Transatlantic Fiber-Optic Expialidocious

Before the internet went global, one undersea gamble made it possible.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Roman Mars?

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• 1:00Roman Mars?

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• 1:40Roman Mars?

  This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars, and I'm here with 99PI producer and reporter Christopher Johnson. Hey, Christopher.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Hey, Roman. So I am in New York City, as you know, and of course, you are in California, and we're connected over Zoom.

• 1:56Roman Mars?

  We are. It's good to see you.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  It's always good to see you. And you're coming in crystal clear, which is great. And this is especially amazing considering that my voice and my face are traveling all the way across the continent to you through wires, Roman. Infrastructure.

• 2:17Roman Mars?

  Love it.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  And that infrastructure uses fiber optics. How familiar are you with fiber optics, Roman?

• 2:24Roman Mars?

  Well, I think I know the basics. It's light carrying information down glass fibers. I think I can, yeah, I can picture it.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Excellent, excellent. That's exactly right. So at its simplest, fiber optics involves basically translating information, like our conversation right now, into pulses of light. And that light zips down those long glass fibers that are finer than strands of hair. And then that light is turned back into information on the other side. And this is what carries most of our internet. A lot of people might think that our information moves through the air, but it doesn't.

• 3:04Roman Mars?

  That's interesting because, I mean, it's easy to have this misconception because, you know, like even the way we talk about the internet, we talk about the cloud and wifi. Like, it makes it feel like it's bouncing around in the sky.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Totally. But in fact, the internet depends on a massive amount of physical fiber optics cables that are crisscrossing the globe. Some of those lines are on land, but there are also one and a half million kilometers, Roman Mars, of fiber optics cables stretched across the bottom of entire oceans, carrying our Zoom calls and our TikToks and our shitposts all over the world.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  About 95% or so of intercontinental traffic goes via submarine telecommunications cables. So our conversation is definitely going through cables.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  This is Jane Raffino. She's a researcher studying global subsea cables.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  No matter how wireless your device is, and no matter how wireless you think your connection is, there is always a wire somewhere.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Now, nearly all of the data moving around the planet this second, Roman, is traveling across the bottom of an ocean somewhere. And the reason I'm telling you all of this is because... There's about a million miles of these submarine fiber optic cables in use today, and they all owe their existence to the one, the one cable, the first, the original, the OG cable that started it all.

• 4:43Roman Mars?

  OK, tell me about the OG cable.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  It's known as the Transatlantic Telephone Fiber Optic Submarine Cable 8, or TAT-8. It was the first ever fiber optic cable to cross an entire ocean, and it really proved what fiber was capable of. And TAT-8 has been on an adventure. So I want to tell you how TAT-8 came to be, and how it was this huge part of a telecommunications revolution, and how it paved the way for the internet that we have today.

• 5:21Roman Mars?

  Sounds great. Let's do it.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  OK, so first, just a little bit of quick background. Fiber optic technology did not start out as a way of communicating. Actually, at first, it was basically just this Victorian-era novelty.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  I mean, it was essentially like a Victorian party trick. They started to use fiber to transmit light, but it was more for like, you know, a decorative garden or a party trick. They sort of had this technology, and they weren't quite sure what to do with it.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  And then into the late 19th century, you see fiber optics getting used in medicine, like doctors are using illuminated glass to light up bodies during surgery. But it really took until the second half of the 20th century for people to see the potential of fiber optics and telecommunications. And then in the mid to late 70s, you really start to see the first fiber optic telephone lines.

• 6:22Roman Mars?

  And so what had they been using as telephone cables like up to this point?

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Basically copper. So in the 1960s, phone cables were still copper based. And that was a problem when it came to long distance submarine cables that connected, say, like the US and Europe. Just because those cables couldn't carry a lot of calls before the line started to sound basically like shit, or it just became too busy for more phone traffic.

• 6:49Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, when I was very little, I do remember, especially long distance calls, they sounded long distance, like you felt the physicality and the limits of the physicality of the wires. But we were just kind of used to it. Like that was, that was just our lives.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And fiber optics offered an alternative to that. A fiber optic line could theoretically carry way more calls more quickly with way less static. Pretty good, right?

• 7:19Roman Mars?

  Big improvement, yeah.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  And so very gradually, these old copper cables were getting replaced with the new fiber optics technology. And not just phone lines. AT&T did the first ever live fiber optics TV transmission when it broadcast the Winter Olympics in 1980 from Lake Placid. And then they made this little promo film to brag about it.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  The latest communications technology was applied in transforming Lake Placid into a global communications control center. The potential of light wave technology inspires predictions of space age home information and entertainment centers in the near future.

• 7:59Roman Mars?

  Clearly, when you have ads about your backbone technology that nobody can really experience, they're like putting all their chips in on fiber optics, right? This is, this is the moment where the fiber optics revolution is about to happen.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  I mean, the new technology was impressive, but there were also big limitations. Fiber optic lines were still only available in a few places and for relatively short distances. And all of it is terrestrial. All these fiber optics lines are on land. So it's still pretty limited. There's also this other thing that had been lurking since even before fiber optics that's kind of threatening to squash the technology before it really even took off.

• 8:42Roman Mars?

  Oh, no. Who's this villain?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Satellites, Roman Mars. Satellites.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  So as soon as satellite technology developed, as soon as they started to put satellites for communication in space, a lot of these cable and telephone companies said, you know, well, we're cooked. Everything's going to be satellites. These are the last cables. We're going to go straight from telegraph cables to obsolescence.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  At the time, satellite technology was becoming more and more of a thing. There were already some communication satellites in use. And so when it came to global telecommunications, the assumption was that satellites were the future and that they would be the thing that fully replaced those old copper cables.

• 9:28Roman Mars?

  And so why is that?

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Well, for one, satellites are in space. This was the tail end of the space race, and we were still pretty obsessed with the final frontier. And so beaming phone calls to and from a satellite hovering above the earth, how cool, man. Like, that was the future. Not moving stuff through boring, dusty-ass copper cables.

• 9:55Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  Satellites were a genuine competitor because they could carry voice traffic a lot more cheaply because cables are incredibly expensive to build.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  And on top of all of that, satellite telecommunications was just simpler, at least on a diplomatic level.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  These cables that go between countries had to be built with consortia. So companies from different countries had to collaborate with each other. And with a satellite, an American company could just do it.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  With satellites, the US could build and operate its own equipment with pretty much complete autonomy, which the US government preferred.

• 10:37Roman Mars?

  Yeah, well, I would prefer that, too. Yeah, yeah. If you've ever been part of an HOA, you would prefer this, too.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I get that. And so despite all of its promise, it wasn't a given that fiber optics would be the future for big, long-distance telecommunications. But fiber did have one very big champion.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  AT&T was at the front of the fiber optics evolution, mostly because they were the experts on long-distance telecom cables. They'd been laying subsea cables all over the planet for nearly like 100 years. They had all the know-how, they had all of the equipment, they were deep on cables. And so, as satellites were kind of threatening cables, researchers at Bell Labs, which was a part of AT&T, they went hard on developing fiber optics. They teamed up with telecom companies in the UK and in France, and they formed this consortium, and then they came up with this plan.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  They said, "Hey, y'all, let's build a massive submarine fiber optic cable and run it from the east coast of the US all the way over to Western Europe." This would be the first-ever fiber cable to cross a whole ocean. Super ambitious.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  There's a big difference between doing it on land and doing it at sea across almost 4,000 miles. And the idea that you would innovate with something that goes into the sea is not, was not obvious. So, this was really untested.

• 12:21Roman Mars?

  Okay, so the researchers and scientists, they're gonna make this leap, that they want to prove, they need to prove, that fiber optics cables are better than satellites. And so they start building this cable that's kind of never been done before, like an undersea fiber optic cable. They'd done copper wires across the Atlantic, but never fiber optics. So how are they gonna go about doing that?

• 12:42Speaker 02

  I mean, basically, they just pulled out all the stops. In the early 1980s, they started doing all of these stress tests around the world. They dropped some simulation cables into the North Atlantic to see how things like temperature and pressure change affected signal transmission, to see if laying and recovering the cable caused any breaks in the fiber. Pretty fundamental stuff.

• 13:07Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  They also built a thing that's called the Ocean simulation facility to see if deep sea conditions mess with the cable's ability to transmit light across all that distance. And that was at the Bell Labs Holmdel complex, which, by the way, is where they now film Severance.

• 13:24Roman Mars?

  Oh, cool.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so things are going pretty well for Bell Labs until during one of their tests, they discovered breaks in the cable's electrical signal. And this was maybe something that could derail the entire project.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  And that is where we get to the famous story that the subsea cable industry gets very, they get very, they get very nervous when you mention the S word, and that is sharks.

• 13:53Roman Mars?

  Oh, man.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:55Roman Mars?

  Sharks are coming.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  According to Jane, one of the lead researchers at Bell Labs had the shark teeth that had been pulled from the glitchy cable, like literal shark teeth Roman Mars.

• 14:07Roman Mars?

  That's amazing.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  I mean, can you imagine? You've been running all these tests and hither and yon over the planet to test this thing out. You got simulations going to make sure that this first ever subsea cable will be completely foolproof. And you've got to get it right. You test for temperature, pressure, tension. And here comes jaws.

• 14:34Roman Mars?

  I mean, sharks weren't really the thing back then. If you remember, I could barely go into an actual pool in the backyard because of jaws. So, but were sharks like a real problem? That seems like even if, I don't know, an occasional shark bit an occasional cable. Is this a real problem?

• 14:50Speaker 02

  I mean, in terms of finding actual teeth in the cable.

• 14:55Roman Mars?

  Okay.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  I shrug. There are competing stories, shall we say, around this. In terms of the faults in the cable, Jane says that those were probably abrasions from the seafloor. But with the stress and the high stakes, and they don't want to take any chances with this thing, the engineers and researchers start doing all of these kind of hilariously thorough tests to figure out how to shark proof this cable.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  For example, they go to aquariums in Connecticut and in Florida, and they put these cables into the shark tanks and they dangle them like a toy right in the sharks' faces.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  And really, the only way that they could get the sharks to go anywhere near the cables is, you know, they wrapped it in fish. So basically like, oh, my dog needs to take a pill. I'm gonna hide it in some cheese. And there was just like, there was no correlation. There was no pattern, no evidence that sharks are particularly attracted to the cables.

• 16:03Roman Mars?

  I mean, what I love about this is that this is a scientific test that a third grader would devise.

• 16:11Roman Mars?

  It's so understandable. It's so great. I love it.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  And the good thing about all of these tests is that they made engineers add these extra layers of protection and insulation to the cable, which in 1986, they started to lay across the floor of the Atlantic. I mean, in some places, they're dropping the cable to more than 26,000 feet down. AT&T actually ran this pretty cool TV ad that showed their crews at sea unspooling the cable and dropping it off the ships.

• 16:47Speaker 05

  But today, we're no longer just a phone company or just a telephone network.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  And the whole time, the voiceover is just flexing about how this one new fiber optic cable was such an incredible leap in global communications.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  Supported by a worldwide intelligent network that will someday make it possible for people anywhere, at any time, to be able to send or receive information.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  The cable ran from England and France across to a town called Tuckerton on the Jersey Shore, not too far from Atlantic City. By the way, there's even a plaque there now, and it marks the US terminal for the Transatlantic Telephone Fiber Optics Submarine Cable 8, AKA Tat 8.

• 17:32Roman Mars?

  Wait, what?

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Well, because there were already seven transatlantic cables, but they were all copper based.

• 17:38Roman Mars?

  OK, got it.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  So then, in December 1988, they finally switched on this new, first of its kind, state of the art cable, and it worked.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  And AT&T decides to get Isaac Asimov to launch the cable, to kind of make the first call. So they have a video call between Paris, London, and New York. And Isaac Asimov sends the first message, and he talks about, you know, "Welcome, everyone, to this maiden voyage on a beam of light." I mean, it's really beautiful opening statement.

• 18:17Roman Mars?

  I love it. I love that they always had this notion of the science fiction nature of their science. You know what I mean? Like, having someone like Isaac Asimov, like, on the ready for these things. Just added some grandeur to all this stuff.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:31Roman Mars?

  OK, so they lay it down, and they introduce it with all this pomp and circumstance. And you have Isaac Asimov there with his mutton chops and everything. I mean, you know, but then in the end, did Tat8 end up truly revolutionizing telecommunications?

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Oh, it absolutely did. I mean, first of all, it was a quantum leap in capacity. Tat8 could carry 40,000 phone calls at once. That's 10 times the capacity of its predecessor, which was a copper-based cable. And then there's the whole cable versus satellite debate. But when Tat8 was switched on, the superiority of subsea fiber optics became very clear.

• 19:09Roman Mars?

  How so?

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Well, satellites had this pernicious problem with latency, where the time it took for a signal to go up into space and come back down had caused delays. Now, they were tiny, but they were enough to drive you absolutely nuts. And signal quality was only kind of so-so. But with Tat8, things were immediately so much better. And Tat8 proved that submarine fiber cables could actually be cheaper to make, to install, to fix. And data was way more secure. And fiber's bandwidth was way higher.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  And also, TAT-8 was coming into use just as the World Wide Web was taking off. So it was also perfectly positioned to fill the immediate demand for infrastructure that could move all this information all over the world quickly. So TAT-8 showed the world of international telecom that a long-distance, subsea fiber-optics cable could really, basically, crush it. In fact, it worked so well that engineers at the time were positive that this would be the first and the last cable like this that they would ever have to install.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  When it was launched, there was this belief that this is gonna be so much capacity, we're not gonna need anything else, ever. I swear, I'll never ask for any more capacity. And it was full within 18 months, because of course, you know, just like when you build a highway, it increases traffic. You build a cable, and it increases traffic. So it's full to capacity within 18 months, which, you know, is not a huge problem because more cables come after it.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  So once TAT-8 proved the concept of international submarine lines, the FCC invested more and more in fiber-optics cables. And so by the 1990s, the capacity of fiber optics overtook satellites, and it just kept growing from there, to the point that today, we are completely reliant on this technology, with hundreds and hundreds of those sprawling, subsea cables that are enmeshing the planet right now.

• 21:20Roman Mars?

  I mean, it's really amazing to think about it and to picture it. But I do want to go back to the satellites for a second, because they obviously didn't go away. So if most of the global internet's infrastructure is fiber-optic cables, where do the satellites actually fit into that?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  So today, satellites only carry a teensy amount of global internet traffic, but they are still a huge part of our internet ecosystem. And this is especially true for remote, low-connectivity places that don't have their own fiber-optics lines yet, or where maybe there's only one cable, and it could be wiped out by a natural disaster, say. And in places like that, satellites are a lifeline for connection and for redundancy. But when it comes to total data capacity, it's not even close. Today, fiber optics are the way of the world.

• 22:13Roman Mars?

  Well, this brings up another question for me, because... You know, who owns all these subsea cables that we're reliant on that crisscross the globe and circle it and send all the traffic around? I mean, you know, that one Tat8 was a consortium of, you know, the US and AT&T and France and stuff like this. Are there still like cooperative international consortia to make everything else happen?

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Mostly, no. There are still some cables that are built or owned like that, but most submarine cables today, it won't surprise you, are in private hands. For example, a small handful of companies install most of the world's subsea cables. And when it comes to ownership, the usual suspects: Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon. Together, they either own or they lease half of all the bandwidth across the world's subsea cables.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  And now, thanks to AI, we are in the middle of a subsea cable boom. All of these tech giants need wires that connect all those data centers around the world, and so they're investing more and more in subsea cables. So, for example, there's a project underway right now to build what will be the world's single longest submarine cable, connecting five continents. Now, as for Tat8, even though it revolutionized global telecom and it played this huge role in the birth of the internet, Tat8 won't be part of this AI explosion.

• 23:51Roman Mars?

  What? Why?

• 23:52Speaker 02

  We'll talk about that after the break.

• 24:06Roman Mars?

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• 24:46Roman Mars?

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• 25:28Roman Mars?

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• 25:51Roman Mars?

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• 26:26Speaker 02

  Okay, Roman, we are back.

• 26:28Roman Mars?

  We are back.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  And now I think it's time to have maybe a little retirement party for Tat-Aid.

• 26:35Roman Mars?

  Retirement, okay.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Because for as much as Tat 8 revolutionized telecommunications, the cable itself didn't actually work for all that long. It was switched on in 1988 and it stopped working in 2002.

• 26:53Roman Mars?

  What?

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Just 14 years later, I know.

• 26:56Roman Mars?

  Wow, okay, RIP Tat 8, yeah. It was just, and it was just sitting there, it's carcass, it's just been sitting there dead?

• 27:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just been sitting there chilling at the bottom of the Atlantic. And now, almost 40 years after it was installed, Tat 8 is finally being pulled out.

• 27:13Roman Mars?

  So why are they bothering to pull it up now, like 40 years later? Like, what's, it's been there so long, why not just leave it?

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Well, ordinarily, that's exactly what they do. They would just leave the cables down there.

• 27:24Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  They don't want to mess with the seabed and recovery can be expensive and it's labor intensive.

• 27:30Roman Mars?

  And there's sharks down there?

• 27:32Speaker 02

  There are sharks down there. But now, there are so many cables running along the bottom of our oceans and seas. And as vast as those oceans and seas are, there are actually limited ideal routes.

• 27:48Roman Mars?

  Right.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  That we can run when you account for protected areas, military areas. So there's all this competition for seabed use, which means that now, to make room, they've got to start pulling up some of those old lines, like Tat 8. Also, the Tat 8 cable is made of all these pretty valuable components and those parts are getting stripped and recycled.

• 28:10Roman Mars?

  That makes sense, that makes sense. So what is this process like? It sounds incredibly hard.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  I am so glad you asked because this is probably my favorite part of this story. I mean, I think it is just so, so cool how they do this. Partly because even though our internet is based on this incredibly fast, efficient technology, it still takes so much labor and human hands to deal with this infrastructure, from installing it to maintaining it and now recovering it. And I talked to Jane about this because she actually met some of the crew of a recovery ship.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  The ship itself can carry a crew of 14 people. There's a captain, there are the coilers, there are a standard ship's engineer, and they come from all around the world. And they go out to sea for two to two and a half months at a time.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  So they basically go out, they collect a section of Tat8 cable, and they bring it back, they offload it, they resupply the ship, they get more coffee and snacks, maybe get some rest. And then they head back out to pick up where they left off. They use a set of coordinates to find and pick up the cable where they left off. They get out to where they generally think that the cable is based off this data. And then they take this flat grapnel hook, they call it a flatfish, which is attached to a long, long rope. And they throw it into the water

• 29:51Speaker 02

  to around where they think they can snag the cable.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  There are some sections that are really deep, so like three miles. Three miles, even just like a three mile long rope is actually quite difficult to imagine because you can't see it all.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  And they're trying to catch a cable that is how big?

• 30:12Speaker 03

  The deep sea portion of Tat8 at least is exactly the diameter of like a candle that you would stick in a candlestick on your cable. And I know that because I keep my Tat8 samples in an Ikea candlestick in my office.

• 30:30Roman Mars?

  Oh, I was not picturing something the width of a candle. I was picturing like maybe like sort of a arm length diameter, like if you put your arms in a circle. I thought that was the cable we're talking about. So how do they hook it? How do they get it on board? I don't even understand.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  So they throw the hook off the ship. And then they slowly drag the hook across the bottom of the sea until like a like you're fishing.

• 30:57Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  They get a bite, they get a snag, and then they start winching the cable into one of the ship's cable tanks, where there are these guys called coilers waiting to get to work.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  And at sea, it's it's part of their job to stand in the tank and grab the cable as it comes through the hatch. And they walk backwards in slow circles to coil the cable.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  And this is all just so fascinating to me because they have to walk backwards in these slow circles, coiling the cable just right. And they do this for eight whole hours.

• 31:36Roman Mars?

  Oh, my lord.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and because this can make you hella dizzy, they have to take breaks. They have to break it up into half hour shifts.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  One of the coilers describes the shift as 14 cigarettes long. So you walk backwards for 30 minutes, you climb up the ladder, which is about 10 meters back to the deck. You have your two cigarettes and back down into the hold for another 30 minutes.

• 32:01Roman Mars?

  That sounds grueling.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Oh, it gets so much worse.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  They are out in the open ocean, three meter swells, they're down in the hold of the ship, pulling in cable, it could be 30 degrees Celsius down there, and you're being tossed around.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  30 degrees Celsius, that's pushing 90 degrees Fahrenheit. And they still have to pull in the cable, stack it just so. And in the meantime, they're making sure that they're not sailing right into like a hurricane.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Because that is the reality, especially in the mid to late summer in the Atlantic. And of course, in the colder months, you're dealing with sea ice. I mean, the ocean is the ocean.

• 32:46Roman Mars?

  Truer words are never spoken, the ocean is the ocean.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Ocean, Roman.

• 32:50Roman Mars?

  Okay, so the parts they've recovered that they've pulled up from the ocean, what happens to it from there?

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Okay, so they can recover and bring back like 1,000 kilometers of Tat8 cable at a time, sometimes more.

• 33:05Roman Mars?

  Oh, wow.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  And they take Tat8 to a port where then it gets stripped apart and it gets recycled, basically. The only thing that they can't really reuse are those long glass fibers. But there's also copper in the cables, and that's really valuable right now because there's a global copper shortage. There's also steel in Tat8, and that gets pulled out and turned into fencing. And the plastic gets turned into consumer goods.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  So when next time you're washing your hair, you can imagine that you could be squeezing your shampoo from part of what used to be the first fiber optic transatlantic cable.

• 33:46Roman Mars?

  It's true downcycling right there.

• 33:49Roman Mars?

  That revolutionized communications is now shampoo bottle.

• 33:54Roman Mars?

  That is hilarious. It's ironic to me that the thing that made it, this technological leap, the glass fibers are useless and all the stuff that's around it is what is harvested and turned into.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  All that shark-proofing.

• 34:07Roman Mars?

  Yeah, all that shark-proofing is why it's valuable and why it can now hold your shampoo

• 34:15Roman Mars?

  in your shower. I can think of no nobler afe. Well, okay, so Tat8, you had a good run. We stripped you for parts. You even got a plaque.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  We salute you, Teddy.

• 34:24Roman Mars?

  Thank you for your service, Teddy.

• 34:40Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was reported and produced this week by Christopher Johnson and edited by Kelly Prime, mixed by Martine Gonzalez, music by Swan Royale and George Langford, fact-checking by Graham Hesha. Jane Rafino's story about Tat8 appears in the May-June issue of Wired Magazine. It's got lots of cool pictures from the recovery ship. Go check it out. We'll have a link in the show notes. Special thanks this week to historian Bill "The Cable Guy" Burns and Jeff Hecht. Kathy Toor is our executive producer. Kirk Colston is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeón, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Le, LaShma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradly, and me, Roman Mars.

• 35:22Roman Mars?

  The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building. In beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.