The Cable

by Gillian Cookson

  News of the triumph had been telegraphed to every part of North America after Field’s message. ‘The impression of this simple announcement it is impossible to conceive. In some places all business was suspended; men rushed into the streets, and flocked to the offices where the news was received.’ At a religious gathering in Massachusetts, 1,000 people rose to their feet and cheered at the news, then gave thanks to God for this great feat, ‘calculated to hasten the triumphs of civilisation and Christianity’. A hundred guns were fired on Boston Common, and New York, once it could believe it, broke into ‘tumultuous rejoicing’. The newspapers talked of nothing else, and Cyrus Field, as he later put it, ‘awoke and found myself famous’. A modest man, he was careful to credit the work of his ‘co-workers’ in the achievement. But Field was the figurehead, and within hours ‘his name was on millions of tongues’. Congratulatory telegrams flooded along the New York and Newfoundland line to Field, including ones from President Buchanan, from Peter Cooper and from the Governor General of Newfoundland. Some came from unlikely quarters: ‘Beech Tree, chief of Oneida tribe, honors the white man whom the great spirit appoints to transmit his lightnings through the deep waters.’ The telegraph clerk, plainly unfamiliar with a third-person form of address, had added at the bottom: ‘No signature.’

  Charles Bright communicated with the Atlantic company board as soon as the Agamemnon reached Valentia, reporting good signals with the Niagara in Trinity Bay. The engineer and his colleagues then enjoyed their first sound sleep for weeks, before joining in a round of civic banquets and celebrations in Valentia, Killarney and Dublin, where the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, on behalf of the queen, knighted the twenty-six-year-old engineer. Bright became the youngest man for generations, as well as the first electrical engineer, to receive such a distinction.

  No messages were allowed to pass on the cable until the electricians had finished their tests. The public was impatient, even though most would never be able to afford to use an Atlantic telegraph personally. Yet they longed for news, for confirmation that the miracle really had come to pass. The silence was broken on 16 August, when the directors cabled their American associates: ‘Europe and America are united by telegraphic communication. Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill towards men.’ The next message was a congratulatory note of 98 words from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan, which in the checking and rechecking took sixteen hours to transmit. Once the White House had convinced itself this was not a hoax, the president penned a reply of 149 words, sent in ten hours.

  Confirmation that the cable worked was a cue for further outpourings of joy. In cities across the United States, guns were fired, flags flew and church bells rang. New York was illuminated on a scale never before seen, ‘as if it were intended to light up the very heavens’. This brought further drama when the blazing lights of City Hall set fire to its cupola, which was destroyed. The hall itself narrowly escaped being burned to the ground.

  Cyrus Field had arrived home with the Niagara on 18 August, having just resigned as general manager of the Atlantic company, and hoping for some rest and peace. He was thirty-eight years old, his sixth child had been born the previous year, and he had barely seen his family for years. First he had to accept a round of celebrations and ceremonies in keeping with his new heroic status. But once this had died down, there was still to be little repose, for there was something not right with the cable. Field had been concerned from the cable’s first days that messages could not be transmitted fast enough. As the trials continued, the speed did not improve, and he feared that the telegraph would not be commercially viable. This was disquieting, but it was swiftly overtaken by a greater worry still.

  Charles de Sauty, the electrician left in charge of the Newfoundland cable station, was having increasing difficulty transmitting and receiving signals. Sometimes the line worked well enough for the operators to chat with each other. One or two highly significant messages passed, for instance news that the Sepoy Mutiny in India had been put down, which halted the mobilisation of two British regiments from Canada. Nine words on the cable had saved the British government perhaps £60,000. In twenty days, the cable carried 271 messages, at an average of ten words each, from Newfoundland to Valentia; in the other direction passed 129 telegrams. On some days, though, de Sauty could receive nothing. The problem seemed to lie at the Valentia end of the cable, where Whitehouse was busily conducting experiments of his own.

  John Lecky’s father had cleared machinery out of a disused slate-sawing yard and lent his building there to the telegraph company. With instruments installed in the east end of the shed, overlooking the pier, this served as a telegraph office for as long as the cable worked. Thomson’s delicate reflecting galvanometers were available, but Whitehouse had chosen to use his own ‘detector’ instruments. These needed a vast increase in the electrical charge:

  Unfortunately for the life of the cable, Mr Whitehouse was imbued with a belief that currents of very high intensity, or potential, were the best for signalling; and he had enormous induction coils, five feet long, excited by a series of very large cells, yielding electricity estimated at about 2,000 volts potential. The insulation was unable to bear the strain, and thus the signals began to gradually fail.

  Blame for the damage landed squarely upon Whitehouse, perhaps unjustly, as many of his views had been supported by his old ally Morse. The cable was far from perfect when handed over to Whitehouse, despite everything the public, and most of the directors, had believed. But Whitehouse’s actions, described as ‘high pressure steam got up in a low pressure boiler’, further damaged the insulation and hastened the telegraph’s end. Most expert opinion of the time concurred in this view. Whitehouse was obliged to revert to using Thomson’s equipment, powered by Daniell cells, and then the professor himself arrived and tried to coax the cable back to life. A few more messages passed, but effectively it was all over, even before the climax of the New York celebrations.

  The directors embarked for Valentia for the formal opening of the line to public messages. Instead they found themselves alongside scientists trying to work out what could be done to save the cable. ‘Everything possible was thought of and tried but to no purpose,’ noted John Lecky. ‘They tried a very powerful current and my father had a huge slate battery made for them. I remember one day going into the operating room and one of the electricians took up a barrel steel pen by an insulated tongs and sent the current through, when the steel melted like wax in a candle!’ After a time the office, with some of its equipment, was abandoned to the boy.

  The fatal defect appeared to be less than 300 miles from Ireland, but there were not then the means to grapple and repair the cable. Even if it could have been retrieved and mended, the line would most likely have quickly failed elsewhere. Its faults were deep-rooted, stemming from the first stages of design and construction, and compounded by its handling afterwards. The cable was by far the longest line ever made, and though its makers were the best in their field, all were novices. The firms of Newall and Glass & Elliot operated quite separately, not communicating with each other as the line was manufactured, and certainly not pooling experience or ideas. As failure cost them nothing, they had no immediate incentive to develop better procedures. The cable made in 1857 was not tested during manufacture – it had been left to Professor Thomson to identify this as a failing and insist on new procedures. Perhaps most damaging, though, was the treatment of the line in the year between its manufacture and laying, when it ‘suffered enough to have destroyed its efficiency even had it been free from faults at first’. The gutta percha insulation had deteriorated when stored outdoors in the sun. The cable was then coiled and re-coiled as it was loaded on board ship and taken off in 1857, then stowed again in 1858 and further damaged in the storm. ‘Take all these things together, and the wonder is, not that the cable failed after a month, but that it ever worked at all.’

  Laying the cable had been an unprecedented feat of engineering, and the telegra
ph proved its worth by carrying messages of high importance during its short life. Charles Bright’s triumph, against the odds and contrary to a great weight of expert opinion, was a tribute to the young man’s ability and determination. Yet the cable had failed despite this, and no one could agree about the causes. The line was summarised at the time as ‘mechanically good but electrically bad’. The success of Bright and his fellows had briefly diverted attention from underlying electrical questions, and disguised just how unsophisticated and experimental electrical understanding and technology were. Until these questions were resolved, the line would never work.

  5

  Languishing

  by Delay

  The Atlantic company reached the end of 1858 having used up all its assets, and with more liabilities than it could meet. Even if the cable could have been repaired, there was no money to attempt it. All staff were under notice of dismissal. A persistent myth that the 1858 cable was a fraud and had never actually worked at all was widely believed, despite evidence to the contrary. As one commentator put it at the time, ‘When engineers have no definite plans, directors no capital, and the public little or no hope, joint stock enterprises have not a brilliant time of it.’

  A total of £465,000 had been spent, most of it a total loss, on the Atlantic dream. Before turning to any positive lessons which might have emerged, it was time for recriminations. Whitehouse was set up to take a great portion of the blame. Thomson tried to defend him, for he thought the man industrious and well-intentioned, but the more the professor investigated what had passed, the more the other’s inadequacies were exposed. The directors accused Whitehouse of ignoring their instructions and wasting thousands of pounds on his own experiments. He was immediately dismissed as electrician, but would not go quietly. Attempting to defend his personal and scientific reputation, he had by the end of September published a booklet setting out his case. He railed against ‘sinister forces’ which had unseated him, particularly ‘the frantic fooleries of the Americans in the person of Mr Cyrus Field’. And this was not the last, for Whitehouse appeared at an extraordinary general meeting of Atlantic shareholders in December 1858, to suggest a merger with a new company. This new venture, he said, had already raised half the capital needed for another cable. The chairman, James Stuart Wortley, politely silenced Whitehouse. Later, in private, Whitehouse declined to give details of this mysterious rival scheme to Stuart Wortley.

  This may have been no more than an attempt to strike back at his persecutors, a figment of Whitehouse’s imagination. But there certainly were other projects competing with the Atlantic company, and some of them were making serious progress. Cyrus Field claimed to be unconcerned by these various schemes, arguing that there was enough business for more than one line. The danger to the Atlantic company, though, was that another enterprise would swallow any funds available, and that Field’s project would be starved of investors.

  The holy grail which all pursued was a route to avoid the worst physical dangers of icebergs and volcanic activity in the Atlantic, and preferably one where relays could be employed to break the distance. There had been such a scheme floated between the two Atlantic attempts of the 1850s, in the spring of 1858, by the European & American Submarine Telegraph Co. The promoters, mainly French, claiming concessions in France, Spain and Portugal, tried to raise £1 million for a telegraph from Plymouth to Finisterre, Lisbon and the Azores, then onwards either to Boston, or to North Carolina via Bermuda. For as long as the fate of the Atlantic company’s cable was uncertain, investors were reluctant to support this, but the plan re-surfaced later.

  After the failure of the Atlantic cable in 1858, others too were inspired to try. The North Atlantic Telegraph Co. used the events of 1858 to argue that ‘a direct line could not be expected to succeed as a commercial telegraph’. On their behalf, Colonel Tal P. Shaffner, an American adventurer encouraged by the Danish government, chartered a boat to survey a route from the north of Scotland by way of the Faeroes, Iceland and Greenland to Labrador or Newfoundland. Although the inhospitable climate would have made it difficult to lay and maintain cables, not to mention recruit staff for the telegraph stations, the scheme gathered some momentum. Sir Charles Bright was appointed engineer. The Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, arranged Admiralty help for Shaffner to make ocean soundings in 1860. The paddle steamer Bulldog, under the experienced Arctic navigator Captain Leopold McClintock, was despatched to work for more than four months alongside the company’s own boat, the Fox. The results were encouraging, and Bright and McClintock presented their findings to the Royal Geographical Society in January 1861. The project faltered, though, for finance, a consequence of the collapse of confidence by investors after 1858.

  The alternative was to go by land, the long way. An idea came together in 1862 for a trans-Siberian line to link New York with London by crossing three continents. Perry Collins, the United States commercial agent at the mouth of the Amoor River in eastern Siberia, had been trying to promote a cable from there to San Francisco. The Tsar, meanwhile, planned to extend the Russian telegraph network eastwards towards Amoor. Collins managed to interest the American Secretary of State in a larger scheme, offering benefits for trade between the two countries, as well as a valuable link between America and Europe. A preliminary survey brought home the size of the task. As there was still no telegraph east of Moscow, at least 14,000 miles of new cable, most of it overland, would be needed. California had been reached by cable from the east in 1861. While San Francisco is 5,000 miles from Amoor, the Bering Strait measures a mere forty miles, and this would have been the only submarine section needed on a line connecting New York with Paris. Hiram Sibley of the Western Union Telegraph was sure that he could complete the project in two years, and perhaps in one, and Samuel Morse predicted no major difficulties. The great advantage of this scheme was its cheapness, only $1.5 million.

  The Russian government was supportive, and the promoters played down the magnitude of the operation. While the capital costs were relatively low, running expenses would be vast, as they needed to support dozens, maybe hundreds, of telegraph stations. But the failure of the Atlantic company, far from undermining this scheme, seemed to give it greater credibility:

  This question has been reduced to a far less gigantic task than it seemed only a short year ago. The only subject of discussion now being the least length of deep sea cable. We have already seen gigantic efforts made, and immense sums of money cast, as it were, into the ocean in futile attempts to connect great distances. The Atlantic cable, unhappily, after exciting the enthusiasm of the world, has come to a disastrous end; the great Red Sea and India telegraph has also succumbed to a fate quite as lamentable. We name these facts, still not without hope, that science, ingenuity and indomitable will may yet overcome all obstacles. The recent success of the Malta and Alexandria cable has inspired the friends of long submerged lines with new ardour and ambition for further efforts.

  But, readers were reminded, the maximum length of any section on that last line was a mere 300 miles. Long submarine cables were still seen as a very bad risk.

  In spite of all these grand plans, three years after the Atlantic failure there was little real progress on any. George Saward, secretary of the Atlantic Telegraph Co., summed up his feelings as the tenth anniversary passed of Brett’s cross-channel cable:

  The history of submarine telegraphy – fairly written – would reflect little credit, either scientifically or morally, upon the present age. In truth, the business of making and laying telegraphic cables is – after a lapse of ten years since their introduction – only now commencing to be treated with the dignity of a science. Great and useful principles have been elicited by repeated failure, but they have been mostly ignored in practice.

  There were two particular groups who angered Saward. One was those scientists who cloaked their discoveries in mystery, men too wrapped up in ‘speculative philosophy’ who hid ‘the grain of scientific wheat in algebraic chaff and mystificati
on’. In fact, thought Saward, ‘the successful construction of the telegraph is no mystery to any mind of fair capacity, depending as it does simply upon the practical application of a very few easy and perfectly well-known natural laws’. In this, the company secretary tended to oversimplify. But nor did Saward have patience with the commercial men who had brought matters to a deadlock because they had failed to reflect sufficiently on the technical aspects of the business. He had particular scorn for the way ‘projectors, concessioners and dealers in monopolies have been allowed to mix themselves up as directors, contractors or officers in these undertakings’. Saward was furious and frustrated, because everyone who knew anything about the subject knew by then that an Atlantic cable could and should work, yet no one seemed to have the wherewithal to make it happen.

  Field had had other things on his mind. He was forced to stay in New York to concentrate on his own business after a costly fire early in 1860 for which he was not fully insured. It was during this period that he first saw Brunel’s Great Eastern afloat. The massive ship was in America in an attempt to cover some of her losses by carrying fare-paying passengers, and Field joined a short cruise. As a holiday, it was a disaster, for the vessel was not organised nor equipped for its numbers of passengers, but the experience underlined the Great Eastern’s potential as a cable-layer. Field’s financial position worsened as 1860 progressed, and he was obliged to mortgage all his personal property to save the paper business. He still had a lucrative share in the American Telegraph Co., which allied itself with Morse’s own lines to secure a monopoly in the eastern United States. This new operation joined with Associated Press to run a telegraph and fast steamer service from Newfoundland, based on Gisborne’s original relay plan, which cut two days from the previous fastest time for transatlantic messages. It was no substitute for an ocean cable, but it helped whet the public’s appetite for ever faster news services, a clamour which intensified after the outbreak of war in the United States.