The Internet Lives Under the Ocean

Your messages don't fly through space. Almost all of them cross the planet as flashes of light, in cables lying on the bottom of the ocean. How thick those cables are, what's inside, how the light keeps going across an ocean, the first cable from 1858, and what really breaks them (spoiler: it's usually not sharks). Chapters 0:00 How does a message cross the world? 0:14 1.5 million km of cables 0:33 What's inside a cable 0:51 Repeaters: keeping the light alive 1:07 The first cable (1858) 1:30 What breaks them, and how they're fixed 1:51 It's under the sea Sources & further reading • Submarine cable FAQs (TeleGeography): https://www2.telegeography.com/submar... • Do cables carry over 99% of intercontinental data? (TeleGeography): https://resources.telegeography.com/2... • Submarine communications cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submari... • The 1858 transatlantic telegraph cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transat... • TAT-8, the first fiber-optic cable across the Atlantic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAT-8 Previous episode: Why Do We Sleep?    • Why Do We Sleep?   Tiny Big Picture: big ideas, explained tiny.