The Cable

by Gillian Cookson

  Gisborne described the occasion as ‘a very proud moment in my somewhat eventful career’. He looked forward to something more than the present scheme promised, to a time ‘when we can whisper mutual words of friendship through the mystic voice of electricity, even though oceans roll between us’. The Atlantic cable had already gripped public imagination around the globe, and there was rising expectation that the whole world would soon be in communication. Chandler White, though, the retired businessman and vice-president of the company, while agreeing with Gisborne to a point, had quite a different approach. White told his guests that the cable should be seen ‘in the light of a great commercial enterprise, directed to the realization of profit, the acquisition of gain, the accumulation of wealth’. He knew that the undertaking was a special one in many ways, but believed firmly that it was driven above all by ‘the mercantile principle’. This was the first inkling of a friction, not just between two men, but between the contrasting approach of engineer and businessman, of the tension between idealism and pragmatic commerce, which would both bedevil and propel the Atlantic project for a decade to come.

  The new company brought an immediate benefit to the colony, for it re-opened the old Electric Telegraph Co. office and used $50,000, which Cyrus Field had sent from New York, to settle the wages and debts owed from Gisborne’s work the previous year. White and Dudley Field then returned to New York, arriving there at the beginning of May, when the first formal meeting of the company took place. In a few minutes, $1.5 million dollars was subscribed. Morse was nominated as advising electrician, and was given a tenth interest in the company for $10,000. As well as his technical experience, Morse was able to offer some sway over the overland telegraph companies on the North American mainland, whose co-operation was vital to the new company’s success. Maury declined a share in the business, as it would have prevented him from using his influence in official circles when he already had ‘the success of the enterprise much at heart, and would be glad to do what I rightfully may to forward it’.

  All this had been achieved within four months of Field’s first meeting with Gisborne. But as his brother, Revd Henry Martyn Field, later wrote: ‘Well was it for them that the veil was not lifted, which shut from their eyes the long delay, the immense toil, and the heavy burdens of many wearisome years.’ Cyrus Field imagined that he was risking a few thousand which he could easily afford, on a venture which may come to nothing. He could not have thought that over the following twelve years he would spend most of his time re-crossing the Atlantic in a sometimes desperate attempt to keep the telegraph project alive, and ultimately gamble everything he owned.

  Even before the transatlantic cable was commissioned, there was much to organise on the American side of the ocean. It was no small undertaking to complete the land line across Newfoundland. The forty miles of telegraph line so far constructed were in the inhabited lowlands. The most difficult stretches remained to be done. There was also the Cabot Strait to cross. The government of Nova Scotia, fearing that they would be left out in the cold, had relented on the landing rights and the chosen route was now Cape Ray to Cape Breton Island, a distance of sixty nautical miles at up to 300 fathoms. A 140-mile link across Cape Breton would also be needed.

  Chandler White, who weeks earlier had been enjoying the views of New York from his retirement retreat, found himself appointed general manager of operations in St John’s. Matthew Field was placed in charge of construction of the Newfoundland land line, while Gisborne was designated consulting engineer. Within a month of the triumphant inaugural dinner, Gisborne had resigned from the company, for reasons not fully explained. Most likely he resented losing his autonomy and having to answer to Matthew Field, a man with little knowledge of telegraphs. Gisborne, though still only thirty years old, had a wealth of experience in this new industry.

  Matthew Field recruited 600 labourers for the Newfound-land job. The land telegraph was to be 400 miles in length, following the coast as it was near impossible to provision such a body of men on any inland route. Supplying building materials and food was difficult enough by sea. The great camp of huts and tents was serviced by the Victoria, delivering ‘barrels of pork and potatoes, kegs of powder, pickaxes and spades and shovels, and all the implements of labor’, all of which had to be man-handled inland to the camp. Henry Field saw the romance of this expedition, for it was ‘a wild and picturesque sight to come upon their camp in the woods, to see their fires blazing at night while hundreds of stalwart sleepers lay stretched on the ground. When encamped on the hills, they could be seen afar off at sea. It made a pretty picture.’ It was expected to take a few months, or at the worst be finished by the following year. In fact it was two and a half years before it was completed. As Cyrus Field later wrote, ‘It was a very pretty plan on paper. There was New York and there was St John’s, only about 1,200 miles apart. It was easy to draw a line from one point to the other, making no account of the forests and mountains and swamps and rivers and gulfs that lay in our way. Not one of us had seen the country or had any idea of the obstacles to be overcome.’ At one point during 1855 he ventured to ask of his brother how many more months the line would take. Matthew replied:

  How many months? Let’s say how many years! Recently, in building half a mile of road we had to bridge three ravines. Why didn’t we go round the ravines? Because Mr Gisborne had explored twenty miles in both directions and found more ravines. That’s why! You have no idea of the problems we face. We hope to finish the land line in ’55, but I wouldn’t bet on it before ’56, if I were you.

  The telegraph once completed ran from a cable station at Point-au-Basque, on the western extremity of Newfoundland, to Trinity Bay, facing the Old World on the east of the island.

  The Atlantic project had been an almost exclusively American enterprise, financed and driven by a small group of men. ‘Our little company raised and expended over a million and a quarter of dollars before an Englishman paid a single pound sterling,’ recalled Cyrus Field. Any one of the projectors was able to write a large cheque as further funds were needed, so there was no necessity even to ask the American public to invest. By the end of 1854, half a million dollars had been spent, some of it with Peter Cooper’s wire-drawing business, which supplied the overland sections of the telegraph.

  In one respect, though, the Americans could not be self-sufficient. England was the only possible source of submarine cables. British dominance in this area was partly a result of their monopoly on the insulating material, gutta percha. More importantly, much of the expertise accumulated during the short life of undersea cables was concentrated in Britain.

  Cyrus Field therefore set out again to London, to inspect samples of cable made for him by Kuper & Co. using copper cores from the Gutta Percha Co. His only other contact there was John Watkins Brett, who had become head of the Magnetic Telegraph Co. Gisborne, by then on travels around the United States, had furnished Field with a letter of introduction to Brett.

  Brett accompanied Field to the factories in London where cable was made, and offered advice on the best structure for a cable. He also invested in the new company and continued to represent its interests in Britain once Field had returned to the United States. While Field was in London on this first telegraph trip he took the opportunity to meet Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Charles Bright and Wildman Whitehouse, and to seek their advice on the transatlantic scheme. Brunel had no direct involvement with submarine telegraphs before or after Field’s visit, though he offered some thoughts on the subject to the American. He is also supposed to have taken Field to Millwall, where his gigantic ship Great Eastern was under construction, pointing out: ‘There is the ship to lay the Atlantic cable!’ This story has the ring of a myth about it. Henry Field, from whom the account originated, says in another context that once the transatlantic cable was a success, ‘a host’ had sprung up ‘to claim the honor’. Although Brunel was long dead by the time his great ship was converted to cable-laying, there were those who wished to
have his name associated more closely with deep-sea cables. But it was Bright and Whitehouse who were of more immediate use to Field, and both later held engineering positions with the Atlantic Telegraph Co. Although Whitehouse’s limitations were soon to be painfully exposed, both he and Bright in 1855 were ‘full of the ardor of science’ and zeal inspired by ‘the prospect of so great a triumph’.

  The submarine cable from Newfoundland to Cape Breton was to be laid from Port aux Basques by the barque Sarah L. Bryant, supervised by a British engineer, Samuel Canning. Field knew that there had been a problem in commissioning machinery to pay out the cable from the ship for this expedition, as Kuper’s were unable to supply it. Making the cable core, insulating it and then laying the cable were at that time three separate operations, carried out by different parties. Field must have believed that construction of the paying-out machinery was in hand, for he went ahead in chartering a luxury coastal steamer from the Charleston Line. This vessel, the James Adger, was needed to tow the Bryant across the Cabot Strait. The Adger, expensive at $750 a day because she was equipped with the most modern facilities, was essentially chosen for a social purpose. Fifty spectators, families of directors and other society figures, were invited along, embarking from New York early in August 1855.

  Field had made a huge miscalculation. He and the other directors of the revived Newfoundland company had spent such a time reassuring one another that the scheme must succeed, that they had overlooked the great difficulties still before them. The presence of fifty trippers in search of a carnival added to the problems, and to the embarrassment when the expedition failed. The weather turned rough and the Bryant could not be found. The Adger went instead to St John’s, where a round of dining and dancing took place. The two ships finally met up in Port aux Basques, where the Bryant was found to have been damaged by storms and in need of repair. Although she carried the cable-laying machinery, it had not been assembled. Other work remained to be done. No site had been identified where the cable could be brought ashore, so that a cable station had to be built from scratch in Cape Ray cove. The company’s steamship Victoria was on hand to help but had difficulty in landing the materials needed. There was further delay when fog descended for two days. When finally the Adger took the Bryant in tow, there was a misunderstanding, the Bryant lost her anchor and the vessels collided. The Bryant came off worse, narrowly avoiding sinking, while the Adger, her captain in a rage at having to take orders from Field, steamed away from the scene.

  After the Bryant had been repaired, Captain Turner of the Adger was involved in a furious row with Peter Cooper, on his first ever ocean voyage. Turner had been instructed by the engineer, Canning, to steer away from the port while keeping a flag on the cable station in line with a white rock on the mountain behind. In this way he would maintain a correct course. It became apparent to Cooper that Turner was not following this line, but the captain would only insist ‘I steer by my compass’. Cooper had a lawyer on board write to the captain, warning him that the company would hold him responsible for the loss of the cable if he did not change his route. ‘He then turned his course and went as far out of the way in the other direction.’

  When the wind turned into a gale, twenty-four miles of the cable had been laid, although they were only nine miles out from shore. The ship’s irregular course meant that there were great kinks in the line. These were likely to affect the future working and maintenance of the cable, assuming even that sufficient wire remained to finish the job. The total distance to be covered was sixty nautical miles, and although seventy-four miles of cable were laid, they were nowhere near their destination. Worse, Captain Turner refused to moderate the speed of his ship despite pleas by the cable-laying vessel. In the end, to save herself from being dragged under, the Bryant was forced to cut the cable, which was lost. Peter Cooper later placed the blame firmly with the stubborn captain. ‘We had spent so much money, and lost so much time, that it was very vexatious to have our enterprise defeated by the stupidity and obstinacy of one man.’ Turner, ‘one of the rebels that fired the first guns on Fort Sumner’, was subsequently killed in action fighting for the Confederacy.

  Canning and Cyrus Field were distraught at the expedition’s failure. All that could be done was to offload the unused length of cable in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and take the revellers back to New York. The company had spent $350,000 and had nothing to show for it. Peter Cooper tried to cheer Field, as he was optimistic that the lessons learned had been valuable ones. Success could not be far away. They now knew that it was impossible to use a vessel such as the Bryant, without its own steam power, on such a mission. The cable-laying ship needed its own steam, to better regulate its motion and speed, manoeuvring as the sea rose and fell so that the strain on the telegraph line was never too great nor too small.

  A year after the very public defeat of 1855, the links from St John’s were finally completed, with little fanfare. The ship Propontis had been fitted out for the purpose. Samuel Canning took charge, assisted by a young electrician called Charles de Sauty, later to be superintendent of the Newfoundland telegraph station during its short life of 1858. Again, seventy-four nautical miles of cable were laid, but this time successfully joining Cape Ray to Cape North on Cape Breton Island. Canning also put down a new twelve-mile stretch from Prince Edward Island to New Brunswick. The Nova Scotia telegraph company made the link from there to Cape Breton, only one and a half nautical miles in length. These small submarine connections brought the North American continent into direct communication with Newfoundland for the first time, via the 400-mile road and telegraph crossing the island, and a further 140-mile line across Cape Breton Island. The British mainland was already linked with Ireland and with continental Europe, so that there was only one further step needed to connect most of the world into one telegraph system. That one remaining gap was the Atlantic Ocean.

  2

  The Great Feat

  of the Century

  The new telegraph between St John’s and New York had swallowed a million dollars, but it ran smoothly and without interruption. The Atlantic projectors had learned a lot by 1855 and their work could be counted a success, as far as it went. The next stage, though, was daunting. It would be an operation on an unprecedented scale and at vast cost, laying almost 2,000 statute miles of cable at depths of two miles or more. No one had yet been able to answer Lieutenant Maury – could there be ‘a time calm enough, the sea smooth enough, a wire long enough, a ship big enough’? The Adger, after all, had failed on her much smaller mission. But the ambitious venture excited the public and challenged the engineers, and did not yet unduly bother the financiers.

  Ten years earlier, the idea of an Atlantic cable had seemed to Morse as wildly improbable as air travel. But a decade before that, land telegraphs had still been in the realm of theory, and it was not until 1845, some time after Morse had sent signals across New York harbour, that Cooke and Wheatstone’s single needle apparatus made overland telegraphs cheap, reliable and widespread. By 1850 all the main towns and cities of Britain were linked into the telegraph network.

  The electric telegraph had not been conceived by Cooke and Wheatstone. In fact, the idea of using electricity as a means of signalling was around before 1750, though the theory could not then be translated into much that was practical. The first functioning telegraph was set up by Francis Ronalds, a distinguished amateur scientist, in his Hammersmith garden in 1816. Ronalds laid eight miles of wire underground, insulated in glass tubes, and using a static charge. He was able to transmit signals, but too slowly, and the system was not sufficiently robust or reliable for commercial operation. Nor did Ronalds convince anyone that the device might actually have a useful purpose. The Admiralty politely rebuffed his suggestion that the telegraph may assist their operations. But later electricians acknowledged the part that Ronalds had played in laying the ground for telegraphy. After 1831, Michael Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction made further advances possible.

&
nbsp; Charles Wheatstone was professor of Experimental Philosophy at King’s College, London, when he met William Fothergill Cooke in 1837. Wheatstone, fascinated from an early age by sound, had started his career as a musical instrument maker. Later he turned to experiments on light and optics. Appointed to the chair at King’s in 1834, he started work on the transmission of electricity along wires, and was the first to measure the speed of electricity – inaccurately, as it turned out, at 250,000 rather than 186,000 miles a second – by experiment in the college vaults. He was also quick to recognise the importance of Ohm’s law as a foundation of electrical engineering. This was the simple rule, first stated in 1827, about the relationship between electromotive force, the resistance of conductors, and current.

  Cooke had been invalided out of the Indian Army and was considering a career in medicine when by chance he witnessed telegraph experiments in Germany. He had the idea of developing the electric telegraph in tandem with railways, which were also in their infancy. The scheme had great attractions – telegraphs could run conveniently alongside railway lines, and were exceptionally useful to railway companies in organising their operations. Cooke threw his energies into understanding telegraphy and developing new instruments. When he met Wheatstone, they pooled their experiences and took out their first joint patent in 1837. In 1838 a telegraph was at work alongside the Great Western Railway between Paddington and West Drayton, in Middlesex. Wheatstone, despite his theoretical interests, was particularly skilled in developing practical applications. Cooke, like Morse, did not come from a scientific background, but was rather a visionary who spotted early the tremendous potential of telegraphs. The partners worked together for a time to develop instruments, with Cooke handling the business matters for which he had great talent. Wheatstone’s first instrument had five needles, pointing to letters of the alphabet around a dial, needing six wires to make it work. A breakthrough came when it was realised that trained operators using a code and a single wire could send and receive messages much more speedily. Using a single wire also made the system less prone to break down. The code generally adopted was Morse’s, developed in 1838.