Another Pacific cable has been constructed jointly by the governments of Great Britain, Canada and Australia across the Pacific from Vancouver to Fanning Island, Fiji Islands, Norfolk Island, and thence to New Zealand and Australia. It is practically 8,000 miles long, and the 3,600-mile stretch from Vancouver to Fanning Island makes the longest single sec tion in the world. This cable brought the Aus tralasian colonies 10,000 miles nearer to Canada than they were before, and there is now com pleted a British telegraph girdle of the world which touches foreign territory only at Madeira and Saint Vincent, in the Cape Verde Islands, both belonging to Britain's old ally, Portugal.
Mention has already been made of the con solidation of competing lines in the Mediter ranean and the East into the Eastern Telegraph Company. To this huge organization belongs a marvelous network of submarine cables — practically all the cables from Land's End, in England, through the Mediterranean to Suez, on through the Red Sea to Aden, across the In dian Ocean to Bombay, thence linking into the system Madras, Singapore, Hongkong, Ma nila, Australia and New Zealand. In addition, practically all the cables which now surround Africa, and many of those which cross the ocean and follow the coast-line of South Amer ica, are in its control. To such an organization the laying of 15,000 miles of cable from Eng land to Australia, via the Cape of Good Hope, at a cost of over $15,000,000, was comparatively easy. Yet this great line may be traced from Land's End in England to Adelaide in South Australia, a distance which a modern Atlantic liner would take six weeks to steam over. The length of cable is more than half way round the globe, and about eight times longer than the first Atlantic cable.
The life of a deep-sea cable, aside from in juries by ship's anchors, rocks, sharks, sawfish and swordfish, has been variously estimated at from 30 to 40 years. Sharks occasionally bite cables and leave some of their teeth embedded, and sawfish and swordfish attack them, espe cially in tropical waters, but on the level plains of ooze two miles or more below the surface cables seem to be almost imperishable. In shal low water they are most exposed to damage. Deep-sea cables generally weigh from one to one and a half tons per mile, but the portions lying in shallow water are so heavily armored as to weigh from 10 to 30 tons per mile. The breaking strain is about seven tons. Yet in
one year the ocean cables of the Commercial Company were severed by ships' anchors five times. In the Firth of Forth in Scotland no less than 13 ship's anchors were once found entangled in a length of four miles of cable. The deep-sea cable costs about $400 per mile, is made in lengths of 15 to 25 miles and stored in coils in a cable-laying steamship. The cost of coast cables may run up to $5,000 a mile, as they have usually paper insulation, covered with a lead sheath, and heavily armed with wire. Coast cables are made in mile lengths and stored on large reels.
Cable Tariffs and Codes.— In the early days the Atlantic Telegraph Company started with a minimum tariff of $100 for 20 words, and $5 for each additional word. Later this was reduced to $25 for 10 words. It was not till 1872 that a rate of $1 a word was intro duced. This word rate system proved so popu lar that it was soon adopted universally, and since 1888 the cable rate across the Atlantic has been down to 12Y2 cents a word. Rates now range from the 12%-cent tariff across the Atlan tic to $1.33 per word from New York to Japan. The average for the whole world is roughly 50 cents a word. The cost of cabling, how ever, is greatly influenced by "coding,' a system by which business men use secret words for commercial messages, and which has developed to an extraordinary degree of perfection. One code word will frequently stand for 10 or 15 words, and there are instances where one word has been used to represent over 100 words. Practically all commercial cablegrams are coded, and nearly all departments of commer cial and industrial life nowadays have their special codes.
Speed of Transmission.— The cost of deep-sea cables makes it vitally important to get as much work out of them as possible. In the first place the transmission time of mes sages has been greatly reduced. Formerly from many parts of the world it took 5 or 10 hours to deliver a cablegram where it now takes from 30 to 60 minutes, and across the Atlantic the companies, for stock-exchange purposes at any rate, send a cablegram and get a reply in two or three minutes. In the second place, where traffic is heavy, speed of transmission of the signals has been greatly increased. Across the Atlantic and on three or four of the busy lines of the Eastern Company the art of cable teleg raphy has been highly developed.