Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great civil engineer, built many world firsts but one of his greatest accomplishments was also one of his greatest commercial failures. During the latter part of his career he built a huge ship, the largest in the world at the time, called the Great Eastern which was originally intended as a passenger ship to take immigrants across to America working on the assumption that shifting thousands of people at a time was much cheaper than a few hundred.

In the event, the Great Eastern was a complete failure in the role it was designed to fulfil and after several turbulent years of failed sailings and expensive mishaps the ship was eventually sold to a group of people headed by Cyrus West Field.

Field was an American business man and one of the modern world’s great unsung heroes. He pioneered the use of deep-sea telegraph cables but even though he succeeded he died a pauper and today is relatively unknown.

His great dream was to lay a cable between Europe and America, in fact the cable terminated on Valentia Island in County Kerry. His first attempts to lay a cable failed because the cable was not strong enough to survive the laying process intact and even when the cable was finally completed it only managed to last a few days before it failed completely as the insulation broke down in the water. The answer lay in a new improved cable that was more robust but also much heavier and thicker.

The cable presented a whole new set of problems because of its size. A 30 metre reel of 16 amp 3 core cable is one thing but 2,300 nautical miles of a cable that weighs a ton per kilometre is quite another. No ship currently afloat could cope with that quantity of cable except one....the Great Eastern. The Great Eastern may have been a flop as a passenger ship but as a cable layer she was a star. The cable was finally laid in 1866 capable of transmitting a whole 8 words per minute but was much better than the eight or so days a voyage across the Atlantic would take at the time.

Nowadays our knowledge based economies rely on data communications and 99% of all Intercontinental Internet traffic is carried on deep-sea data cables but using light instead of electricity and transmitting at much greater speeds. However, despite being under the sea they are surprisingly fragile; they are often damaged by fishing nets and anchors and some major outages recently have been caused by people stealing large tracks of the cable from the seabed for its scrap value though how one sells two or three miles of deep sea data cable is any ones guess.

In some areas of the world many deep sea cables intersect making them a nice target for any international terrorist with a diving suit and this has lead to calls for more cables to be laid  for resilience and better security for the specialised ships that repair the cables when they do get broken.