Paul Robeson and the transatlantic phone line

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 January 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In September 1956, a telephone cable called TAT-1 was laid under the Atlantic Ocean, making high-quality transatlantic phone calls possible for the first time. Eight months later in May 1957, 1,000 people squeezed into St Pancras Town Hall in London for the world’s first transatlantic concert. The person performing, Paul Robeson, was a globally renowned singer, but he’d been banned from travelling outside the USA. So, he made use of the new transatlantic telephone line to perform to his fans in the UK. Ben Henderson speaks to John Liffen, who curated an exhibition on TAT-1 and the concert at the Science Museum in London. (Photo: Engineers build repeaters used in TAT-1. Credit: Russell Knight/BIPs via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Ben
0:09.9	Henderson.
0:10.9	It's May 1957 and a thousand people have squeezed into St. Pancras Town Hall in North London
0:18.1	for a historic concert.
0:20.0	Paul Robeson, an American singer, famous around the world for his deep, rich voice is the
0:25.5	man they've queued up to here, but he isn't there.
0:29.6	At least not physically, he is in a studio thousands of kilometres away in New York.
0:44.0	It was the world's first transatlantic concert.
0:47.1	Robeson's voice was carried under the ocean by a new telephone line called transatlantic
0:52.8	number one or tat one.
0:55.5	It was developed only the year before in 1956.
0:59.2	Tat one, this telephone cable, was really the first drop of rain in a shower led to a storm.
1:07.2	This amazing worldwide revolution in communications through the internet and the worldwide web.
1:16.2	That is John Liffon.
1:17.5	He curated an exhibition about Tat one and Robeson's concert for London Science Museum in 2016.
1:24.1	Sorry I've had to fade out that beautiful voice, but we'll hear more of Robeson later.
1:29.0	First, I need to tell you about this new cable that allowed people to hold audible conversations
1:34.4	across the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.
1:40.0	Cables were first laid under the Atlantic in the 1850s, but they could only transmit telegraph
1:44.8	messages, which were like text messages that would be typed out and handed to somebody.
1:49.9	The first time voices were carried across the Atlantic Ocean was in 1927, but it was
1:55.3	far too expensive for most people to use.
	...

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