外刊
How the world was wired
本文回顾了1866年跨大西洋电报电缆的铺设历程，将其视为现代信息时代的开端。文章不仅讲述了这一工程壮举如何连接世界并推动技术转型，还反思了“互联即和平”的理想幻灭，以及人类通过坚持与创新将不可能变为可能的普遍规律。
信息时代的黎明
IT HAS BEEN called the Victorian equivalent of the Apollo project . At the time it was compared to Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, was said to have half undone the Declaration of Independence , and prompted giddy predictions of world peace. The completion of the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 showed that a global telecommunications network was possible and marked the dawn of the modern information age.
从蒸汽到数据的转折
This epic tale was retold in the early years of the internet boom, and today a growing awareness of humanity’s reliance on vulnerable but unseen submarine data cables has given it renewed relevance. A triumph of Victorian engineering, the Atlantic cable marked the point at which the age of steel and steam began to yield to the modern world in which industrial might depends on the transport and manipulation of weightless data. In his pacey retelling of the story, an adventure yarn with telegraph cables, James Tabor shows how the technology of one era laid the foundations for the next.
探索可能的边界
The cable’s story also serves as a parable in another way. As the project progresses, the apparently impossible gradually starts to look feasible, and outlandish feats (such as recovering broken cables from the ocean floor) start to become routine, as new techniques and machinery are steadily refined. It is a reminder of the power of perseverance and innovation, and may bring to mind, for modern readers, such challenges as building fusion reactors , quantum computers or reusable rockets. In the words of Arthur C. Clarke, a science-fiction author who published his own account of the Atlantic cable in the 1950s and would later liken it to the Apollo programme, “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
内容来源：The Economist。本页为 Follow 编辑摘要，完整内容请在小程序中学习。
