After innumerable failed attempts, the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic was finally completed on 5 August 1858. At long last, people could hold direct conversations between the continents - albeit at the glacial rate of a few words per hour. Bulky copper cables remained the status quo for over a century. And then along came optical fibres: glass cylinders the width of a human hair. Capable of transmitting information over vast distances using laser light, they enabled our modern connected world. Today, more than 2 billion kilometres of optical fibres criss-cross the globe, with more rolling off the production line at a rate nearly 20 times the speed of sound.
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