TAT-1

Assembled from 16 blocks · 2 evidence · 9 related

1. Story
2. The first transatlantic telephone cable, and the object that turned the ocean floor from a telegraph medium into a communications system carrying live human conversation. Laid between 1955 and 1956 between Gallanach Bay near Oban in Argyll and Clarenville in Newfoundland, with an onward link to Nova Scotia, it was inaugurated on 25 September 1956 and carried 36 telephone circuits. The engineering was coaxial rather than optical: a pair of cables, one for each direction, with vacuum-tube repeaters spliced into the line at intervals along the seabed, powered from shore. Thirty-six circuits is the number to hold on to. It is a number of simultaneous conversations that a modern office switchboard would find unremarkable, and it was the entire telephone capacity between two continents; calls had to be booked, and the system was so heavily used that its capacity was a matter of national policy. TAT-1 also established the pattern that everything since has followed — a consortium of national carriers, a shared cable, a design life measured in decades and a landing point inherited from the telegraph era. It was retired in 1978.
3. Knowledge
4. TAT-1
5. TAT-8
6. Connections
7. The 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable
8. TAT-8
9. TAT-1 opens with 36 telephone circuits
10. TAT-1
11. MAREA
12. TAT-8, the first transoceanic fibre cable, enters service
13. TAT-8 is lifted from the seabed
14. Evidence
15. Supports the TAT-1 route (Gallanach Bay near Oban to Clarenville, Newfoundland), its 36 telephone circuits and its 25 September 1956 inauguration, and the TAT-8 route, its 280 Mbit/s on two working fibre pairs, its roughly 40,000 circuits and its entry into service on 14 December 1988. V55 verification basis: retrieved by search, not opened. One retrieved source gives 26 rather than 25 September 1956 for TAT-1 entering service, and this pack records that discrepancy instead of resolving it.
16. Supports the 1858 cable dates (completion 5 August, first test signals 10 August, first official message 16 August, failure 18 September), the message counts of the working period, the 1866 landing at Heart's Content and the recovery of the 1865 cable, and Cyrus Field's organising role. V55 verification basis: retrieved by search, not opened. This is a specialist enthusiast-maintained archive rather than an institutional one; it is the standard working reference for this subject and reproduces primary material, but a curator should replace it with institutional citations before publication.