THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT 

 TELEGRAPH AND CABLE LINES 



SOME very notable achievements 

 are enumerated in the report for 

 1904 of General A. W. Greely, 

 Chief Signal Officer, U. S. A. A wire- 

 less telegraph system has been estab- 

 lished between Cape Nome and Fort St 

 Michael, which in an afternoon easily 

 transmits 5,000 words across the 107 

 miles of water. The apparatus was in- 

 vented entirely by the Signal Corps en- 

 gineers. A cable of 596 miles, of Amer- 

 ican make, has been laid between Sitka 

 and Valdes. During the year 55,559 

 messages were transmitted on the gov- 

 ernment lines, of which 31,020 were 

 commercial and 26,539 official messages. 

 The revenue of the lines is increasing 

 very rapidly. Of the Alaskan system 

 General Greely says in his report : 



"The undertaking is unique in the 

 annals of telegraphic engineering, 

 whether one considers the immense ex- 

 tent of territory, its remoteness from 

 the United States, the winter inaccessi- 

 bility of the regions, the severity of the 

 climate, the uninhabited and trackless 

 districts, or the adverse physical condi- 

 tions. If plotted on a map of the United 

 States this system would reach from 

 Wyoming to the Bahamas, off the coast 

 of Florida. The cables used would 

 reach from Newfoundland to Ireland, 

 and the land lines from Washington to 

 Texas. 



' ' Its totality also comprises elements 

 not elsewhere combined in a single sys- 

 tem — submarine, land, and wireless 

 methods, all worked as one component 

 and harmonious system. The entire 

 construction of 3,625 miles includes not 

 only 2,079 miles of cable and 1,546 

 miles of land lines, but also a wireless 

 system of 107 miles. 



' ' The United States has brought 

 southeastern Alaska, the Yukon Valley, 

 and the Bering Straits region into tele- 



graphic communication with the rest of 

 the civilized world. There yet lacks, 

 to complete the dream of a half cen- 

 tury since of telegraphically uniting 

 America and Asia via Bering Straits, a 

 cable to the Asiatic shore and a Rus- 

 sian land line of about 1,500 miles to 

 Nikolaevisk. 



' ' The Signal Corps wireless station at 

 Nome could communicate with a similar 

 station on the Kamchatka coast, but the 

 infertile and sparsely inhabited country 

 thence to the nearest Russian station of 

 Nikolaevisk renders any such enterprise 

 unlikely. 



" It is important to note that the com- 

 pletion of the Alaskan lines perfects the 

 military intercommunicating system of 

 the United States. The President or the 

 Secretary of War can now reach, over 

 strictly American lines of telegraph and 

 cable, every important military com- 

 mand from the icy waters of Bering 

 Strait to the tropical seas of the Sulu 

 Archipelago, with the exception of the 

 legation guard at Pekin. 



' ' The Alaskan cables were manufact- 

 ured in the United States, and are the 

 first American- made cables to be used 

 on a long line. 



" The seamless rubber cable between 

 Sitka and Seattle, 1,070 miles in length 

 and laid in an average depth of 1,000 

 fathoms and in an extreme depth of 

 1,700 fathoms, in addition to being less 

 expensive in its original cost, has a 

 transmitting power greater by 25 per 

 cent than was mathematically calcu- 

 lated on the basis of trans-Atlantic 

 gutta-percha cables. 



"The cable system of southeastern 

 Alaska, 413 miles in length, was oper- 

 ated without interruption during the 

 entire fiscal year, and a similar absence 

 from interruptions has marked the ex- 

 tension of 1,070 miles to Seattle. 



