The first chapter, “Circuitous Routes: From Topology to Topography,” gives a broad overview of the three major eras of cable development, providing the backdrop for the rest of the book. In it, I sketch out the large-scale cultural forces that affected cable networks, beginning with the copper telegraph cable’s relationship to colonization from the 1850s to the 1950s, extending through the coaxial telephone cable’s imbrication in postwar politics from the 1950s to the 1980s, and ending with emergence of fiber-optic cables in relation to deregulation and privatization from the 1990s on. To understand the routing of these networks, I argue that we need to move away from network topology, the analysis of the mathematical structure of connections, to topography, the analysis of how cables have been embedded into historical and geographic matrices. Counter to typical assumptions, cable geographies do not simply follow a terrestrial logic (they are often laid underwater when possible), an urban logic (they often connect suburban or rural environments), or a demand-driven logic (they often connect places that are already connected). Rather, I show how over the past hundred years transpacific cable systems have been constructed to be secure: they are deliberately routed to insulate signal flow from potential sources of natural and social interference, from a nuclear bomb to a terrorist attack. Cable routing is also driven by a competing tendency to interconnect: systems have often been routed in inconvenient and expensive ways in order to link with other systems. On the whole, this dynamic gives new routes traction in existing topographies, leaving us with a relatively centralized global network.