*The Price of Victory*

The author is N.A.M. Rodger, and the subtitle is A Naval History of Britain, 1815-1945.  An excellent book, volume three in a longer series.  Here is one excerpt:

…the most significant of all material innovations of the nineteenth century was virtually invisible.  It took twenty-five years of investment and some heavy losses, but the completion of the first reliable transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 may be taken to mark the moment when intercontinental communication times fell instantaneously from months to hours.  Contemporaries talked enthusiastically of the ‘practical annihilation of time and space,’ and for an imperial and naval power with more time and space to handle than anyone else, the submarine cable was truly revolutionary.  This different and expensive technology offered secure communications almost invulnerable to interference (except in shallow water).  Britain possessed most of the world’s capacity to manufacture underwater cables, had an effective monopoly of Gutta percha, the only good insulator, trained the majority of the world’s cable operators, owned (in 1904) more than twice as many cable-laying ships as the rest of the world put together, and alone had mastered the difficult art of recovering and repairing cables in deep water.  The high fixed costs, advanced technology and very long life (seventy-five years on average) of undersea cables made it extremely difficult for foreigners to break into this monopoly.

I will be buying and reading other books by this author, as this is one of the very best books of this year.