ALASKA GETS ITS FIRST “ALL-AMERICAN” TELEGRAPH CONNECTION
On March 2, 1903, Congress funded undersea telegraph cables between Seattle, Sitka, and Juneau, which would connect Alaska’s military posts to their Washington, D.C., headquarters. Previously, Alaskan telegraphs reached the Lower 48 via Canadian wires.
To tackle the job, the U.S. Army used a Spanish ship seized off the coast of Cuba in 1898, during the Spanish-American War. Named the Rita by the Spanish, the army redubbed it the Burnside, after Civil War major general Ambrose Burnside. The nearly 300-foot iron steamer could carry 300 miles of cable.
The Burnside finished laying the first 291 miles of cable between Sitka and Juneau in October 1903. By the following August, it had strung over 1,000 miles of line from Sitka to Seattle. Under further appropriations, the Burnside extended the cables from Sitka to Valdez in 1904 and on to Seward in 1905. Twenty years passed before large sections needed replacement. The first undersea telephone cables reached Alaska in 1956.
Today’s cable ships connect Alaskan communities to fiberoptic cables. Prince of Wales Island in southeast Alaska received its first undersea fiberoptic connection in 2022. In September 2023, a cable ship repaired fiberoptic lines in the Beaufort Sea that were sheered by sea ice, disrupting cellular and internet service from Nome to Utqiagvik.
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