Voices Under the Sea

At 9 o'clock one morning last week the bulb-nosed shape of Her Majesty's Telegraph Ship Monarch, world's largest cable-laying vessel, rode slowly into Random Sound off Clarenville on the east coast of Newfoundland and began a new era in communications. After 30 years of planning, seven months of steaming, Monarch had paid out of her massive hold 4,900 miles of copper-cored, steel-armored, polyethylene-insulated 1 3/4-in. cable, and with the splice at Clarenville, completed the first underwater telephone cable linking America and Europe. Now, for the first time in history, voices could travel long distances under the sea.

Business-wise, the 2,650-mile, $42 million cable between Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, and Oban. Scotland (financed and owned 50% by American Telephone & Telegraph, 41% by British Post Office, 9% by Canada's Overseas Telecommunications) was an absolute necessity. Starting in 1927, when transatlantic radiophone service began, the volume of New York-London messages alone had grown from 2,000 to 101,500 in 1955. Meanwhile, wavelength limitations not only overloaded but doomed the transatlantic radiophones to a meager 15 circuits that were at the mercy of static, sunspot interference and fading. Following bursts of sunspot activity, delays on overseas calls sometimes ran up to seven hours; occasionally the blackouts have been known to last for days.

The 22nd underseas cable and the first phone cable (the others can handle only telegraph messages) can transmit 35 calls simultaneously over each of its two lengths, more than doubling present transatlantic phone capacity. Service will be inaugurated sometime this fall and by conservative A. T. & T. estimate should be at full capacity within two years at the standard rate of $12 per three-minute New York-London call. With no atmospherics to throw it off, the submarine phone cable is bell-clear, is expected to be working at all times. Last week grey, ramrod-straight Monarch Captain James P. F. Betson, who kept in phone contact with shore technicians over the cable even as he was paying it out. gave it a glowing testimonial: "There is no background noise at all ... it is truly the silent voice under the ocean."

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