PK: A Museum for the Biggest Telecommunication Hub in the World

In 1920, the little building below was the biggest telecommunication hub in the world. It was the telegraph, rather than the telephone, but 14 cables that circled the globe terminated here at Porthcurno, in Cornwall at the end of that long peninsular in the South-West of England. It was first picked as a location in 1870 for a cable to India 150 years ago. The requirements were a sandy beach (to bury the cables), small (so of no interest to shipping since dragging anchors are the biggest danger to the cables), plus at the end of England...meaning in Cornwall. Porthcurno was a tiny valley that ended at a small beach. It ticked all the requirements.

Once that first cable to India terminated at Porthcurno, it was an obvious place to bring other cables ashore from other parts of the world. Porthcurno Telegraphic Station, or PK in telegraphic abbreviation, became the most important station in the world. Take a look at how extraordinary this was. This building is only about ten feet square, but the whole world came here.

Here's a look inside. Even today, this little building holds the record for the most undersea cables terminating in one place. The last cable only went out of service in 1970. There are now fiber optic cables that come up the same beach. The reasons for this being a good location haven't changed. But fiber optic doesn't stop here. It runs straight past to more modern facilities. Where did these cables go? Faial in the Azores, Brest in France, Bilbao in Spain, Gibraltar 1, Saint John's in Newfoundland, the Isles of Scilly, two cables to Carcavelos in Portugal, Vigo in Spain, Gibraltar 2 and 3. They then went on from there to other places like that first cable to India that terminated at Mumbai (then still called Bombay).

Despite my parents living in Cornwall for decades, I first heard about Porthcurno in this 1996 Wired article by Neal Stephenson, yes, 26 years ago. It was titled Mother Earth Mother Board: The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.

I loved the article both because it was fascinating and because I wished I could write like that. At that point, I was VP of Product Development for Compass Design Automation and had no idea I might become a writer (and I still wish I could write as well as Neal Stephenson, who wrote Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon, and many others that you should rush out and read). Here's Neal's description of the building at the top of this post:

On a sunny summer day, Porthcurno Beach was crowded with holiday makers. The vast majority of these were scantily clad and tended to face toward the sun and the sea. The fully clothed and heavily shod tourists with their backs to the water were the hacker tourists; they were headed for a tiny, windowless cement blockhouse, scarcely big enough to serve as a one-car garage, planted at the apex of the beach. There was a sign on the wall identifying it as the Museum of Submarine Telegraphy and stating that it is open only on Wednesday and Friday.

By the way, I totally recommend reading Neal's article linked above...but I have to warn you, it is over 40,000 words long. As you will know if you have read his books, Neal doesn't do short.

When I read that article and looked at a map, I realized it was not much more than an hour's drive from my parent's house. But I never was there conveniently on a Wednesday or Friday. I could take a chance like Neal did, that all the people who ran the museum would be in the local pub drinking beer. But it turned out that in the 26 years since Neal's Wired piece, the other part of the telecommunication hub, where messages were received and retransmitted, had been turned from a pub into the museum you see at the top of this post: The Museum of Global Communications. Open every day without having to go to the pub to find the docents.

So last week, when I was in Cornwall for reasons you know if you read Breakfast Bytes every day, I went there.

During the war, Porthcurno was an obvious target to get bombed. After all, one of the first things the Allies did in the war was to haul up and cut the German submarine cables. Cornwall is famous for tin mining (supposedly, Cornish pasties have that big crust so miners could eat them and then discard the crust without getting tin or lead poisoning). So Cornish miners took Porthcurno underground to be immune from bombing. Today it is the second part of the museum.

Even if you live in England, Porthcurno is pretty much off the beaten track (let's face it, it is off the beaten track even if you live in Plymouth, which is already in Cornwall). But it is worth a visit. I can't say "if you are passing through" since there is no way to be passing through Porthcurno. Like nearby Land's End, there is nowhere to go further. And, by the way, Land's End is not the most Western point of the UK mainland. See my post Off-topic: Geography to find out where it is. And once you've seen the museum, you can go to Porthcurno Beach, where these people are sunbathing on old telegraph cables and modern fiber-optic cables.

Museums

I really like museums of technology, and I've written about them here quite a bit. Take a look at:

• The Intel Museum
• German Computer Museums
• British Computer Museums
• The Computer History Museum
• Four Early Computers 1&2 and Four Early Computers 3&4
• Heinz Nixdorf's Legacy in Paderborn
• The San Jose Tech Museum
• Porsche Museum (video)
• Mercedes-Benz Museum
• TSMC Museum of Innovation
• Quarry Bank Mill: A Technology Museum from the Industrial Revolution

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