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To: D. Newberry who wrote (3117)	11/6/1999 7:58:00 AM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15615

DN, your remarks sound plausible. One thing it's easy to lose sight of is how old the technology of laying transoceanic cables is - the first well functioning transatlantic telegraph cable was laid during July 1866. They already had had a decade of experience with the perils of undersea cables, the first one crossing the English Channel had gotten trawled up after a mere 12 hours of service :-) I came across this story in an absolutely fascinating mathematics book, "Fourier Analysis" by T.W. Korner. The connection being that it was not understood at first how the propagation of signals on cables at low frequencies (telegraph...) where the series inductive reactance is low in relation to the series resistance of the cable is more like the heat equation than the wave equation. The first working transatlantic cable was an absolute disaster, it took literally hours to send a telegraph message there was so much dispersion. I'm a little less scared about possible disaster scenarios around these cables knowing how long their history is. It's proven technology in my opinion!