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Why We Tip
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How the Internet Crosses Oceans
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How Credit Scores Work
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Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

In 1764, the footmen of London rioted to protect their tips. Night after night at Ranelagh Gardens, a fashionable pleasure ground in Chelsea, servants mobbed gentlemen who had tried to end the custom of vails, the cash that visitors were expected to hand to their hosts' staff. One account described fighting with drawn swords for some hours, and a carriage broken to pieces. The custom was already old. Historians trace it to Tudor England, when a guest at a great country house was expected to reward the servants who carried his bags, delivered his messages and saw him to the door. Critics came to see it as a tax on hospitality itself. The philanthropist Jonas Hanway campaigned against vails, and a few noblemen raised their servants' wages so the practice could stop. Scotland gave it up first, when Edinburgh's lawyers and landowners resolved that their servants would no longer take vails. James Boswell later boasted of this to Samuel Johnson. Johnson replied that the Scots had abolished vails only because they were too poor to give them. A century later, the custom reached America.

It arrived as a souvenir. Tipping caught on in the United States after the Civil War, when newly wealthy Americans traveling in Europe brought it home as a mark of sophistication. Employers soon found a use for it. The Pullman Company ran luxury sleeping cars on the railroads. It hired Black men as porters almost exclusively, many of them formerly enslaved, and paid them so little that investigators concluded they could not live without tips. To many Americans, it smacked of European servility. In 1909, Washington became the first state to outlaw tipping, making it a misdemeanor both to give a tip and to accept one. Mississippi, Arkansas, Iowa, South Carolina and Tennessee passed bans of their own, and Georgia followed. In 1916, a writer named William Rufus Scott published The Itching Palm, a book-length attack that called tipping "the modern form of Flunkyism" and "democracy's deadly foe." The laws were nearly impossible to enforce, since customers kept offering tips and waiters kept taking them. Washington had quietly repealed its ban in 1913, three years before Scott's book came out. By 1926, every state law against tipping was gone.

What lasted was a pay system built around the tip. When Congress extended the federal minimum wage to restaurant and hotel workers in 1966, it added a "tip credit," which lets an employer count part of a worker's tips toward the wage it owes. Since 1991, the federal minimum cash wage for tipped workers has been $2.13 an hour. Tips are supposed to cover the rest of the full federal minimum, and if they fall short, the employer has to make up the difference. Lately the tip has been spreading, too. Touchscreen payment tablets now suggest one at coffee counters and takeout windows. In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 72 percent of American adults said tipping was expected in more places than five years earlier. The early bans left a trace. Washington, the first state to ban tipping, now requires employers to pay tipped workers the full state minimum wage, currently $17.13 an hour, before a single tip. Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina also once outlawed tips. None of the three has a state minimum wage law today, and a server there can still be paid $2.13.

Load a website hosted in New York from a laptop in London, and your request will almost certainly cross the Atlantic on the seabed. More than 99 percent of the data moving between continents travels through undersea cables, according to the research firm TeleGeography. Your click is turned into pulses of laser light and fired down glass fibers about as thin as a human hair. The cable comes ashore at a landing station, an unremarkable building near the coast where it plugs into networks on land. Light in glass travels at about 204,000 kilometers per second, roughly two-thirds of its speed in a vacuum. In 1858, the first Atlantic telegraph cable needed about 16 hours to deliver a 98-word message from Queen Victoria. Today the fastest route between data centers near London and New York, a cable called Hibernia Express, completes a round trip in under 59 milliseconds. It cost more than $300 million and opened in 2015, shaving about 6 milliseconds off the previous best. It was built with high-frequency traders in mind, firms whose computers buy and sell in fractions of a second.

They are humbler objects than you might expect. For most of the journey a cable is about as wide as a garden hose, with the fibers wrapped in layers of plastic, copper and sometimes steel wire. In the deep ocean it simply lies on the bottom, often more than two miles down. Near the coast, where fishing boats and anchors are the bigger threat, the cable gets extra armor. It is usually buried about a meter under the seabed by a plow that the cable ship tows behind it. The ship pays out cable at around 6 knots, about 7 miles per hour. Every 60 to 100 kilometers or so sits a repeater, a sealed box that boosts the fading light. Repeaters need electricity, so some systems send as much as 15,000 volts down a copper conductor inside the cable. The people paying for all this have changed too. Now Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are among the biggest investors. TeleGeography tracks more than 600 active and planned cables, with over 1.5 million kilometers in service. Meta's planned Project Waterworth would stretch more than 50,000 kilometers on its own, longer than the Earth's circumference.

All that hardware breaks with dull regularity. The International Cable Protection Committee counts roughly 200 faults a year, and about two-thirds are caused by fishing gear and ships dragging their anchors. Sharks get blamed, but the committee's records show fish bites caused no faults between 2007 and 2014. You rarely notice an outage because traffic is spread across several cables and reroutes. Tonga had no such backup in 2022, when a volcanic eruption cut its only international cable. The country got by on makeshift satellite links for five weeks until a repair ship could mend it. A ship drags a grappling hook along the seabed until it snags the cable, hauls the broken ends on deck and splices in a fresh section. Lately the anchors have raised harder questions. On Christmas Day 2024, an oil tanker called the Eagle S dragged its anchor along the floor of the Baltic Sea for roughly 60 miles, damaging a power cable between Finland and Estonia along with four data cables. It was the third such incident in the Baltic in just over a year. Within weeks NATO had sent warships and patrol aircraft to watch the seabed. Finnish investigators later recovered the tanker's missing anchor.