The information we send over the Internet follows a distinct physical pathway?it doesn't just evaporate when you hit send and then suddenly reconstitute itself at its destination. The data, translated into pulses of light, travels through twisted strands of fiber. In Manhattan, the Empire City Subway (abbreviated as ECS on the manhole cover) provides the pathways for that data. ECS maintains a network of underground conduits filled with cables for television, landlines, traffic signals, and the Internet.
As our tour group is dripping sweat onto the sidewalk (thanks, July heat wave), Blum recalls one winter evening when he watched workers thread a cable through the conduit. Beneath an ECS manhole cover, "there was no visible bottom, only an abyss of twisted cables," he writes in Tubes. It's so crowded down there that the workers joke that the cables pop out like snakes from a can when they take the cover off; they have to grease new cables in order to squeeze them through the conduits. "It's been a problem for 80 years," Blum says.
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