How did you think telephone calls could be made outside the UK (as we are an island) before the satellite age? It would need very tall telephone poles to cross the sea !
and when they laid the first cables on the sea bed they discovered that the bottom of the ocean wasn't quite as flat as they expected, and they used to mark the end of the cable mid-ocean with a buoy, go back to port for some more cable and go back out and find the buoy. no sattelite navigation, just a good old compass, pretty clever lads.
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