9 May 2013. 66 ‘Strangling the Internet’, op. cit. 67 Ibid

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In France, the city of Marseille in particular has become a global hub for landing fibre-optic cables. As for Brazil, read ‘EllaLink’s transatlantic submarine cable has already anchored in Portugal’, BNamericas, 6 January 2021. 5 Félix Blanc, Géopolitique des câbles: une vision sous-marine de l’Internet [‘The geopolitics of

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in 2018, Australia, fearing espionage, denied the Chinese company Huawei the possibility of landing a cable on its territory. Read ‘Australia supplants China to build undersea cable for Solomon Islands’, The Guardian, 13 June 2018. 8 Russian Optical Trans-Arctic Cable System. 9 ‘The Arctic: a new internet highway?’, Arctic Yearbook, 2014

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. 11 ‘Arctic subsea communication cables and the regional development of northern peripheries’, Arctic and North, no. 32, September 2018. 12 ‘Quintillion activates Arctic subsea cable’, Submarine Cable Networks, 13 December 2017. 13 ‘Charges: Ex-Quintillion CEO duped investors in Arctic broadband project’, Alaska Public Media, 12 April 2018. Elizabeth Pierce was arrested

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with Jean Devos, 2020. 41 Interview with Laurent Campagne, 2020. 42 Interview with Jean Devos, 2020. 43 Ibid. 44 Interview with Laurent Campagne, 2020. 45 ‘Undersea cables: Indispensable, insecure’, Policy Exchange, 1 December 2017. 46 Ibid. 47 ‘Comment la France écoute (aussi) le monde’ [‘How France (also) listens to the world’], L

Some Remarks

by Neal Stephenson  · 6 Aug 2012  · 335pp  · 107,779 words

, the Bronx is to Manhattan. Today this is all quite familiar, but in the 19th century, when the first feeble bits struggled down the first undersea cable joining the Old World to the New, it must have made people’s hair stand up on end in more than just the purely electrical

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barnyard, improvised quality until the Year of Our Lord 1858, when the terrifyingly high financial stakes and shockingly formidable technical challenges of the first transatlantic submarine cable brought certain long-simmering conflicts to a rolling boil, incarnated the old and new approaches in the persons of Dr. Wildman Whitehouse and Professor William

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less interesting. Those early cables were eventually made to work, albeit not without founding whole new fields of scientific inquiry and generating many lucrative patents. Undersea cables, and long-distance communications in general, became the highest of high tech, with many of the same connotations as rocket science or nuclear physics or

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gutta-percha (a natural gum also derived from a tree grown in Malaya) was used for submarine cables. Gutta-percha is humble-looking stuff, a nondescript brown crud that surrounds the inner core of old submarine cables to a thickness of perhaps 1 centimeter, but it was a wonder material back in those days

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, colorful, wildly diverse, essentially peaceful, and plagued only by the congestion of its own success. JARING’s link to the global Internet is over an undersea cable that connects it to the United States. This is typical of many Southeast Asian countries, which are far better connected to the US than they

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bit rate that is used for this purpose is 64 kbps. A circuit, then, in telephony jargon, amounts to a datastream of 64 kbps. Copper submarine cables of only a few decades ago could carry only a few dozen circuits—say, about 2,500 kbps total. The first generation of optical-fiber

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’t really grok the Internet. The undersized cables they are running reflect their myopic outlook.” So the bad news is that the capacity of modern undersea cables like FLAG isn’t very impressive by Internet standards, but the slightly better news is that such cables are much better than what we have

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a steel antishark jacket. As the shore is approached, various other layers of steel armoring wires are added. This more or less describes how all submarine cables are being made as of 1996. Only a few companies in the world know how to make cables like this: AT&T Submarine Systems International

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(AT&T-SSI) in the US, Alcatel in France, and KDD Submarine Cable Systems (KDD-SCS) in Japan, among others. AT&T-SSI and KDD-SCS frequently work together on large projects and are responsible for FLAG. Alcatel

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and routers were in place. Likewise, satellites have failed to match some of the latest leaps in fiber capacity and can no longer compete with submarine cables, at least until such time as low-flying constellations such as Iridium and Teledesic begin operating. Within the next few years, several huge third-generational

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? Opinions vary on this: pro-FLAG people argue that the Straits, with all of their ship traffic, are a relatively hazardous place to put a submarine cable and that a terrestrial crossing of the Malay Peninsula is a tactical masterstroke. FLAG skeptics will tell you that the terrestrial crossing is a necessity

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Egypt. THE ORIGIN OF FLAG Kessler Marketing Intelligence Corp. (KMI) is a Newport, Rhode Island, company that has developed a specialty in tracking the worldwide submarine cable system. This is not a trivial job, since there are at least 320 cable systems in operation around the world, with old ones being retired

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, for example, it wired large parts of the United Kingdom with a “cable television” system that is actually a generalized digital communication network. But transoceanic submarine cables were outside of its traditional realm. On the other hand, during the early ’90s, Nynex found itself stymied from competing in the United States because

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been put out to bid in 1993 and had turned into a competition between two consortia, one consisting of AT&T Submarine Systems and KDD Submarine Cable Systems, and the other formed around Alcatel and Fujitsu. The former group ended up landing the contract. So AT&T, which evidently felt threatened by

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up as they went along, and as often as not, they got it wrong. THOMSON AND WHITEHOUSE As of 1861, some 17,500 kilometers of submarine cable had been laid in various places around the world, of which only about 5,000 kilometers worked. The remaining 12,500 kilometers represented a loss

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and extremely powerful tool that happened to be perfectly suited to the problem of how to send electrical pulses down long submarine cables. Wildman Whitehouse predicted that sending bits down long undersea cables was going to be easy (the degradation of the signal would be proportional to the length of the cable) and William

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SUN. TECHNOLOGICAL WONDERS OF MODERN CABLE STATIONS. WHY UGANDANS COULD NOT PLACE TELEPHONE CALLS TO SEATTLE. TRAWLERS, TICKLER CHAINS, TEREDO WORMS, AND OTHER HAZARDS TO UNDERSEA CABLES. THE IMMENSE FINANCIAL STAKES INVOLVED—WHY CABLE OWNERS DO NOT CARE FOR THE COMPANY OF FISHERMEN, AND VICE VERSA. 35˚ 17.690' N, 139˚ 46

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Japanese international telecommunications network in 1964, was relegated to a laboratory for Niiro. The goal was to make KDD a player in the optical-fiber submarine cable manufacturing business. Such a move was not without controversy in the senior ranks of KDD, who had devoted themselves to a very different corporate mission

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and institutions. AT&T, in other words. Unlike the United States or France or Great Britain, Japan was never much of a player in the submarine cable business back in the prewar days, and so Ohta’s and Niiro’s notion of going into head-to-head competition against AT&T, its

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very best quality control. Cables and repeaters have to work for at least 25 years under some really unpleasant conditions. KDD Submarine Cable Systems (KDD-SCS) built its first optical fiber submarine cable system, TPC–3, in 1989 and will soon have more than 100,000 kilometers of cable in service worldwide. It designs

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some of its resources into one of those famous far-sighted long-range Japanese R&D programs, it paid off beautifully. In the field of submarine cable systems, the lowly assistant has taught the sumo champion a lesson and sent him reeling back—not quite out of the ring, but certainly enough

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and as a cringing sidekick to the even bigger and more sinister AT&T. Michio Kuroda is a KDD executive who negotiates deals relating to submarine cables. He tells of a friend of his, a KDD employee who went to the United States two decades ago to study at a university and

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afterward, AT&T decided to adopt an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” strategy toward FLAG, which eventually led to it and KDD Submarine Cable Systems getting the contract to build FLAG’s cable and repeaters. (AT&T-SSI is supplying 64 percent of the cable and 59 percent of

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FLAG managed to cut a deal with China Telecom to run a full-bore 10.6 Gbps spur straight into Shanghai. While China has other undersea cable connections, they are tiny compared with FLAG, which is now set to be the first big cable, as well as the first modern Internet connection

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compete with AT&T in the future. HAZARDS Dr. Wildman Whitehouse and his 5-foot-long induction coils were the first hazard to destroy a submarine cable but hardly the last. It sometimes seems as though every force of nature, every flaw in the human character, and every biological organism on the

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like a science fiction creature, a bivalve with a rasp-edged shell that it uses like a buzz saw to cut through wood—or through submarine cables. Cable companies learned the hard way, early on, that it likes to eat gutta-percha, and subsequent cables received a helical wrapping of copper tape

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. Most of the fishing-related damage is caused by trawlers, which tow big sacklike nets behind them. Trawlers seem designed for the purpose of damaging submarine cables. Various types of hardware are attached to the nets. In some cases, these are otter boards, which act something like rudders to push the net

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the case of a data haven. Somewhat to his own surprise and relief, he concluded that it simply wasn’t going to happen. “Cutting a submarine cable,” Barnes says, “is like starting a nuclear war. It’s easy to do, the results are devastating, and as soon as one country does it

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minute the cable is down. Upcoming advances in fiber bandwidth may push this figure, for some cables, past the million-dollar-a-minute mark. Clearly, submarine cable repair is a good business to be in. Cable repair ships are standing by in ports all over the world, on 24-hour call, waiting

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, one conductor at a time. Engineer Musalam watched attentively while I badgered him with nerdy questions.He brought me up to speed on the latest submarine cable gossip. During the previous month, in mid-June, SEA-ME-WE 2 had been cut twice between Djibouti and India. Two cable ships, Restorer and

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as SEA-ME-WE 1 and 2, which is also the same building that will be used by FLAG. In addition, there is a new submarine cable called Africa 1 that is going to completely encircle that continent, it being much easier to circumnavigate Africa with a cable-laying ship than to

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a great deal of his intellectual gifts on pursuits that, I thought at first, could hardly have been less relevant to his earlier work on undersea cables. But that was my problem, not his. I didn’t figure out what he was up to until very close to the ragged end of

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beach proclaiming “Telephone Cable” as a feeble effort to dissuade mariners from using the bay for anchor practice. It was here that the long-range submarine cable business, after any number of early-round knockdowns, finally dragged its bloody self up off the mat and really began to kick ass. By the

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never went to Falmouth—a major port some 50 kilometers from Porthcurno. Enough anchors had hooked cables, even by that point, that “major port” and “submarine cable station” were seen to be incompatible, so the landing site was moved to Porthcurno.That was just the beginning: the company (later called the Eastern

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later, after the Italian had worked the bugs out of the system, the government stepped in and arranged a merger between his company and the submarine cable companies to create a new, fully integrated communications monopoly called Cable & Wireless. 50˚ 2.602' N, 5˚ 39.054' W Museum of Submarine Telegraphy, Porthcurno

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other). The vibration in the glass siphon tube reduced the friction against the paper tape to the point where even the weak currents in a submarine cable could move it back and forth. Movement to one side of the tape represented a dot, to the other side a dash. We prevailed upon

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how thin it gets. Exactly the same trick is used to create the glass fibers that run down the center of FLAG and other modern submarine cables: an ingot of very pure glass is heated until it glows, and then it is stretched. The only difference is that these are solid fibers

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machines that assure a consistent result. Moving down the room, we saw a couple of large tabletops devoted to a complete, functioning reproduction of a submarine cable system as it might have looked in the 1930s. The only difference is that the thousands of miles of intervening cable are replaced with short

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. In this case the unit is only a few feet away, but in practice it would have been on the other end of a long submarine cable, say in the Azores. This regenerator/retransmitter unit sends its output to a twin siphon-tube recorder which draws both the incoming signal (say, from

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machine is not functioning correctly, it will be obvious from a glance at the tape. The regenerated signal goes down the table (or down another submarine cable) to a machine that records the message as a pattern of holes punched in tape. It also goes to a direct printer that hammers out

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in the use of the World Wide Web, generating enormous demand for bandwidth. That (in combination, of course, with other demands) creates a demand for submarine cables much longer and more ambitious than ever before, which gets investors excited—but the resulting project is so complex that the only way they can

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and make intelligent decisions is by using a computer with a graphical user interface. HACKING WIRES As you may have figured out by this point, submarine cables are an incredible pain in the ass to build, install, and operate. Hooking stuff up to the ends of them is easy by comparison. So

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at another frequency, and another, and another, to make a complicated waveform, and if that waveform could be transmitted to the other end of a submarine cable intact, then there was no reason in principle why the complex waveform known as the human voice couldn’t be transmitted in the same way

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on him, and he feels the need to just get away from his job for a few days and think about something—anything—other than submarine cables. The last time this feeling came over him, he made inquiries with a tourist bureau in Ireland that referred him to a quiet, out-of

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his room, and began ambling through the building. The first thing he saw was a display case containing samples of various types of 19th-century submarine cables. It turned out that the former owner of this mansion had been the captain of the Great Eastern, the first of the great deep-sea

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the time—so large that its utter uselessness had made it a laughingstock, the Spruce Goose of its day. The second generation of long-range submarine cables, designed to Lord Kelvin’s specifications after the debacle of 1857, were thick and heavy. Splicing segments together in mid-ocean had turned out to

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driven by power from the ship’s main engines, the ultimate capacity of Monarch’s cable engines is 30 tons. The art of laying a submarine cable is the art of using all the special features of such a ship: the linear engines, the maneuvering thrusters, and the differential GPS equipment, to

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the slack control problem. That, in combination with the company’s fleet of cable-laying ships and its human capital, makes it dominant in the submarine cable-laying world. By “human capital” I mean their ability to dispatch weather-beaten operatives such as the Lan Tao Island crowd to difficult places like

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still know how to get things done everywhere. It is not difficult to work out how all of this has informed the development of the submarine cable industry. AT&T makes really, really good cables; it has the pure technology nailed, though if it doesn’t stay on its toes, it’ll

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is the ongoing domination of the cable-laying industry by the British, and his monument is concealed beneath the waves: the ever growing web of submarine cables joining continents together. Bell founded the telephone industry. His legacy was the Bell System, and his monument was strung up on poles for all to

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

by Simon Winchester  · 27 Oct 2009  · 522pp  · 150,592 words

the well-fed Justice—I could describe how the sea eventually became a sea of laws and commerce, and how tramp steamers and liners and submarine cables and jet aircraft then crossed and recrossed it in an infinite patchwork designed for the attainment of profit and comfort. In the Sixth Age, that

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North America to Europe: it was a mere 1,600 miles from the harbor opening at St. John’s to the cliffs of Connemara. An undersea cable—for such had already been invented in Europe: a telegraph cable had been laid between Britain and France in August 1850, and soon afterward others

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, J. M. W., 197–98 Tuvalu Islands, 412n Typhoon (book), 205 Typhoons, 423n U-boats, German, 261–66, 268–70 Uluburun archaeology site, 64–65 Undersea cables. See Cables, undersea Undersea oil exploration, 403–4 Undertow (painting), 198–99 Union Castle passenger liners, 186 United Nations, 176, 372n United States air transport

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

by Simon Winchester  · 1 Jan 2003  · 582pp  · 136,780 words

condition, which an event like Krakatoa did much to unsettle. The communications technology of the time, for example – the advances of telegraphy, the building of undersea cables, the flourishing of news agencies – ensured that the world's more advanced peoples learned about the eruption within moments of its happening. But at the

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of the day, ‘so gutta-percha, the very substance it demanded, was discovered.’) By 1865 the India Rubber, Gutta Percha & Telegraph Works Company was producing submarine cables as fast as the world was able to connect itself, and they were happily transmitting The converted warship Agamemnon laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable

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Clementine moored in Folkestone Harbour and connected to a boat two miles away, with a message successfully sent between the two. Since that time the undersea cable had become fixed in the public consciousness. Alfred, Lord Tennyson had written a hymn to the romance of the idea of coded voices hurrying along

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. Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime, And a new Word runs between: whispering, ‘Let us be one!’ The undersea cable connecting Singapore with London, after passing first by land in those days to Penang, crossed the Bay of Bengal to Madras, hopscotched across India and

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) Gilbert, J. S., and Sparks, R. S. J., The Physics of Explosive Volcanic Eruptions (London, Geological Society of London, 1998) Haigh, K. R., Cableships and Submarine Cables (London, Adlard Coles, 1968) Hall, R., and Blundell, D. J. (eds.), Tectonic Evolution of Southeast Asia (London, Geological Society of London, 1996) Hamilton, Warren, Tectonics

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–39, 240 the effects 241–61 the experiences 261–321 death statistics 5, 313 telegraphy 5, 7, 28n, 146, 167,184–7, 192–4, 215 undersea cables 5, 6, 184, 187, 189 lack of geological knowledge at the time 5–6 religious fears 6 and birth of global village 6–7 impact

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power

by Jacob Helberg  · 11 Oct 2021  · 521pp  · 118,183 words

Road project.”32 All of these efforts amount to a bewildering mix of corporate deal-making and state-sponsored extortion. They traverse a tangle of undersea cables, next-generation wireless networks, and global supply chains. But broadly speaking, we can break China’s back-end strategy for dominating the Internet into four

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to a country’s Internet system. “People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not,” says Jayne Stowell, who negotiates Google’s submarine cables. “It’s in the ocean.”65 Roughly a century and a half after that first copper connection under the English Channel, there are around 400

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of the world’s communications.68 And China is well on its way to controlling many of them. * * * The British company that laid that first undersea cable in 1850 still exists. In 2008, its successor entity, Global Marine, formed a joint venture with a company that will sound very familiar—a subsidiary

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connect the United States and northern Europe.III It’s part of the nearly $40 billion that Facebook and Google invested in network infrastructure like undersea cables in 2018 alone.70 But as China’s wealth and influence have grown, Chinese companies have joined the undersea game. Over the past decade, Huawei

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) to block a Huawei cable between Sydney and the Solomon Islands and (unsuccessfully) to stymie another deal between Huawei and Papua New Guinea. “Given that undersea cables carry the bulk of the world’s telecommunications data,” says William Evanina, the former director of the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center, “safeguarding

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of a sweeping new national security law on Hong Kong, the Department of Justice urged the Federal Communications Commission to scuttle an 8,000-mile undersea cable between Hong Kong and the United States—a joint project between Facebook, Google, and Pacific Light, the Hong Kong subsidiary of a Chinese conglomerate. One

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, it’s redirected to the landing station at Redondo Beach, on the Pacific coast, where it might enter a number of trans-Pacific cables. As undersea cables make landfall, they link up with so-called terrestrial cables in the ground. Our email can travel via underground fiber-optic cables or along the

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vacuum of the cosmos, China’s back-end dominance quietly grows. Having zipped across the United States via underground fiber-optic cables, your email reenters undersea cables on the Pacific coast. Most likely, it travels along the Unity/EAC-Pacific cable, built in 2010 by Telstra, Google, Singtel, and Time dotCom. It

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Secure 5G.145 A few months later, the State Department launched a Clean Network program to encourage friendly governments to protect back-end infrastructure like undersea cables and cell carriers.146 The 2021 National Defense Authorization Act included new restrictions on the sourcing of critical defense technologies from China,147 as policymakers

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to Ireland, Denmark, and Norway. It is, for my money, the best Irish-Jersey collaboration since Bruce Springsteen. IV. While China has sought to control undersea cables, Russia has appeared more interested in sabotaging them. In recent years, Russian submarines have stepped up their activity near cable routes. V. It should be

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any votes.)86 Any one of these moves could upend an election. And because this manipulation would take place on the back-end—through an undersea cable or with an implant stealthily inserted into a voting machine—it might prove far harder to identify than any fake news on the front-end

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government. Nor are many of the nation’s hospitals, utility companies, and banks. Virtually all of these systems are connected to back-end infrastructure—like undersea cables—owned and operated by the private sector, not the federal government. Yet an attack on any one of them could be incredibly destructive to the

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-over-chinese-mobile-giant-xiaomi-recording-millions-of-peoples-private-web-and-phone-use/?sh=707cb72d1b2a. 60 “South America-1 (Sam-1),” Submarine Cable Map, March 2001, https://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/south-america-1-sam-1. 61 Andrew Blum, Tubes, e-book, 116, 125. 62 “Internet Exchange Points,” Data Center Map, https

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, March 10, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/10/technology/internet-cables-oceans.html. 66 “Submarine Cable 101,” TeleGeography, https://www2.telegeography.com/submarine-cable-faqs-frequently-asked-questions. 67 “Submarine Cable Map,” Submarine Cable Map, https://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/seamewe-3. 68 Jeremy Page, Kate O’Keeffe, and Rob Taylor, “America’s Undersea Battle With

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,” Military Cyber Affairs, 2018, https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/mca/vol3/iss1/7/. 75 Winston Qiu, “Global Marine Group Fully Divests Stake in Huawei Marine Networks,” Submarine Cable Networks, June 6, 2020, https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/vendors/huawei-marine/global-marine-completes-sale-of-30-stake-in-huawei-marine-networks-for-85

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://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-detailed-public-map-us-internet-infrastructure-180956701/. 79 Winston Qiu, “China-Myanmar International (CMI) Terrestrial Cable Launches for Service,” Submarine Cable Networks, November 15, 2014, https://www.submarinenetworks.com/news/china-myanmar-international-cmi-terrestrial-cable-launches-for-service. 80 “Terrestrial Cable Resource,” China Mobile International

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

by Jon Gertner  · 15 Mar 2012  · 550pp  · 154,725 words

tall, thoughtful, experimental physicist named Oliver Buckley who had spent much of his career at the Labs trying to address the special problems that affected “submarine” cable—that is, cable that went under water, connecting islands to the mainland, and was susceptible to a range of stresses that didn’t affect ordinary

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. For burying wire, the men in Chester had to develop new processes involving special tractors they invented and splicing techniques. Other Labs engineers focused on undersea cables, which required not only special materials and techniques but special ships, outfitted with enormous spools of cable in their massive holds, that could lay the

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needed to help design impermeable underwater cables, for example, one possibility was gutta-percha. But gutta-percha had drawbacks, including its extreme expense. For an undersea cable to Catalina Island, off the coast of California, the Labs’ chemists began looking for an alternative. Natural rubber was considered too soft in its pure

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—that is, to “vulcanize” it—the men had to address the problem that sulfur corrodes copper and would undoubtedly degrade the vital wires within the undersea cable. Only after the chemists determined that they could purify the rubber in a complex manner and then create fine silica flour as an insulator could

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dashes back and forth between Canada and Ireland. And in the decades after, engineers figured ingenious ways to increase the speed and capacity of other submarine cables. By the early 1900s, overseas telegraph communications had become a lucrative business. Human voices were different than telegraph signals. Carried by copper wire, the telephone

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1950s there were sixteen radio channels operating between the continents. These were relatively cheap to operate (and certainly less expensive than a 2,200-mile undersea cable, which was projected to cost about $42 million, or roughly $340 million in today’s dollars). But overseas radio had one ineradicable fault: Weather and

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was, this was not acceptable. At the same time, he noted, there was an obvious and unique answer: Figure out a way to make an undersea cable with repeaters spaced every forty miles or so, and then figure out a way to make it work for twenty years without leaks or interruption

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the time Kelly began planning an undersea cable with British phone engineers in 1953, a small library already existed about what would and would not work. In the years following World War II, the Labs had tested various designs for undersea repeaters on shorter routes—notably a submarine cable that successfully connected Key West

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put it in July 1961, to install “the great cable in space.” Satellites offered an alternative to the increasingly burdened underseas cables; more important, they could carry live television, which the current underseas cables could not. Within a decade, some economists predicted, orbiting relays could be a billion-dollar-a-year business.31 “We

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reliability, that might befall AT&T’s plans for a large-scale relay business. The complexity of the project was easily on par with the undersea cable, but the time frame for development was much faster, making the task even more difficult. Nothing in the satellite could be allowed to fail, moreover

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, for as hard as it was to repair an undersea cable, it would be impossible, in a world that had yet to send a man into space, to fix a satellite. O’Neill, the project manager

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” of work to create and used tens of thousands of transistors. Its complexity dwarfed that of other previous Bell Labs undertakings such as the transatlantic undersea cable. ESS, as Fred Kappel, the chairman of AT&T, pointed out at its opening in Succasunna, “was the largest single research and development project in

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that goal been achieved? There were now cables and microwave links and electronic switching stations that connected all Americans; there were likewise satellite links and undersea cables that connected the country to the rest of the world. At Bell Labs, Bill Baker, though loath to concede that a mature industry like his

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in how much information could be sent over fiber optic cables, which were beginning to connect not only regions of the country but also, through undersea cables, the continents. Many of the innovations that emerged from the Labs during this period would never become familiar to Americans in the way that communications

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paid by phone subscribers, which effectively allowed the organization to function much like a national laboratory. Bell Labs managers knew they could support projects—the undersea cable, for example, or cellular telephony—that might require decades of work. The funding stream also assured the managers that they could consistently support educational programs

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, 1958. The memo suggested that a satellite system “at best … would probably yield barely acceptable transmission performance as contrasted with the excellent performance obtainable with submarine cable. … The satellite system would be a major undertaking. With so many uncertainties in the picture no accurate estimate of research and development cost can be

The Cable

by Gillian Cookson  · 19 Sep 2012  · 136pp  · 42,864 words

later, John Brett discovered that Wheatstone himself had also in 1845 been developing a scheme for a Channel telegraph. Yet Brett continued to insist that submarine cables were ‘purely an invention of our own’ and that ‘no man’s labours or suggestions were borrowed’. In the United States, Professor Samuel Finley Breeze

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started out as an artist, was professor of Natural Science at Yale and a pioneer of land telegraphs in the United States. His experiments on submarine cables were well recorded, so his claim that he was thinking about a transatlantic cable early in the 1840s is convincing. Morse left an account of

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by 1850 was superintendent of the Nova Scotia government telegraph lines, then the only wires in the province. Gisborne put forward a plan for a submarine cable between Newfoundland and the North American mainland at Halifax. His employers gave him leave to find support for this idea in St John’s. To

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with exclusive landing rights on the island for fifty years. Experience had already shown Brett that such contracts were essential to raise sufficient money for submarine cables, which had exceptionally high capital costs. Without the promise of a monopoly and high returns, investors were not willing to back such a risky project

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be self-sufficient. England was the only possible source of submarine cables. British dominance in this area was partly a result of their monopoly on the insulating material, gutta percha. More importantly, much of the expertise accumulated during the short life of undersea cables was concentrated in Britain. Cyrus Field therefore set out again

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, both he and Bright in 1855 were ‘full of the ardor of science’ and zeal inspired by ‘the prospect of so great a triumph’. The submarine cable from Newfoundland to Cape Breton was to be laid from Port aux Basques by the barque Sarah L. Bryant, supervised by a British engineer, Samuel

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afterwards when inland telegraphs proved invaluable in deploying troops and police against the Chartist threat. The Bretts found fame as promoters of the first international submarine cable, laid between Dover and Cap Gris Nez near Calais, late in August 1850. They had obtained a ten-year concession, or monopoly, on the route

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, and from Orford Ness in Suffolk to the Netherlands. The longest of these was 100 miles, the deepest 160 fathoms. The success of these early submarine cables disguised some of their inherent flaws. On a short or shallow line, faults did not necessarily stop the telegraph from working. In the depths of

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as an insulator to submarine cables, it needed to be stored in water to retain its remarkable properties. Its supremacy lasted for a century, until the advent of polyethylene-based synthetics, handing Britain, which had a monopoly on gutta percha, a long-lasting stranglehold on the production of undersea cables. While the material itself

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turned out to be much more than a matter of waterproofing. Even when the quality of the cable was excellent, and the insulation perfectly sound, undersea cables simply did not function as expected. Messages would not pass down the line at anything like an acceptable speed without breaking down into a chaotic

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viability. The electrician Willoughby Smith lamented many years later that the phenomenon of electrical induction had not been understood sooner. Looking back at the earliest undersea cables, Smith could see that the blame for their poor performance fell upon failures in scientific understanding as well as inadequate testing and quality control. Faraday

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the Channel line of 1851, and then in the cables, 100 miles in length, connecting Orford Ness with Holland in 1853. Faraday realised that a submarine cable, made from a central copper conductor surrounded by an insulating envelope of gutta percha, armoured on the outside with iron wire rope, formed an electrical

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interior surface of the insulating sheath as a charge, and so prevents it from moving freely onward on its journey as it otherwise would. The submarine cable is virtually a lengthened out Leyden jar … a bottle for the electricity, rather than a simple channel or pipe open freely at both ends. While

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doubts persisted, submarine cables received a great boost from a national emergency, the Crimean War, which supplied the impetus and the funding for an ambitious scheme. The Crimea has

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. When coated with three layers of gutta percha, the diameter became about three-eighths of an inch, rather larger than previous submarine cables. By the time the Atlantic crossing was planned, submarine cable manufacture had become much better organised and regulated, in the hope of avoiding some of the calamities of the early projects

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, would be linked. This trial would mimic the transatlantic cable as closely as possible, not only in length, but also because subterranean lines closely resembled submarine cables in their electrical properties. These underground cables were already in commercial use, so that Morse and his ‘active and agreeable collaborators’ had to conduct their

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scientific expedition, they were sure England was going to profit by it to our injury. So now there were those who felt that in this submarine cable England was literally crawling under the sea to get some advantage of the United States. But any idea of taking the line directly to the

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armour the whole cable, the 2,200 miles of line, to be completed by the end of June 1857, were split between the two leading submarine cable-makers, R.S. Newall of Birkenhead, and Kuper & Co. of Greenwich, which became Glass, Elliot & Co. during the course of the contract. These companies, both

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occasionally arisen between the mother country and her descendants’. Memories were fresh of the bloody and damaging Crimean War, for which Newall had made the submarine cable. Many were conscious that better transatlantic communications at that time might have brought the United States to the aid of Britain and France. As it

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and ambition for further efforts. But, readers were reminded, the maximum length of any section on that last line was a mere 300 miles. Long submarine cables were still seen as a very bad risk. In spite of all these grand plans, three years after the Atlantic failure there was little real

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hope for from government was guarantees to their shareholders, and these were conditional on the line being successfully laid. It was still thought that long submarine cables may not prove profitable, so that dividends needed to be assured. But a guarantee on those terms did nothing to address the main problem, that

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of Trade and the Atlantic Telegraph Co. Galton’s deliberations were seen as ‘the most valuable collection of facts, warnings, and evidence ever compiled concerning submarine cables’. Galton himself believed that if cables were reliable, government money would not be needed in any form, for private investors would take up the job

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lines. His committee met between December 1859 and September 1860, and in 1861 published a report with recommendations on the making, laying and working of undersea cables. During the course of his enquiry, Galton interviewed most of the leading submarine telegraph engineers of the time. He collected evidence about the abortive attempts

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gutta percha to be a generally better insulator than any other compound or mixture. The young engineer could also suggest ways of avoiding faults in submarine cables by improvements in manufacture and laying, and how to mend them when they arose. The versatile Jenkin had also been investigating Thomson’s theory, the

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success. This also satisfied one of Galton’s complaints about the arrangements in 1857. And who better to shoulder a substantial part of the burden? Submarine cable companies possessed the technical insight to understand just how far risks had decreased, and how lucrative the telegraph company shares might turn out to be

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in the field. The Gutta Percha Co. had in the previous decade made over 9,000 miles of insulated wire for the inner cores of submarine cables. Glass & Elliot, their main customer, had made and laid more than 6,500 miles of underwater cable. The merger produced a completely integrated cable-making

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himself, like Cyrus Field, had flirted with personal ruin by gambling almost everything on the Atlantic cable. He went on to found a string of submarine cable companies until he, Gooch and other associates controlled telegraphs stretching from Britain across the Far East and Australasia. Porthcurno, an isolated sandy cove in the

Your Computer Is on Fire

by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip  · 9 Mar 2021  · 661pp  · 156,009 words

subject matter and case studies, ranging from human-in-the-loop content moderation to Bitcoin mining, from mobile banking platforms to game design, and from undersea cable networks to keyboard interfaces, among many other examples. At the same time, the volume does not aspire to be a “conspectus” on computing and new

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, and capacity of the internet than the organizations that prop it up. Not the users. Not the visionary network designers. Other networked organizations—from the undersea cable owners to service providers to big data brokers to data aggregators—have gained the most. While surely not all organizations intend to exploit people, it

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the world’s telecommunications system commands the world,” argues historical geographer Peter Hugill.6 He traces the ways in which the power of British colonial submarine cable networks was eclipsed by post–World War II American communications satellites. He observed in 1999: “Just as American radio communications challenged the British cable ‘monopoly

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the 1990s, observing that, in Eick and his collaborator’s maps, “the lines of Internet traffic look more like beacons in the night than, say, undersea cables, satellite relays, or fiber-optic cables.” Harpold argued that although genuinely innovative in their techniques of handling large data sets, these late-twentieth-century internet

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such terrible images with which to begin a conversation about the operation of the internet? Tubes summon up an image not far from the actual undersea cables that really do undergird nearly speed-of-light communication. Although Stevens’s tubes seemed drawn from an industrial-era playbook, fiber optics, which enabled speed

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surveillance, which spurred many nations to start ocean-spanning cable projects, hoping to circumvent US networks. Undersea cable technology is not new; in the mid-nineteenth century, a global telegraph network depended on them. In the 1850s, undersea cables were made of copper, iron, and gutta-percha (a Malaysian tree latex introduced to the

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coaxial cables with vacuum tube amplifier repeaters. By the late twentieth century, they were fiber optics. By 2015, 99 percent of international data traveled over undersea cables, moving information eight times faster than satellite transmission.19 Communication infrastructure has looked rather like tubes for a century and a half. Infrastructural narratives had

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allegations that Rousseff was embarking on a socialist plan to “balkanize” the internet. Al Jazeera reported that Brazil was in the process of laying more undersea cable than any other country, and encouraging the domestic production of all network equipment, to preclude the hardware “backdoors” that the NSA was reported to be

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Chicago Press, 1990), 129. 21. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 22. “A giant undersea cable makes the Internet a split second faster,” CNN Money (February 30, 2012). On remediated metaphors in the digital world, see Jay David Bolter and Richard

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or more. All data from consulting firm Terabit, reported by Economic Times (April 2012), http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-04-15/news/31342442_1_undersea-cable-submarine-cables-fibre. 30. J. P. Singh, Leapfrogging Development? The Political Economy of Telecommunications Restructuring (Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 1999). 31. Bill Woodcock, “Brazil

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of” the internet. With rising demand for ever higher bandwidth, the internet has increasingly become a physical infrastructure project in its own right, requiring dedicated undersea cables, fiber-optic landlines, and server farms to handle exponentially increasing traffic—but telephone, TV cable, and cellular telephony, all originally installed as part of other

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work in large parts of the world that their collapse would represent a catastrophe. Further, these firms have invested substantially in physical systems, such as undersea cables surrounding the African continent.22 As Nathan Ensmenger shows in this volume, “the cloud” is really a factory: not just virtual but also physical and

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Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook,” New Media & Society 10 (2016). 22. Yomi Kazeem, “Google and Facebook Are Circling Africa with Huge Undersea Cables to Get Millions Online,” Quartz Africa (July 1, 2019), https://qz.com/africa/1656262/google-facebook-building-undersea-internet-cable-for-africa/. 23. Gary Cook

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early computing leader, 138 empire, 381 industrial technology, 221, 327 Ministry of Technology, 150 NGO (nongovernmental organization) networks, 324 Shirley, Stephanie “Steve,” 143–147, 146f Submarine cable networks, 93 United Kingdom (cont.) women programmers, 2, 139–147, 151–153, 162, 367, 383 women programmers and empire, 147–148, 152–153 World War

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A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon

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Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure

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Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

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The Crux

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Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane

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The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000

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Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

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The Dream of Europe: Travels in the Twenty-First Century

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Wireless

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Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

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Zeitgeist

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We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance

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Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

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The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth

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The Twittering Machine

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Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World

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The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters

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After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405

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Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World

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The Deepest Map

by Laura Trethewey  · 15 May 2023

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

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The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution

by Charles R. Morris  · 1 Jan 2012  · 456pp  · 123,534 words

Civilization: The West and the Rest

by Niall Ferguson  · 28 Feb 2011  · 790pp  · 150,875 words

Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

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Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town

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The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel  · 26 May 2008  · 760pp  · 218,087 words

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

by David Fromkin  · 2 Jan 1989  · 681pp  · 214,967 words

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

by Mark Pendergrast  · 2 Jan 2000  · 564pp  · 153,720 words

A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester  · 9 Oct 2006  · 482pp  · 147,281 words

Lonely Planet Iceland (Travel Guide)

by Lonely Planet, Carolyn Bain and Alexis Averbuck  · 31 Mar 2015

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans

by Mark Lynas  · 3 Oct 2011  · 369pp  · 98,776 words

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution

by Henry Schlesinger  · 16 Mar 2010  · 336pp  · 92,056 words

The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low

by Richard Jurek  · 2 Dec 2019  · 431pp  · 118,074 words

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr  · 19 Feb 2019

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping

by Roger Faligot  · 30 Jun 2019  · 615pp  · 187,426 words

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism

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The Scientist as Rebel

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Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News

by Eric Berkowitz  · 3 May 2021  · 412pp  · 115,048 words

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

by Andy Greenberg  · 5 Nov 2019  · 363pp  · 105,039 words

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order

by Rush Doshi  · 24 Jun 2021  · 816pp  · 191,889 words

Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain

by John Darwin  · 12 Feb 2013

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking  · 15 Mar 2018

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World

by Timothy Garton Ash  · 23 May 2016  · 743pp  · 201,651 words

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

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Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities

by Vaclav Smil  · 23 Sep 2019

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!

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The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914

by Richard J. Evans  · 31 Aug 2016  · 976pp  · 329,519 words

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

by Niall Ferguson  · 13 Nov 2007  · 471pp  · 124,585 words

Turing's Cathedral

by George Dyson  · 6 Mar 2012

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

by Adam Greenfield  · 29 May 2017  · 410pp  · 119,823 words

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

by Nathan Schneider  · 10 Sep 2018  · 326pp  · 91,559 words

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence

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Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick  · 1 Mar 2011  · 855pp  · 178,507 words

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know

by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman  · 3 Jan 2014  · 587pp  · 117,894 words

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets

by Donald MacKenzie  · 24 May 2021  · 400pp  · 121,988 words

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010

by T M Devine  · 25 Aug 2011

Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly  · 11 Aug 2016  · 425pp  · 116,409 words

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia

by Peter Hopkirk  · 2 Jan 1991  · 580pp  · 194,144 words

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language

by Robert McCrum  · 24 May 2010  · 325pp  · 99,983 words

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

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The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime

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The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912

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Platform Capitalism

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The Rise of the Network Society

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No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

by Glenn Greenwald  · 12 May 2014  · 253pp  · 75,772 words

Empire Lost: Britain, the Dominions and the Second World War

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1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall

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Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica)

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Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

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Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made

by Gaia Vince  · 19 Oct 2014  · 505pp  · 147,916 words