Though business matters had stalled, there had already been much headway on the scientific front. At first after the failure of 1858 there had seemed to be more questions than answers. The Atlantic company had hopes of repairing the line, which was believed unbroken, although controversy continued about the causes of its demise. In 1860, the directors sent an expedition to Newfoundland to recover a length of the cable there. Only five miles was fished up, and although the seabed was found to be much rougher and more uneven than expected, the cable itself still worked well. The puzzle over its failure seemed no nearer to solution.
Yet the cable, as Field said later, ‘did more by his death than his life’. In its failure, he argued, it had been of immense benefit to science. ‘It has been the great experimenting cable. No electrician ever had so long a line to work upon before, and hence the science of submarine telegraphy never made such rapid progress as after that great experiment.’ Every cable subsequently laid, where the projectors took lessons from the 1858 line, had been successful. ‘All these triumphs over the sea are greatly indebted to the bold attempt to cross the Atlantic [in 1858].’ This, though, was written with long hindsight.
At the time, over the winter of 1858 and through 1859, Field struggled to keep Atlantic cable hopes alive. He described these as his darkest days. ‘It is more difficult to revive an old enterprise than to start a new one.’
Recognising that private investors had been frightened away by the scale of losses, Field saw a way forward through attracting government support. But this was not easy in the circumstances of 1859. All governments expressed interest, sometimes even enthusiasm, for international cables, but none was prepared to risk the sums needed to finance such schemes. Britain was particularly keen to improve communications, especially in the direction of her empire in the east. She was also markedly reluctant to commit public money to the enterprise. The best that companies could hope for from government was guarantees to their shareholders, and these were conditional on the line being successfully laid. It was still thought that long submarine cables may not prove profitable, so that dividends needed to be assured. But a guarantee on those terms did nothing to address the main problem, that investors lost everything if the cable itself did not work. And after the Red Sea debacle, the conditions of government support tightened further.
The efforts to revive the Atlantic scheme after 1858 took place against the backdrop of another submarine disaster, that of the Red Sea cable. The Red Sea telegraph had promised a secure route from Britain to India, avoiding the practical and political problems of a line across the Ottoman Empire. The overland telegraph was unsatisfactory even in peacetime, with Morse code messages sent on by telegraphers who did not understand English. Telegrams were delivered days or weeks late and so full of errors that they were often impossible to decipher. Events of 1857 underlined the urgent need for new arrangements. During the Indian Mutiny, an emergency request for troops had taken forty days to reach London from Lucknow. Lord Derby’s government therefore decided to back a Red Sea cable, which would have the advantage of being under British management and control, so that foreign powers could not intercept confidential messages nor interrupt the flow of information.
Although the government was keen to have this line in place, they would commit themselves only to a guarantee to shareholders of a minimum four and a half per cent return. The condition was that the telegraph should test well for a month after laying. In theory, if the line failed, there would be no call on public funds. If it worked, it should make at least some profit and the worst case would be that the British government subsidised a strategically important cable. This agreement appeared as watertight as the cable, binding the government to pay only if the cable were successful. Unfortunately neither worked at all as intended.
The submarine line, in six parts totalling 3,500 miles connecting Egypt with the west coast of India, was completed by Newall in February 1860. Some of the sections worked for more than two years, but the entire line, from Suez to Karachi, operated for only a few hours. No telegram ever travelled the whole distance, and it soon became apparent that there were serious problems with all six sections. The line had not been tested underwater before laying. Its protective iron armour was too light and soon rusted, allowing worms to eat through the insulation. Furthermore it was laid too tight on an uneven seabed, so that when it became encrusted with barnacles the extra weight caused hanging sections to break. There were no arrangements in place for repair. All in all, the enterprise was described as ‘like running a donkey for the Leger’. The promoters had fatally underestimated the scale of their task.
Yet the shareholders did not lose. Every section of cable had tested successfully, as required in the contract. Derby’s successor, Palmerston, and his chancellor, Gladstone, were therefore bound to pay the maximum penalty, £36,000 a year, despite having no working cable to show for it. Over the following fifty years, the cost to the Exchequer was £1.8 million.
Stuart Wortley, the Atlantic company chairman, had already, early in 1859, secured promises of subsidies from the Treasury. There was an offer of up to £20,000 a year to cover the cost of official messages on the line, and a guaranteed return to shareholders of eight per cent for twenty-five years on a new capital of £600,000. In exchange, the government wanted the exclusive Newfoundland concession, originally negotiated by the New York and Newfoundland company. But none of this would come into effect until the cable was working. So much money had been lost to date, and public confidence was so low, that a conditional subsidy like this could not tempt investors. But the government, after its embarrassing loss in the Red Sea, would go no further.
In the years following 1858, while little progress was made with any transatlantic project, the cause of submarine telegraphy advanced steadily in the Mediterranean and Middle East. The Atlantic attempts attracted most publicity, and unnerved investors. The eastern expeditions, though, with less fanfare, were crucial in developing cable technology during the early 1860s. Much of the Mediterranean work was contracted to R.S. Newall. His Malta-Cagliari-Corfu line gradually failed between 1857 and 1861, and the Malta-Alexandria telegraph frequently broke down, yet the cables themselves were improving significantly, as were laying and testing techniques. The Malta-Alexandria telegraph of 1861 was in fact a landmark, the first deep-sea cable successfully laid. It was the first sent out in tanks and tested under water on board ship. Although laid in water that was too shallow, so that it needed constant repair, it worked well for ten years. The lessons learned in the Atlantic were finally being put into practice, yet the public remained wary of submarine telegraph shares. The engineers and large investors though, closer to events, were convinced that the technology was now viable, and long-distance lines would be highly profitable.
Field’s ‘great experimenting cable’ had given Professor Thomson and his colleagues much to think about. Thomson and Fleeming Jenkin, previously a telegraph engineer for Newall, started to design sending keys which would answer the problem of sending messages down long cables at commercial speeds. Eventually they came up with an automatic sending device. Thomson and Jenkin established a partnership with Cromwell Fleetwood Varley, inventor of the ‘curbing capacitor’. The electricians discovered that by using these instruments together, and introducing duplexing, or two-way traffic on the line, the problem of ‘retardation of the signals’ was effectively solved. Speeds greatly increased after 1860, up to perhaps twenty-five words a minute, though before 1873 between seven and thirteen was a more usual rate.
While there was a hiatus in operations in the Atlantic, the British government and Atlantic Telegraph Co. were not inactive. The government took a course which turned out to serve the industry better than any number of financial guarantees could have done, one which effectively settled the main scientific controversies surrounding long-distance cables. An enquiry was set up under a respected Board of Trade technical expert, Captain Douglas Galton, a combined investigation by the Board of Trade and
the Atlantic Telegraph Co. Galton’s deliberations were seen as ‘the most valuable collection of facts, warnings, and evidence ever compiled concerning submarine cables’. Galton himself believed that if cables were reliable, government money would not be needed in any form, for private investors would take up the job of laying submarine lines. His committee met between December 1859 and September 1860, and in 1861 published a report with recommendations on the making, laying and working of undersea cables.
During the course of his enquiry, Galton interviewed most of the leading submarine telegraph engineers of the time. He collected evidence about the abortive attempts on the Atlantic, and about the more and less successful cable-laying experiences in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. Thomson, Jenkin and Varley were key to his investigation. All were respected scientists with recent practical experience of cable-laying, and understood mechanical as well as electrical engineering. Jenkin’s experiments in Newall’s factory during 1859 had proved pure gutta percha to be a generally better insulator than any other compound or mixture. The young engineer could also suggest ways of avoiding faults in submarine cables by improvements in manufacture and laying, and how to mend them when they arose. The versatile Jenkin had also been investigating Thomson’s theory, the ‘Law of the Squares’. He presented Galton with proof of the law, showing that increased input voltage had no effect on the rate at which messages could be transmitted. Whitehouse still refused to accept the ‘Law of the Squares’ and continued to argue that higher applied voltages would force signals along Atlantic cables. The company electrician’s decision to apply hundreds, if not thousands, of volts to the 1858 cable had had catastrophic results, but he still blamed the poor standard of the cable itself. Thomson and Jenkin finally and indisputably proved the folly of Whitehouse’s actions.
Galton’s final report listed the submarine lines laid between 1850 and 1859. At first reading, it is a dismal picture. Of the many miles laid down, a great proportion had failed. The unsuccessful ones were mainly deep-sea cables that had had mechanical failures, usually a breakage. Galton thought that the early successes of submarine telegraphy, the cables between Dover and Calais, and Orford Ness and The Hague and Ostend, had given false confidence, for they actually concealed serious gaps in understanding and expertise. He concluded that there must be much more careful quality control during cable construction, and also much greater care in cable-laying. This was not entirely new to the industry, but clearly the best practices of leading engineers needed to be adopted universally. Galton’s other recommendations were for standardisation, in electrical units and measurements, and in signalling and receiving. Much of this came to pass during the early 1860s under the guidance of Thomson, Jenkin and Varley. The vital but unglamorous standardisation of the ohm and other units continued quietly through the early 1860s, guided by Jenkin and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Galton had exonerated Thomson and his circle, and because his investigation had been so searching, it settled the matter in their favour. Galton was decisive. In the dispute between Thomson and Whitehouse, there could no longer be any doubt about who was in the right.
Galton continued to be a key government advisor on the subject of deep-sea cables. The Atlantic Telegraph Co. was still in the financial doldrums, and still seeking public help. In March 1863 another approach was made to Gladstone. The company had reduced the price of new shares to £5 in the hope of appealing to a wider group of shareholders. Prospective investors were told that the reasons for failure in 1858 had been ‘fully ascertained’. The faults:
arose from no inherent scientific difficulties, even then, when knowledge on the subject was so far in the rear of its present position. The result was simply what might have been expected, or, to speak more correctly, it was even less disastrous than might have been reasonably looked for from imperfect manufacture – the want of due superintendence and good organisation, and the absence, owing to the then state of science, of the means of testing the cable with anything like the accuracy that is now possible. These elements of failure no longer exist, and in particular the various improved methods at present in use for testing submarine telegraphs are such as readily to detect imperfections which, owing to their minuteness, must formerly have escaped observations altogether.
The company was confident in the technology and expected success; they needed £600,000, but only £220,000 had been raised. Could the government subscribe £100,000? ‘There is danger of the enterprise languishing by delay.’ The company’s new eight per cent preference shares were guaranteed for twenty-five years by the British government, but only while the cable worked. There were also subsidies each year of £20,000 from Britain, and $70,000 from the US Congress, covering the cost of official messages. Reuter guaranteed business worth £5,000 a year for the line from his news agency. Although the Newfoundland and other landing rights in British North America had been conceded to the British government, the company retained its concession in Maine, and had reached an agreement to link in with the overland telegraph system in the United States. The business was beginning to take shape.
Gladstone referred the company’s appeal for funds to Galton, who had moved to the War Office, who consulted Wheatstone and others to assess the risk. They had learned much from the Red Sea failure. Continuing experience had shown the best ways of constructing a cable – the preferred insulation, how best to apply it. The qualities of copper wire were better understood, and so was the need to constantly test cable at every stage of its manufacture. The instruments for working lines had been ‘materially improved, and rendered far more sensitive’, which prevented damage to the cable. Despite all these positive advances, though, Galton and his associates urged caution, for they saw a weak link in the chain:
Notwithstanding all the experience which has been acquired in laying cables, considerable risk attends this part of the enterprise. This risk partly depends on the weather, and partly on the degree of vigilance and prudence exercised, at every moment of the day and night, by the persons who superintend the operation. It is a risk therefore which no care and foresight can entirely remove.
His advice went further: ‘The risk is much diminished by the use of powerful steamships, properly constructed, and by the persons who undertake the operation holding a large interest in the success of the enterprise, and it must be recollected that with less experience than is now possessed, a cable was successfully laid across the Atlantic’. Galton’s counsel was to prove wise.
So the Atlantic company had ‘prepared the way for success, by paying for the greatest experiment in telegraphs which the world has known, and now they come forward with their dearly bought experience to renew the attempt to unite Europe and America. The enterprise is of great importance to commerce, and would largely promote imperial interests. It offers strong possibilities of success.’ Yet by June 1863, it had raised only £300,000, half of what was needed. The Treasury finally announced that it could not help, telling the company that the issue should be left to ‘private capitalists’.
As an incentive to attract more investors, it was decided that the price of telegrams could be doubled to five shillings a word. The existing tariff had been set under an agreement signed before the failure in 1858, when predictions of signalling speed were over-optimistic and before it was appreciated just how few messages might be carried. Under the terms of the financial guarantee, though, the company could not increase the rates without British government agreement. In July 1863 Field wrote to Gladstone, urging a speedy decision on the price increase, so that the new arrangements could be quickly advertised. ‘It is of great importance that our efforts should take place before the annual exodus of the wealthy to the seaside and the continent.’ Gladstone’s officials, however, were privately advising him that the 1858 agreement had lapsed, and there was uncertainty about whether the 1859 contract was still in force. It also came to light that the Atlantic company’s rights in Newfoundland had run out after the failure in 1858. Only with difficulty
was the landing monopoly there extended to March 1868, on condition that a cable was then in place and working. Although the directors did intend laying a new cable in 1864, this new deadline added to the urgency.
While these developments in Britain were a matter of frustration, across the Atlantic political events threatened to sink any immediate prospect of a cable. The civil war which raged for four years from 1861 in the United States brought personal tragedy to some of the Atlantic company’s stalwart supporters. Lieutenant Berryman, a native of Virginia, torn in his loyalties but holding firm to his duty to the Union, died of illness on the battlefield early in the war. His colleague Maury, also Virginian by birth, survived the war, but it ended his naval career. After decades as an officer of the US Navy, he tendered his resignation three days after his state seceded from the Union in April 1861. Appointed a commander in the Confederate Navy, Maury was soon afterwards sent to England as a spokesman for the Confederacy. It was years before he would return to his native land. The conflict also hit Field’s American Telegraph Co., which lost much of its line, to the advantage of its rival, the Western Union. Yet the war also gave telegraphs a chance to prove their worth.
The Cable Page 10
