TyCom owned eleven ships, and their job was to lay glass on the bottom of the sea. The company had designed, made and installed more than 300,000 kilometers of undersea cable, a part in most of the world's big ocean networks. In the summer of 2000, with carriers racing to wire every ocean, Tyco International put its cable arm up for sale to the public. It planned to keep about 88 percent of the shares for itself.

AT&T's Cable Fleet Changes Hands

TyCom grew out of two old businesses. Tyco bought Simplex Technologies, a cable factory in New Hampshire, in 1974. In July 1997 it bought AT&T's submarine systems business, with its labs in New Jersey and its fleet of cable ships. Simplex alone grew its yearly output from 22,000 to 60,000 kilometers of cable. The bet in the prospectus went further. TyCom planned to own its own network, the TyCom Global Network, and sell bandwidth on it.

Thirty-Two Dollars at the Top

TyCom priced at $32 a share in July 2000 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as TCM. The timing was the peak of the telecom boom. Within months, carriers stopped buying and capacity on the ocean floor sat unused. Tyco bought back the public shares, and TyCom filed to end its registration in December 2001. The cable business stayed inside the Tyco family for years and now runs on its own as SubCom.

Cover: Barks Fleeing Before the Storm, Jules Dupré. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for boats on a stormy sea (undersea cable fleet).