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Giant 'telescope' links New York and London


Corcaigh

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"The vision of Victorian engineer Alexander Stanhope St George had finally been realized.

On Tuesday a drill bit emerged from the banks of the Thames, completing the transatlantic "tunnel."

In all its optical brilliance and brass and wood, there stood the Telectroscope -- a 37 feet long by 11 feet tall dream of a device allowing people on one side of the Atlantic to look into its person-size lens and, in real time, see those on the other side via a recently completed tunnel running under the ocean. (Think 19th century webcam. Or maybe Victorian-age video phone.)"

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/05/22/scope.project/index.html

Of course there isn't an actual tunnel, just teh internets connecting two HDTV cameras, but it's a nice idea.

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OK, for you it is an actual tunnel, you just can't get inside it to prove it. You have to believe and trust the visual 'evidence'.

Either photons travel through an underwater cable, or electrical charge travels through an underwater cable. :whoknows:

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I should've said video conferencing. Point is, this might be the most pointless fulfilled dream in history. Not exactly sure how people seeing each other in "real time" across oceans is newsworthy.

It's not really a fulfilled dream. It's an artist's performance piece. Read the article again.

Of course only part of this story is true.

St. George is an artist in Britain who does have a grandfather -- minus the great prefix -- named Alexander.

And the transatlantic tunnel is really a transatlantic broadband network rounded off on each end with HD cameras, according to Tiscali, an Italian Internet provider handling the technical side of the project.

As for the Telectroscope -- well, it was a fanciful idea that, according to St. George, came about from a typo made by a 19th-century reporter who misspelled Electroscope -- a device used to measure electrostatic charges - as Telectroscope.

"The journalist also misunderstood what it was about and wrote in the article that it was a device for the suppression of absence," said St. George. "The accidental hope captured their imagination and lots of people at the end of the 19th century thought it was a great idea."

The Telectroscope captured St. George's imagination five years ago when he began pondering how to do a project on the childhood fantasy of digging a hole to the opposite side of the Earth. And because the artist also happens to have an expertise in Victorian chronophotography -- a precursor to cinematography -- he had a slight idea of where to look for the proper equipment.

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I should've said video conferencing. Point is, this might be the most pointless fulfilled dream in history. Not exactly sure how people seeing each other in "real time" across oceans is newsworthy.

It's a tourist attraction. It's a piece of art. It's history.

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Sigh... rather unimaginative, are we?

He has a point ... I mean what about those people who travelled around the world by balloon in less than 80 days. What's the point when a jet aircraft can do it in much less.

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He has a point ... I mean what about those people who travelled around the world by balloon in less than 80 days. What's the point when a jet aircraft can do it in much less.

I mean really... how many times did Steve Fossett crash while trying to balloon around the world? Idiot should have just taken Continental. :silly:

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