Broadcast from the Sea Floor

I enjoy how exceedingly arcane some radio "firsts" are. Officially the first submarine broadcast was December 7th 1930. But on October 15th 1919 there was a two-way radio communication between Commander Clark Withers of the US Submarine H-2 and the US Destroyer Blakely. the submarine was submerged in the Hudson River off 96th street NYC. There is almost a decade between those two events. I didn't believe there was that size gap in experimentation.

In 1924 a diver from Philadelphia named C. O. Jackson, broadcast from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. A microphone was mounted inside his helmet wrapped in sponges to protect it from impact and to mute his voice at that range. the carbon mics of that era were very delicate.

He did not broadcast from the bottom. A cable ran back up to the boat where a more traditional transmitter and antenna rig relayed the signal to WIP-AM. From there the city of Philadelphia could hear Jackson describe the briny deep. At the time WIP was owned by the Gimbel Brothers Department Store.

WIP began it's first official broadcast on March 18, 1922. WIP had been a flashy station from day one. Back then, as a day share with WGBS in New York, they were audible straight into Manhattan. They broadcast from inside a glass DJ booth so that any onlooker could watch. So broadcasting from the sea floor may have been a stunt, but it was a stunt hundreds of thousands of people heard. More here.

First Submarine Broadcast

As with all firsts I will first define my terms. By Submarine I mean the craft which travels underwater. I also mean that the broadcast occurred while the craft was fully submerged. A submarine on the surface is no different than a boat, right? This type of transmission was employed throughout WWII by all sides so it would be no surprise that it was developed before the conflict began in Europe. What's surprising is how much earlier.

The Navy took an early interest in radio, they were outfitting their fleet with radios as early as 1916, but only for use at the surface. Some sources I found give the first Submarine broadcast a date of December 7th 1930. These give a location of New London, Connecticut. I think we can all assume they mean off shore. More specifically "they" were 10 miles off shore in Long Island Sound. By "They" I mean that there were in fact two submarines; the USS 0-4 and the USS 0-3. First Lieutenant Norman S. Ives gave a brief description of the mechanics of submarines aboard the USS 0-4 while submerging. Afterward Lieutenant George C. Hern gave a similar talk and also allowed the listeners to hear the acoustics of the submerging USS 0-3. The shortwave signal was picked up and rebroadcast by WEAF, with announcers George Hicks and James Wallington presiding.

The book "Connecticut Firsts" by Wilson Faude cites this 1930 event as the first submarine broadcast as does the "Kane Book of Famous Firsts". The problem with the off-cited date of 1930... is that there is a very credible citation in the Bureau of Engineering Monthly Report of Radio and Sound for an event 10 years earlier. Since this was a prepared broadcast it is obvious that there was testing even technological steps that had to precede it. A photograph of the USS 0-7 here clearly has a radio on board. (pictures) More here.

In the year 1919 the U.S. Navy sponsored a joint project to achieve transmission to and reception by submarines. This project involved the Edison Society, the U.S. Bureau of Standards, the Hammond Laboratory, and the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company. They tested an array of antenna and transmission types. The most crucial discovery was by Willoughby and Lowell of the Bureau of Standards. It was discovered that the very low frequencies suffered much less attenuation in sea water. Attenuation limits the range of radio signals and is affected by the materials a signal must pass through. We call this Path Loss. (I'll get into that in detail some other day.)

In their culminating test, a U.S. Navy submarine off the coast of New London received a signal on 24 kc that was broadcast from a radio station at Nauen, Germany, 3,234 miles away. Furthermore.. the 1921 Text book "Principles of radio communication" by John Harold Morecroft et al. clearly spelled out proper use of loop antennas on submerged submarines. This leaves two questions.
1. Why do so many texts list the 1930 date?
2. What happened in the intervening 11 years?

Submarine Telegraphs

I saw a book cover, ornate and gilt that read "Submarine Telegraphs." I was struck immediately with the wrongness of that configuration. You can't have a telegraph on a submarine, wireless yes, but telegraph no. After a bit of research I found three things.
1. Cable terminology has changed
2. Google books scans peoples hands by accident

Today we more often refer to these as sea cables, or marine cable, maybe even submarine cables. Our complete abandonment of the telegraph has slowly led us to refer to the cabel and not the device it connects to.

In 1902 The New York times published the article I clip above. Over 100 years ago we were so reliant on the telegraph that it made business sense to run 200,000 miles of submarine telegraph cable cable in 1,750 separate segments. As the tile says the cost of that was over a quarter of a million dollars. In 2006 moolah that equals $6,423,801. Of course the catastrophic devaluation of the dollar this year reduces that somewhat but I'm sure it's still a very big number. More here.

The construction of such an infrastructure commits you to both it's maintainence and compatibility moving forward. Those cables transmitted 4 billion messages a year. Of course that's less than our modern network move in a minute. Running a cable under the ocean is a big undertaking. At the time there were 1,180,000 miles of cable . Each carried dozens of individual wires, almost 4 million miles of copper.

At the time the aforementioned article was written, there were still cables being laid to criss-cross the Pacific to connect Canada with Australia. These cables weren't laid in straight lines. While that would have saved thousands of miles of copper, it's not practical. In order to access the wire, it needed to "land" at multiple islands. Just negotiating the connections with the multiple municipalities and nations was incredible. More here.

At the time all this was still battery powered. It was only in 1860 that terra voltaism became a possibility. A British civil engineer named Septimus Beardmore worked out a way to operate a telegraph system with only a single voltaic element. it consisted of a pair of dissimilar metals buried in the earth at opposite ends of the line. His early experiments worked over a 300 miles cable between the Cromer and Heligoland Islands.General Oceanic was the first company to attempt a production submarine telegraph. They incorporated in 1845. they later changed the name to the “General Oceanic & Subterranean Electric Printing Telegraph Company.” Mostly they talked a big game. They never built anything. Today we call it vaporware. the real hero of undersea cabling was Nathaniel J Holmes. In 1848 the Electric Company of London had fired Nathaniel J Holmes after the telekouphonon fiasco. He became the principal electrical engineer in domestic and submarine telegraphy. He became manager of the General Telegraph co. A company that lasted until 1951. Within a decade he was overseeing projects for the South-of-Ireland Direct Telegraph Company laying 60+ mile lengths under the sea.