Transatlantic Fiber-Optic Expialidocious

Summary

99% Invisible: “Transatlantic Fiber-Optic Expialidocious”

Host: Roman Mars
Guest/Reporter: Christopher Johnson
First Air Date: June 30, 2026
Topic: The story of the first transatlantic fiber optic cable, TAT-8, its impact on global communications, and its recent (literal) removal from the ocean floor.

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the hidden but world-altering design story of the transatlantic fiber optic submarine cable TAT-8. Host Roman Mars and producer/reporter Christopher Johnson investigate how this cable started a telecommunications revolution, the dramatic technical and logistical challenges in deploying and now recovering such cables, and the profound impact on our modern, hyperconnected world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Basics of Fiber Optics (00:56–04:00)

• Christopher Johnson introduces the concept: “At its simplest, fiber optics involves basically translating information, like our conversation right now into pulses of light. And that light zips down those long glass fibers that are finer than strands of hair, and then that light is turned back into information on the other side.” (01:47)
• Most of internet traffic is not “in the cloud,” but is moved globally via a physical network of submarine fiber optic cables.
• Researcher Jane Rafino: “No matter how wireless your device is ... there is always a wire somewhere.” (03:22)

2. Fiber’s Origins and Early Uses (04:00–06:36)

• Victorian use of fiber optics as a “party trick” for transmitting light (05:00).
• Mid-20th century: Used in medicine, not telecommunications.
• Only by the late 1970s do you get the first fiber optic telephone lines.
• Before fiber, copper cables handled long-distance calls, but were limited: “...couldn’t carry a lot of calls before the line started to sound basically like shit, or it just became too busy...” (05:42)

3. Satellites vs. Fiber Optics (07:27–11:17)

• Satellite communications were initially seen as the end for undersea cables. Satellites offered autonomy (no need for international consortia) and were seen as “the future.”
• Cable proponent Jane Rafino: “These cables that go between countries had to be built with consortia... But with a satellite, an American company could just do it.” (09:27)
• AT&T and Bell Labs, with deep expertise in laying cables, pushed for innovation and led the charge in subsea fiber optics.

4. Building TAT-8: The First Transatlantic Fiber Optic Cable (11:18–16:29)

• Jane Rafino: “There’s a big difference between doing it on land and doing it at sea across almost 4,000 miles... this was really untested.” (11:18)
• Stress-testing cables against deep-sea conditions.
• Sharks!: A famous industry story blames sharks for cable damage. Engineers tested shark “interest” in cables by dangling them in shark tanks with fish wrapped around them—like “my dog needs to take a pill, so I’ll hide it in cheese.” (14:56)
• Result: Added insulation and protection—sharkproofing! Cable laid 26,000 ft deep from the UK/France to Tuckerton, New Jersey.

5. Launch and Success of TAT-8 (16:29–18:59)

• Switched on in December 1988; science fiction author Isaac Asimov participated in the inaugural transatlantic call: “Welcome everyone to this maiden voyage on a beam of light. I mean, it’s a really beautiful opening statement.” (17:05, recounted by Jane Rafino)
• TAT-8 could carry 40,000 calls at once—ten times its predecessor.
• Subsea fiber optic cables proved faster (no satellite latency), more secure, higher capacity, and ultimately cheaper to build and operate.
• Capacity was filled within 18 months; as Jane Rafino put it: “When it was launched, there was this belief that this is going to be so much capacity, we’re not going to need anything else ever...And it was full within 18 months.” (19:39)

6. The Modern State of Fiber vs. Satellite (20:36–21:54)

• Today’s undersea cables are essential; satellite carries only a “teensy amount” of global internet traffic but is critical for remote locations and redundancy.
• Ownership has shifted: Most cables now are private, with Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon owning/leasing about half of all bandwidth.

7. TAT-8’s Retirement and Cable Recovery (25:35–33:31)

• TAT-8 stopped functioning in 2002 but lay on the ocean floor for two more decades before recovery efforts began, driven by limited seabed space and a need for valuable materials.
• The Recovery Process: Crews of 14 recover cable sections by dragging a “flatfish” grapnel hook for three miles (!) across the seabed, snagging a cable “the diameter of a candlestick.”
  • Jane Rafino: “I keep my Tat 8 samples in an IKEA candlestick in my office.” (29:20)
• The Coilers: Workers who painstakingly coil the cable into tanks for eight hours, taking frequent breaks:
  • “One of the coilers describes the shifts as 14 cigarettes long. So you walk backwards for 30 minutes, you climb up the ladder, which is about 10 meters, have your two cigarettes, and back down ...” (30:54)
• The recovered cable is stripped for copper (currently in high demand), steel (for fencing), plastics (for consumer goods). The glass fibers themselves are basically useless now.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “No matter how wireless your device is ... there is always a wire somewhere.” — Jane Rafino (03:22)
• “I mean, in terms of finding actual teeth in the cable? Okay, I shrug." — Christopher Johnson on the shark story (14:06)
• “Really the only way they could get the sharks to go anywhere near the cables is ... they wrapped it in fish. So, basically like, oh, my dog needs to take a pill. I'm going to hide it in some cheese.” — Jane Rafino (14:56)
• “The ocean is the ocean.” — Jane Rafino (31:41)
• “So next time you’re washing your hair, you can imagine that you could be squeezing your shampoo from part of what used to be the first fiber optic transatlantic cable.” — Jane Rafino (32:42)
• “That’s true downcycling right there. Like this thing that revolutionized communications is now a shampoo bottle.” — Roman Mars (32:54)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Fiber optic basics & misconceptions: 01:40–03:31
• Victorian party tricks to telecom breakthrough: 04:39–05:38
• Rise of satellite competitors: 07:58–11:17
• The shark myth & actual cable protections: 13:09–15:18
• TAT-8 launch with Isaac Asimov: 17:05–17:33
• TAT-8’s surprising shortfall in capacity: 19:39–20:08
• Modern private cable ownership & the AI era: 21:54–23:07
• How cables are recovered, the "coilers": 28:00–31:10
• Downcycling TAT-8 into shampoo bottles: 32:42–33:31

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Episode Tone & Style

• Friendly, accessible, and humorous—full of metaphors and real-world comparisons (“like my dog needs to take a pill ... hide it in cheese”).
• Mix of awe (the physical scope of global communications, the hidden nature of infrastructure) and wry observations (ancient tech now living on as recycled plastic bottles).
• A sense of wonder about technological progress alongside the toil and effort it still requires.

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Conclusion

By tracing the history of TAT-8 from design marvel, through technological revolution, to its eventual afterlife as fence posts and shampoo bottles, this episode captures the essential, invisible role of infrastructure in global communication—and the continual cycles of innovation, obsolescence, and reinvention underpinning our connected world.

For images and further reading, check out Jane Rafino’s companion story in Wired (May/June issue, linked in show notes).

Transcript

[Geico Narrator]

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[Roman Mars]

It feels good when the story ends with savings. It feels good to Geico.

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[Roman Mars]

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars and I'm here with 99pi producer and reporter Christopher Johnson. Hey, Christopher.

[Christopher Johnson]

Hey, Roman. So I am in New York City, as you know, and of course you are in California. And we're connected over zoom.

[Squarespace Advertiser]

We are.

[Roman Mars]

It's good to see you.

[Christopher Johnson]

It's always good to see you. And you're coming in crystal clear, which is great. And this is especially amazing considering that my voice and my face are. Are traveling all the way across the continent to you through wires from an infrastructure.

[Roman Mars]

Love it.

[Christopher Johnson]

And that infrastructure uses fiber optics. How familiar are you with fiber optics, Roman?

[Roman Mars]

Well, I think I know the basics. It's light carrying information down glass fibers. I think I can. Yeah, I can picture it.

[Christopher Johnson]

Excellent, excellent. That's exactly right. So at its simplest, fiber optics involves basically translating information, like our conversation right now into pulses of light. And that light zips down those long glass fibers that are finer than strands of hair, and then that light is turned back into information on the other side. And this is what carries most of our Internet. A lot of people might think that our information moves through the air, but it doesn't.

[Roman Mars]

That's interesting because, I mean, it's easy to have this misconception because, you know, like, even the way we talk about the Internet, we talk about the cloud and WI fi, like, it makes it feel like it's bouncing around in the sky. Totally.

[Christopher Johnson]

But in fact, the Internet depends on a massive amount of physical fiber optics cables that are crisscrossing the globe. Some of those lines are on land, but there are also one and a half million kilometers, Roman Mars of fiber optics cables. Stretched across the bottom of Ent Oceans, carrying our Zoom calls and our TikToks and our shit posts all over the world.

[Jane Rafino]

About 95% or so of intercontinental traffic goes via submarine telecommunications cables. So our conversation is definitely going through cables.

[Christopher Johnson]

This is Jane Rafino. She's a researcher studying global subsea cables.

[Jane Rafino]

No matter how wireless your device is, and no matter how wireless you think your connection is, there is always a wire somewhere.

[Christopher Johnson]

Now, nearly all of the data moving around the planet this second Roman is traveling across the bottom of an ocean somewhere. And the reason I'm telling you all of this is because there's about a million miles of these submarine fiber optic cables in use today. And they all owe their existence to. To the one, the one cable, the first, the original, the OG cable that started it all.

[Roman Mars]

Okay, tell me about the OG cable.

[Christopher Johnson]

It's known as the transatlantic Telephone Fiber optic Submarine Cable 8, or TAT 8. It was the first ever fiber optic cable to cross an entire ocean. And it really proved what fiber was capable of. And TAT8 has been on an adventure. So I want to tell you how TAT8 came to be and how it was this huge part of a telecommunications revolution and how it paved the way for the Internet that we have today.

[Roman Mars]

Sounds great. Let's do it.

[Christopher Johnson]

Okay, so first, just a little bit of quick background. Fiber optic technology did not start out as a way of communicating. Actually, at first it was basically just this Victorian era novelty.

[Jane Rafino]

I mean, it was essentially like a Victorian party trick. They started to use fiber to transmit light, but it was more for like, you know, a decorative garden or a party trick. They sort of had this technology and they weren't quite sure what to do with it.

[Christopher Johnson]

And then into the late 19th century, you see fiber optics getting used in medicine. Like doctors are using illuminated glass to light up bodies during surgery. But it really took until the second half of the 20th century for people to see the potential of fiber optics and telecommunications. And then in the mid to late 70s, you really start to see the first fiber optic telephone lines.

[Roman Mars]

And so what had they been using as telephone cables, like up to this point?

[Christopher Johnson]

Basically copper. So in the 1960s, phone cables were still copper based. And that was a problem when it came to long distance submarine cables that connected, say, like the US and Europe. Just because those cables couldn't carry a lot of calls before the line started to sound basically like shit, or it just became too busy for more phone traffic.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, when I was very little, I do remember especially long distance calls, they Sounded long distance. Like you felt the physicality and the limits of the physicality of the wires. But we were just kind of used to it. Like that was just our lives.

[Christopher Johnson]

Absolutely. And fiber optics offered an alternative to that. A fiber optic line could theoretically carry way more calls more quickly with way less static. Pretty good, right?

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, big improvement. Yeah.

[Christopher Johnson]

And so, very gradually, these old copper cables were getting replaced with the new fiber optics technology. And not just phone lines. AT&T did the first ever live fiber optics TV transmission when it broadcast the Winter Olympics in 1980 from Lake Placid. And then they made this little promo film to brag about it.

[AT&T Advertiser]

The latest communications technology was applied in transforming Lake Placid into a global communications control center. The potential of light wave technology inspires predictions of space age home information and entertainment centers in the near future.

[Roman Mars]

Clearly, when you have ads about your backbone technology that nobody can really experience, they're like putting all their chips in on fiber optics. Right. This is the moment where the fiber optics revolution is about to happen.

[Christopher Johnson]

I mean, the new technology was impressive, but there were also big limitations. Fiber optic lines were still only available in a few places and for relatively short distances. And all of it is terrestrial. All these fiber optics lines are on land, so it's still pretty limited. There's also this other thing that had been lurking since even before fiber optics that's kind of threatening to squash the technology before it really even took off.

[Roman Mars]

Oh, no. Who is this villain?

[Christopher Johnson]

Satellites roaming Mars Satellites.

[Jane Rafino]

So as soon as satellite technology developed, as soon as they started to put satellites for communication in space, a lot of these cable and telephone companies said, you know, well, we're cooked. Everything's going to be satellites. These are the last cables. We're going to go straight from telegraph cables to obsolescence.

[Christopher Johnson]

At the time satellite technology was becoming more and more of a thing, There were already some communication satellites in use. And so when it came to global telecommunications, the assumption was that satellites were the future and that they would be the thing that fully replaced those old copper cables.

[Roman Mars]

And so why is that?

[Christopher Johnson]

Well, for one, satellites are in space. This was the tail end of the space race, and we were still pretty obsessed with the final frontier. And so beaming phone calls to and from a satellite hovering above the earth. How cool, man. Like, that was the future. Not moving stuff through boring, dusty ass copper cables.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jane Rafino]

Satellites were a genuine competitor because they could carry voice traffic a lot more cheaply because cables are incredibly expensive to build.

[Christopher Johnson]

And on top of all of that, satellite telecommunication was just simpler at Least on a diplomatic level.

[Jane Rafino]

These cables that go between countries had to be built with consortia, so companies from different countries had to collaborate with each other. And, and with a satellite, an American company could just do it.

[Christopher Johnson]

With satellites, the US could build and operate its own equipment with pretty much complete autonomy, which the US government preferred.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, I would prefer that too. Yeah, yeah. If you've ever been part of an hoa, you would prefer this too.

[Christopher Johnson]

Yeah, I get that. And so, despite all of its promise, it wasn't a given that fiber optics would be the future for big long distance telecommunications. But fiber did have one very big champion. AT&T was at the front of the fiber optics evolution, mostly because they were the experts on long distance telecom cables. They'd been laying subsea cables all over the planet for nearly like 100 years. They had all the know how, they had all of the equipment. They were deep on cables. And so as satellites were kind of threatening cables, researchers at Bell Labs, which was a part of AT&T, they went hard on developing fiber optics. They teamed up with telecom companies in the UK and in France and they formed this consortium and then they came up with this plan. They said, hey y', all, let's build a massive submarine fiber optic cable and run it from the east coast of the all the way over to Western Europe. This would be the first ever fiber cable to cross a whole ocean. Super ambitious.

[Jane Rafino]

There's a big difference between doing it on land and doing it at sea across almost 4,000 miles. And the idea that you would innovate with something that goes into the sea is not, was not obvious. So this was really untested.

[Roman Mars]

Okay. So the researchers and scientists, they're going to make this leap that they want to prove. They need to prove that fiber optics cables are better than satellites. And so they start building this cable that's kind of never been done before, like an undersea fiber optic cable. They've done copper wires across the Atlantic, but never fiber optics. So how are they going to go about doing that?

[Christopher Johnson]

I mean, basically they just pulled out all the stops. In the early 1980s, they started doing all of stress tests around the world. They dropped some simulation cables into the North Atlantic to see how things like temperature and pressure change affected signal transmission, to see if laying and recovering the cable caused any breaks in the fiber. Pretty fundamental stuff.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah.

[Christopher Johnson]

They also built a thing that's called the ocean Simulation facility to see if deep sea conditions mess with the cable's ability to transmit light across all that distance. And that was at the Bell Labs, Holmdel Complex, which, by the way, is where they now film severance.

[Roman Mars]

Oh, cool.

[Squarespace Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Christopher Johnson]

And so things are going pretty well for Bell Labs until during one of their tests, they discovered breaks in the cable's electrical signal. And this was maybe something that could derail the entire project.

[Jane Rafino]

And that is where we get to the famous story that the subsea cable industry gets very. They get very. They get very nervous when you mention the S word, and that is sharks.

[Roman Mars]

Oh, man. Yup, sharks are coming.

[Christopher Johnson]

According to Jane, one of the lead researchers at Bell Labs had the shark teeth that had been pulled from the glitchy cable. Like literal shark teeth roaming Mars.

[Roman Mars]

That's amazing.

[Christopher Johnson]

I mean, can you imagine? You've been running all these tests and hither and yon over the planet to test this thing out. You got simulations going to make sure that this first ever subsea cable will be completely foolproof. And you've got to get it right. You test for temperature, pressure, tension, and here comes Jaws.

[Roman Mars]

I mean, sharks were really the thing back then. If you remember, I could barely go into an actual pool in the backyard because of Jaws.

[Jane Rafino]

So.

[Roman Mars]

But were sharks, like, a real problem? That seems like, even if, I don't know, an occasional shark bit, an occasional cable. Is this a real problem?

[Christopher Johnson]

I mean, in terms of finding actual teeth in the cable? Okay, I shrug. There are competing stories, shall we say, around this, in terms of the faults in the cable. Jane says that those were probably abrasions from the sea floor. But with the stress and the high stakes, and they don't want to take any chances with this thing, the engineers and researchers start doing all of these kind of hilariously thorough tests to figure out how to sharkproof this cable. For example, they go to aquariums in Connecticut and in Florida, and they put these cables into the shark tanks and they dangle them like a toy right in the sharks faces.

[Jane Rafino]

And really the only way that they could get the sharks to go anywhere near the cables is, you know, they wrapped it in fish. So basically like, oh, my dog needs to take a pill. I'm going to hide it in some cheese. And there was just like, there was no correlation. There was no pattern, no evidence that sharks are particularly attracted to, to the cables.

[Roman Mars]

I mean, what I love about this is that this is a scientific test that a third grader would devise. It's so understandable. It's so great. I love it.

[Christopher Johnson]

And the good thing about all of these tests is that they made engineers add these extra layers of protection and insulation to the Cable, which in 1986, they started to lay across the floor of the Atlantic. I mean, in some places they're dropping the cable to more than 26,000ft down at&t actually ran this pretty cool TV ad that showed their crews at sea unspooling the cable and dropping it off the ships.

[AT&T Advertiser]

But today, we're no longer just a phone company or just a telephone network.

[Christopher Johnson]

And the whole time, the voiceover is just flexing about how this one new fiber optic cable was such an incredible leap in global communications, supported by a

[AT&T Advertiser]

worldwide intelligent network that will someday make it possible for people anywhere at any time to be able to send or receive information.

[Christopher Johnson]

The cable ran from England and France across to a town called Tuckerton on the Jersey shore, not too far from Atlantic City. By the way, there's even a plaque there now, and it marks the US terminal for the transatlantic telephone fiber optics submarine cable 8, aka TAT 8.

[Roman Mars]

Wait, why 8?

[Christopher Johnson]

Well, because there were already seven transatlantic cables, but they were all copper based.

[Roman Mars]

Okay, got it.

[Christopher Johnson]

So then in December 1988, they finally switched on this new first of its kind, state of the art cable. And it worked.

[Jane Rafino]

And AT&T decides to get Isaac Asimov to launch the cable to kind of make the first call. So they have a video call between Paris, London and New York, and Isaac Asimov sends the first message and he talks about, you know, welcome everyone to this maiden voyage on a beam of light. I mean, it's really beautiful opening statement.

[Roman Mars]

I love it. I love that they always had this notion of the science fiction nature of their science, you know what I mean? Like, having someone like Isaac Asimov like on the ready for these things just added some grandeur to all this stuff. Yeah, okay, so they lay it down and they introduce it with all this pomp and circumstance, and you have Isaac Asimov there with his mutton chops and everything. I mean, you know. But then in the end, did Tede end up truly revolutionizing telecommunications?

[Christopher Johnson]

Oh, it absolutely did. I mean, first of all, it was a quantum leap in capacity. Tat8 could carry 40,000 phone calls at once. That's 10 times the capacity of its predecessor, which was a copper based cable. And then there's the whole cable versus satellite debate. But when TAT 8 was switched on, the superiority of subsea fiber optics became very clear.

[Discover Advertiser]

How so?

[Christopher Johnson]

Well, satellites had this pernicious problem with latency where the time it took for a signal to go up into space and come had caused delays. Now, they were tiny, but they were enough to drive you absolutely nuts. And Signal quality was only kinda so so. But with TAT8, things were immediately so much better. And TAT8 proved that submarine fiber cables could actually be cheaper to make, to install, to fix. And data was way more secure and fiber's bandwidth was way higher. And also, tad8 was coming into use just as the World Wide web was taking off. So it was also perfectly positioned to fill the immediate demand for infrastructure that could move all this information all over the world quickly. So Tat8 showed the world of international telecom that a long distance subsea fiber optics cable could really basically crush it. In fact, it worked so well that engineers at the time were positive that this would be the first and the last cable like this that they would ever have to install.

[Jane Rafino]

When it was launched, there was this belief that this is going to be so much capacity, we're not going to need anything else ever. I swear I'll never ask for any more capacity. And it was full within 18 months because of course, you know, just like when you build a highway, it increases traffic. You build a cable and it increases traffic, so it's full to capacity within 18 months, which, you know, it's not a huge problem because more cables come after it.

[Christopher Johnson]

So once TAT 8 proved the concept of international submarine lines, the FCC invested more and more in fiber optics cables. And so by the 1990s, the capacity of fiber optics overtook satellites, and it just kept growing from there to the point that today we are completely reliant on this technology with hundreds and hundreds of those sprawling subsea cables that are enmeshing the planet right now.

[Roman Mars]

I mean, it's really amazing to think about it and to picture it, but I do want to go back to the satellites for a second because they obviously didn't go away. So if most of the global Internet's infrastructure is fiber optic cables, where do the satellites actually fit into that?

[Christopher Johnson]

So today, satellites only carry a teensy amount of global Internet traffic, but they are still a huge part of our Internet ecosystem. And this is especially true for remote, low connectivity places that don't have their own fiber optics lines yet, or where maybe there's only one cable and it could be wiped out by a natural disaster, say. And in places like that, satellites are a lifeline for connection and for redundancy. But when it comes to total data capacity, it's not even close. Today, fiber optics are the way of the world.

[Roman Mars]

Well, this brings up another question for me, because who owns all these subsea cables that we're reliant on that crisscross the globe and circle it and send all the traffic around. I mean, that one, TAT 8 was a consortium of the US and AT&T in France and stuff like this. Are there still cooperative international consortia to make everything else happen?

[Christopher Johnson]

Mostly no. There are still some cables that are built or owned like that, but most submarine cables today, it won't surprise you, are in private hands. For example, a small handful of companies install most of the world's subsea cables. And when it comes to ownership, the usual suspects, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. Together, they either own or they lease half of all the bandwidth across the world's subsea cables. And now, thanks to AI, we are in the middle of a subsea cable boom. All of these tech giants need wires that connect all those data centers around the world. And so they're investing more and more in subsea cables. So for example, there's a project underway right now to build what will be the world's single longest submarine cable connecting five continents. Now, as for TAT 8, even though it revolutionized global telecom and it played this huge role in the birth of the Internet, tat8 won't be part of this AI explosion.

[Jane Rafino]

What?

[Roman Mars]

Why?

[Christopher Johnson]

We'll talk about that after the break.

[Roman Mars]

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[Christopher Johnson]

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[Christopher Johnson]

okay, Roman, we are back.

[Roman Mars]

We are back.

[Christopher Johnson]

And now I think it's time to have maybe a little retirement party for TAT8.

[Roman Mars]

Retirement.

[AT&T Advertiser]

Okay.

[Christopher Johnson]

Because for as much as TAT8 revolutionized telecommunication, the cable itself didn't actually work for all that long. It was switched on in 1988, and it stopped working in 2002. What, 14 years later. I know.

[Bank of America / 8Sleep Advertiser]

Wow.

[Roman Mars]

Okay. Rip Tat 8. Yeah. And it was just sitting there. Its carcass, it's just been sitting there dead.

[Christopher Johnson]

Yeah, it's just been sitting there chilling at the bottom of the Atlantic. And now, almost 40 years after it was installed, TAT8 is finally being pulled out.

[Roman Mars]

So why are they bothering to pull it up now? Like 40 years later? Like, what's the. It's been there so long. Why not just leave it?

[Christopher Johnson]

Well, ordinarily, that's exactly what they do. They would just leave the cables down there. Yeah, they don't want to mess with the seabed. And recovery can be expensive. And it's labor intensive.

[Roman Mars]

And there's sharks down there.

[Christopher Johnson]

There are sharks down there. But now there are so many cables running along the bottom of our oceans and seas. And as vast as those oceans and seas are, there are actually limited, ideal routes that we can run when you account for protected areas, military areas. So there's all this competition for seabed use, which means that now to make room, they've got to start pulling up some of those old lines like tat8. Also, the tat8 cable is made of all these pretty valuable components, and those parts are getting stripped and recycled.

[Roman Mars]

That makes sense. That makes sense. So what is this process like? It sounds incredibly hard.

[Christopher Johnson]

I am so glad you asked, because this is probably my favorite part of this Story I think it is just so, so cool how they do this. Partly because even though our Internet is based on this incredibly fast, efficient technology, it still takes so much labor and human hands to deal with this infrastructure, from installing it to maintaining it and now recovering it. And I talked to Jane about this because she actually met some of the crew of a recovery ship.

[Jane Rafino]

The ship itself can carry a crew of 14 people. There's a captain, there are the coilers, There are a standard ship's engineer, and they come from all around the world and they go out to sea for two to two and a half months at a time.

[Christopher Johnson]

So they basically go out, they collect a section of TAT 8 cable and they bring it back, they offload it, they resupply the ship, they get more coffee and snacks, maybe get some rest, and then they head back out to pick up where they left off. They use a set of coordinates to find and pick up the cable where they left off. They get out to where they generally think that the cable is based off this data. And then they take this flat grapnel hook, they call it a flatfish, which is attached to a long, long rope, and they throw it into the water.

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[Christopher Johnson]

To around where they think they can snag the cable.

[Jane Rafino]

There are some sections that are really deep. So like three miles. Three miles, even just like a three mile long rope is actually quite difficult to imagine because. Because you can't see it all.

[Christopher Johnson]

And they're trying to catch a cable that is how big.

[Jane Rafino]

The deepsea portion of tat8 at least is exactly the diameter of like a candle that you would stick in a candlestick on your table. And I know that because I keep my Tat 8 samples in an IKEA candlestick in my office.

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Oh.

[Roman Mars]

I was not picturing something the width of a candle. I was picturing like, maybe like sort of a arm length diameter, like if you put your arms in a circle. I thought that was the cable we're talking about. So how do they hook it? How do they get it on board? I don't even understand.

[Christopher Johnson]

So they throw the hook off the ship and then they slowly drag the hook across the bottom of the sea until like you're fishing, they get a bite, they get a snag, and then they start winching the cable into one of the ship's cable tanks where there are these guys called coilers waiting to get to work.

[Jane Rafino]

And at sea, it's part of their job to stand in the tank and grab the cable as it comes through the hatch. And they walk backwards in slow circles to coil the cable.

[Christopher Johnson]

And this is all just so fascinating to me because they have to walk backwards in these slow circles, coiling the cable just right. And they do this for eight whole hours.

[Roman Mars]

Oh, my Lord.

[Christopher Johnson]

Yeah. And because this could make you hella dizzy, they have to take breaks. They have to break it up into half hour shifts.

[Jane Rafino]

One of the quailers describes the shifts as 14 cigarettes long. So you walk backwards for 30 minutes, you climb up the ladder, which is about 10 meters back to the deck, you have your two cigarettes, and back down into the hold for another 30 minutes.

[Roman Mars]

That sounds grueling.

[Christopher Johnson]

Oh, it gets so much worse.

[Jane Rafino]

They are out in the open ocean, 3 meter swells. They're down in the hold of the ship pulling in cable that could be 30 degrees Celsius down there. And you're being tossed around 30 degrees

[Christopher Johnson]

Celsius, that's pushing 90 degrees Fahrenheit. And they still have to pull in the cable, stack it just so. And in the meantime, they're making sure that they're not sailing right into like

[Jane Rafino]

a hurricane, because that is the reality. Especially in the mid to late summer in the Atlantic. And of course, in the colder months, you're dealing with sea ice. I mean, the ocean is the ocean.

[Roman Mars]

Truer words are never spoken. The ocean is the ocean.

[Christopher Johnson]

Ocean gone, Ocean, Roland.

[Roman Mars]

Okay, so the parts they recovered that they've pulled up from the ocean, what happens to it from there?

[Christopher Johnson]

Okay, so they can recover and bring back like a thousand kilometers of TAT8 cable at a time, sometimes more.

[Roman Mars]

Oh, wow.

[Christopher Johnson]

And they take TAT 8 to a port where then it gets stripped apart and it gets recycled. Basically. The only thing they can't really reuse are those long glass fibers. But there's also copper in the cables, and that's really valuable right now because there's a global copper shortage. There's also steel in Tat 8 and that gets pulled out and turned into fencing. And the plastic gets turned into consumer goods.

[Jane Rafino]

So next time you're washing your hair, you can imagine that you could be squeezing your shampoo from part of what used to be the first fiber optic transatlantic cable.

[Roman Mars]

That's true down cycling right there. Like this thing that revolutionized communications is now shampoo bottle. That is hilarious. It's ironic to me that the thing that made it this technological leap, the glass fibers are useless, and all the stuff that's around it is what is harvested and turned into all that shark proofing. Yeah, all that shark proofing is why it's valuable and why it can now hold your shampoo in your shower. I can think of no nobler of fate. Well, okay. So Tad 8, you had a good run. We stripped you for parts.

[Christopher Johnson]

You even got a we salute you, Teddy.

[Roman Mars]

Thank you for your service, Teddy. 99 Invisible was reported and produced this week by Christopher Johnson and edited by Kelly prime, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real and George Langley Comfort. Fact Checking by Graham Hacha Jane Rufino's story about TAT 8 appears in the May June issue of Wired magazine. It's got lots of cool pictures from the recovery ship. Go check it out. We'll have a link in the show Notes. Special thanks this week to historian Bill the Cable Guy Burns and Jeff Hecht. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstead is the digital director. Delaney hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Barube, Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivienne Lesh, Madonn, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina, Gleason, Talon and Rain Strad, and me, roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord Server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of [e-mail].

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[Christopher Johnson]

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[Roman Mars]

Hello beautiful nerds. It's Roman here. If you're loving 99 Invisible and you want to hear new episodes, ad free and get access to exclusive bonus content. Subscribe to Sirius XM Podcast plus on Apple Podcasts or visit siriusxm.com podcastplus to start your free trial today.