This represents a noteworthy virtuous circle - a self-amplifying trend. The development of graphical user interfaces has led to rapid growth in personal computer use over the last decade, and the coupling of that technology with the Internet has caused explosive growth 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 wrap their minds around it 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 it has always been the case that cables get laid first and then people begin trying to think of new ways to use them. Once a cable is in place, it tends to be treated not as a technological artifact but almost as if it were some naturally occurring mineral formation that might be exploited in any number of different ways.

This was true from the beginning. The telegraphy equipment of 1857 didn't work when it was hooked up to the first transatlantic cable. Kelvin had to invent the mirror galvanometer, and later the siphon recorder, to make use of it. Needless to say, there were many other Victorian hackers trying to patent inventions that would enable more money to be extracted from cables. One of these was a Scottish-Canadian-American elocutionist named Alexander Graham Bell, who worked out of a laboratory in Boston.

Bell was one of a few researchers pursuing a hack based on the phenomenon of resonance. If you open the lid of a grand piano, step on the sustain pedal, and sing a note into it, such as a middle C, the strings for the piano's C keys will vibrate sympathetically, while the D strings will remain still. If you sing a D, the D strings vibrate and the C strings don't. Each string resonates only at the frequency to which it has been tuned and is deaf to other frequencies.

If you were to hum out a Morse code pattern of dots and dashes, all at middle C, a deaf observer watching the strings would notice a corresponding pattern of vibrations. If, at the same time, a second person was standing next to you humming an entirely different sequence of dots and dashes, but all on the musical tone of D, then a second deaf observer, watching the D strings, would be able to read that message, and so on for all the other tones on the scale. There would be no interference between the messages; each would come through as clearly as if it were the only message being sent. But anyone who wasn't deaf would hear a cacophony of noise as all the message senders sang in different rhythms, on different notes. If you took this to an extreme, built a special piano with strings tuned as close to each other as possible, and trained the message senders to hum Morse code as fast as possible, the sound would merge into an insane roar of white noise.

Electrical oscillations in a wire follow the same rules as acoustical ones in the air, so a wire can carry exactly the same kind of cacophony, with the same results. Instead of using piano strings, Bell and others were using a set of metal reeds like the ones in a harmonica, each tuned to vibrate at a different frequency. They electrified the reeds in such a way that they generated not only acoustical vibrations but corresponding electrical ones. They sought to combine the electrical vibrations of all these reeds into one complicated waveform and feed it into one end of a cable. At the far end of the cable, they would feed the signal into an identical set of reeds. Each reed would vibrate in sympathy only with its counterpart on the other end of the wire, and by recording the pattern of vibrations exhibited by that reed, one could extract a Morse code message independent of the other messages being transmitted on the other reeds. For the price of one wire, you could send many simultaneous coded messages and have them all sort themselves out on the other end.

To make a long story short, it didn't work. But it did raise an interesting question. If you could take vibrations at one frequency and combine them with vibrations 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. The only difference would be that the waves in this case were merely literal representations of sound waves, rather than Morse code sequences transmitted at different frequencies. It was, in other words, an analog hack on a digital technology.

We have all been raised to think of the telephone as a vast improvement on the telegraph, as the steamship was to the sailing ship or the electric lightbulb to the candle, but from a hacker tourist's point of view, it begins to seem like a lamentable wrong turn. Until Bell, all telegraphy was digital. The multiplexing system he worked on was purely digital in concept even if it did make use of some analog properties of matter (as indeed all digital equipment does). But when his multiplexing scheme went sour, he suddenly went analog on us.

Fortunately, the story has a happy ending, though it took a century to come about. Because analog telephony did not require expertise in Morse code, anyone could take advantage of it. It became enormously popular and generated staggering quantities of revenue that underwrote the creation of a fantastically immense communications web reaching into every nook and cranny of every developed country.

Then modems came along and turned the tables. Modems are a digital hack on an analog technology, of course; they take the digits from your computer and convert them into a complicated analog waveform that can be transmitted down existing wires. The roar of white noise that you hear when you listen in on a modem transmission is exactly what Bell was originally aiming for with his reeds. Modems, and everything that has ensued from them, like the World Wide Web, are just the latest example of a pattern that was established by Kelvin 140 years ago, namely, hacking existing wires by inventing new stuff to put on the ends of them.

It is natural, then, to ask what effect FLAG is going to have on the latest and greatest cable hack: the Internet. Or perhaps it's better to ask whether the Internet affected FLAG. The explosion of the Web happened after FLAG was planned. Taketo Furuhata, president and CEO of IDC, which runs the Miura station, says: "I don't know whether Nynex management foresaw the burst of demand related to the Internet a few years ago - I don't think so. Nobody - not even AT&T people - foresaw this. But the demand for Internet transmission is so huge that FLAG will certainly become a very important pipe to transmit such requirements."

John Mercogliano, vice president - Europe, Nynex Network Systems (Bermuda) Ltd., says that during the early 1990s when FLAG was getting organized, Nynex executives felt in their guts that something big was going to happen involving broadband multimedia transmission over cables. They had a media lab that was giving demos of medical imaging and other such applications. "We knew the Internet was coming - we just didn't know it was going to be called the Internet," he says.

FLAG may, in fact, be the last big cable system that was planned in the days when people didn't know about the Internet. Those days were a lot calmer in the global telecom industry. Everything was controlled by monopolies, and cable construction was based on sober, scientific forecasts, analogous, in some ways, to the actuarial tables on which insurance companies predicate their policies.