The Cable

by Gillian Cookson

  Although the outlook was bleak, the projectors decided to carry on making the cable in the hope that something could be done in the short time available. Field remained upbeat, telling the directors of the New York and Newfoundland company early in March 1866 that he had little doubt of success that year. And finally, a way was found to circumvent the legal problems surrounding the Atlantic company. Field took advice from Daniel Gooch, who, despite his close connections as a director of Telcon and of the Great Eastern company, had remained aloof, never personally investing in the Atlantic company nor completely convinced by its prospects. But he had changed his mind after witnessing at first hand the events of 1865. Gooch suggested forming a new company, and this time offered to invest substantially himself.

  As a result, the Anglo-American Telegraph Co. Ltd was founded. It undertook to lay a cable for the Atlantic company that summer. In return the Anglo-American was entitled to a huge slice of future income, with priority over claims by Atlantic shareholders or creditors. This was later to cause untold difficulties. Atlantic company investors who had kept faith over many years and suffered great losses, now found themselves cut out of the profits. Furthermore, Thomson and his engineering associates, who had given time and expertise unpaid in the expectation that they would reap benefits later, were ignored under the new arrangements. The Anglo-American, it emerged, did not consider that anything was owed, legally or morally, to these men, although the cable could never have been laid or worked without them. The directors, who included Glass and Gooch, knew this full well. They had even relied on the engineers to help float the new company, asking Thomson, Jenkin, Varley and others to write assurances in the prospectus that a rate of eight words a minute down the line could easily be achieved.

  Once again, there had been a last ditch rescue. But Field had again been over-optimistic about finance. Very little money was subscribed by the general public, who, lacking the confidence of the insiders, still feared losing all. A total of £230,000 had been promised by private investors, mainly people connected with Telcon. Telcon itself pledged £100,000. Ten individuals, among them Elliot, Glass, Gooch, Pender and Field himself, were committed to investing £10,000, but there was still a shortfall. This time the cable was saved by the merchant banker Junius Morgan, now principal of J.S. Morgan & Co., the friend of Field from the days of pro-Union lobbying in London. Morgan’s bank committed itself in April 1866 to supply the rest of the capital Field needed. By the utmost good fortune, this agreement was sealed just before 10 May, Black Friday. The fall-out from this financial crash would otherwise have ended any chances of raising money that year, and maybe for much longer. And by strange irony, Black Friday was triggered by the collapse of the bank of Samuel Gurney, long-time director of the Atlantic company.

  But it was a done deal, and there was to be no other significant obstacle to the cable. Success when it came was an anticlimax. The Great Eastern was accompanied by the Terrible, the Albany and the Medway, with William Corry laying the shore end at Valentia. Anderson was again the master, Canning the engineer, Willoughby Smith had taken over as electrician, with Thomson on board lending advice. The flotilla set sail on Friday, 13 July 1866. It was, said Henry Field, ‘almost monotonous from its uninterrupted success’.

  As planned, the ship proceeded slowly, covering between 105 and 128 miles a day. The British public had daily newspaper accounts of progress as the cable unrolled across the ocean floor. Across the Atlantic, there was no news – without a cable, nothing could yet be known. In Newfoundland, some people, though not as many as the previous year, waited anxiously, expectantly, at Heart’s Content for news. At daybreak on 27 July, as fog lifted, there was wild excitement, ‘the wildest excitement I have ever witnessed,’ said Gooch, when masts were spotted on the horizon. There were six of them, and four funnels, and it was without doubt the Great Eastern. A fleet of small boats set out to meet the successful convoy. The submarine telegraph between Newfoundland and Cape Breton had broken down, and so it took two days for the tidings to reach New York. The first news Field’s instrument of peace brought to the New World was of war, between Austria and Italy in the Adriatic, but the report ended with confirmation of a peace treaty. This was taken as an excellent sign, that the cable ‘was born to be the herald of peace’.

  Although the British government had been at times frustratingly unhelpful – and the Liberals were by then out of office – one of the first telegrams to cross the Atlantic on the new cable was sent by Field to Gladstone. ‘Many thanks for your kind words last night in the House of Commons about my country which I read with much pleasure here this morning soon after breakfast – very truly your friend, Cyrus W. Field.’ Written from Heart’s Content, here was the announcement, if one were needed, writ large, of an overnight revolution in transatlantic news and communication.

  The Cabot Strait cable was repaired in two days, and the line fully opened for a predictable rush of congratulatory messages. Even better news was to come. By the time Great Eastern had refuelled and made her way 600 miles back east, Albany and Terrible had located the 1865 cable and almost caught it. It took days longer, and thirty frustrating attempts, to secure and retrieve the line. Once on board it was carefully tested. It worked. Willoughby Smith could communicate with Valentia, where two telegraphers who had spent a year testing the defunct cable were startled to receive coherent signals at last. For the first time, Cyrus Field wept.

  A triumphant message to Field’s family in New York went from the ship to Valentia, and back across the ocean on the new cable. Then the Great Eastern steamed slowly to St John’s through bad weather, completing the 1865 line on 7 September. The second round of celebration was even more exuberant, for the revival of the lost cable was to the public more exciting still than the laying of the new.

  Field was lauded and honoured, and later given a banquet by the New York Chamber of Commerce at the Metropolitan Hotel, attended by the acting vice president of the United States, Lafayette S. Foster. In London, The Times joined in the general hyperbole. ‘Since the discovery of Columbus nothing has been done in any degree comparable to the vast enlargement which has thus been given to the sphere of human activity.’ Captain Anderson, Professor Thomson, Canning and Glass all received knighthoods; Gooch and Curtis Lampson, directors of the Anglo-American Telegraph Company, the higher rank of a baronetcy. Field, as an American citizen, could not be knighted but was heaped with praise by the British establishment, and awarded a Congressional gold medal in the United States.

  The delight was not quite universal. In Siberia, gangs of workmen erecting 20,000 poles for the Russian-American overland route threw down their tools and walked away when news of the Atlantic cable belatedly reached them. Western Union lost $3 million on that venture. Elsewhere there was some disapproval of the Revd Henry Field’s triumphalist account, and the way that he invested the cable with religious meaning. A critic in the American Southern Review pointed out that the cable was in fact ‘about as [religious] as Wheeler’s Sewing Machine’. The Atlantic telegraph was:

  simply a postal arrangement. The utmost that can be effected by it, is the transformation of intelligence between Europe and America eight or nine days earlier than before. This is a matter of importance. It facilitates commerce and the capture of absconding criminals, it serves travellers and will be of great comfort to many an anxious heart. We can also imagine instances in which great international interests might be secured, which the interposition of some days might put in peril. These are advantages to rejoice in, and be thankful for … But let the praise be discriminating, and then it will be at once more sincere and more valuable.

  The critic also thought Americans were trying to take more than their share of credit for the success. ‘One might suppose, from the style and tone of the demonstrations in New York, that it was as thoroughly American as if it had been the out-growth of the Monroe doctrine.’ In fact, the United States’ involvement extended only to the fact that Field was an American citizen, and
that some of the initial surveys had been carried out by the US Navy. ‘For the rest, it was done chiefly by British science and mechanical skill, British enterprise and British capital.’

  This, though, is hardly a full story. The cable had been driven forward from the start by Americans, from the Canadian provinces and the United States. Britons had brought to it a sophistication in science, technology and finance. The honours were similarly divided between engineers and entrepreneurs, between the ideals of international peace and understanding and the desire for commercial profit.

  The new telegraph was so expensive that very few could afford to use it. As Sir James Anderson put it, ‘no one can order his dinner by telegram’. Traders, the cable’s main users, drew great benefits from having the latest and most reliable commercial data. The effect was to stabilise financial markets, especially in the United States, where solid information replaced damaging rumour and speculation. And the cable was itself, after so many tribulations, a major business success. In its first year, the Anglo-American Telegraph Company paid a dividend of more than twenty-five per cent. Telcon benefited too, John Pender reporting to shareholders in 1867 that trade was booming, the company’s competence to make, lay and recover cables ‘in great oceanic depths’ settled beyond doubt.

  But Gisborne’s ‘mystic voice of electricity’ had a wider impact yet on millions who could never pay to use it directly. On the eve of the first attempt to lay a cable in 1857, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland had predicted that the cable would give connections between the Old and New Worlds ‘a life and an intensity which they never had before’. The cable’s part in bringing international peace is questionable – better communication does not necessarily bring better understanding. In other ways, though, this life and intensity was immediately apparent. Reuter was the first to capitalise upon it, his agency’s telegrams packed with the latest news for the following day’s papers across the ocean. When James Garfield was shot in 1881, reports appeared in British newspapers within hours, a stark contrast to the twelve days taken over the previous presidential assassination. From this moment began a sense of shared experience, a convergence of cultures, between the two English-speaking nations.

  So dependent was Reuter on the transatlantic cable – and so increasingly irritated by the Anglo-American’s high charges for telegrams – that in 1869 he was instrumental in launching the first direct line from Europe to the United States, between Brittany and Boston. Sir James Anderson was also involved, as director of the expedition, and he subsequently became a successful businessman, director of a number of submarine telegraph companies associated with John Pender. He rose to be managing director of the Eastern Telegraph Co., an amalgamation of four of Pender’s companies.

  Pender himself, like Cyrus Field, had flirted with personal ruin by gambling almost everything on the Atlantic cable. He went on to found a string of submarine cable companies until he, Gooch and other associates controlled telegraphs stretching from Britain across the Far East and Australasia. Porthcurno, an isolated sandy cove in the west of Cornwall, was for a century the point at which Pender’s network of fourteen telegraph systems converged, the main communications gateway of the British Empire. Pender was angered not to have been knighted in the wake of the success in 1866, nor afterwards for his services to Empire, and wrote confidentially to Gladstone in 1881 to stake his claim to a baronetcy. He argued that he had risked a quarter of a million pounds on the Atlantic scheme, ‘without which the necessary capital for the undertaking could not have been secured’. His entire motivation, he said, was public service, and somewhat surprisingly claimed that ‘pecuniary advantage to myself was neither the object nor the result of these transactions’. Pender made a further fortune through his network of telegraphs, absorbing them into the group later named Cable & Wireless Ltd. A knighthood finally came in 1888.

  Canning, Bright, Jenkin, Thomson, Willoughby Smith and Varley carved out distinguished careers in engineering. Only after the threat of legal action, and mediation by Richard Glass, did Thomson, Jenkin and Varley start to receive their dues for their work on the Atlantic project. Licence payments from the company for use of their instruments were to prove immensely profitable over the following years.

  Others involved in the cable expeditions of the 1850s were less fortunate. Maury, in London for several years after the Civil War, eked out a living writing geography text books. His direct association with the Atlantic cable was over, but he did receive, among other honours, an LLD from the University of Cambridge in recognition of his achievements. In 1868 he returned to the United States as Professor of Meteorology at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, where he died in 1873. Galton’s damning conclusions ended Wildman Whitehouse’s career in telegraphy in 1861, and he spent the rest of his life experimenting on electrical devices for trams and omnibuses rather than returning to surgery. Frederic Gisborne, having fallen out with Field at the end of 1856, abandoned telegraphy in disgust and took up mining exploration in Newfoundland and neighbouring provinces. He resumed his daring and strenuous life of old. A serious gunshot wound during one of these expeditions in 1861 forced him to find a less active role. Gisborne made a great deal of money as a minerals agent, but lost it all in the 1870s. The Canadian federal government then appointed him superintendent of the Dominion Telegraph & Signal Service, and for the remainder of his life he criss-crossed the remotest parts of the country, building and re-building telegraphs. At the time of his death in 1892, he was engaged in plans for a Pacific cable.

  For the ‘changed world’ which The Times had foreseen in 1856, the unceasing march of progress up to the century’s turn, had still not delivered the Pacific telegraph. This was one thing that Cyrus Field had not been able to effect, although he too tried. Having staked most of his assets on the Atlantic cable, Field was afterwards able to pay off all his remaining creditors from 1860. He never gave up on his mission to improve relations between the United States and Britain, acting as a conduit for information between John Bright and colleagues, and their American equivalents. But this alone did not satisfy him, for he could not live without some grand project to fill the void left by the Atlantic scheme. For a time, the Pacific project took over. In 1880 Field was writing to an acquaintance, ‘I hope that you and I may live to see a cable between the west coast of the United States and the Sandwich Islands, Japan and Australia’. He was actively pursuing it through government and Wall Street contacts, looking for ‘fifteen to twenty millions of dollars, cash’. It could be complete in two years …

  By the time Field died in 1892, he had long-standing financial troubles, much of his fortune having been wiped out in saving the New York elevated railway system from collapse. The Pacific cable idea was long abandoned, and it was to be another decade after his death before it was completed. A generation passed, thirty-six years, between the first Atlantic and Pacific cables. The delay was due partly to the much greater depths and distance of the Pacific, but that is not the full story. Once the Atlantic had been crossed, a Pacific link was, at least for a time, superfluous. With Pender’s cables laid to Australasia, the whole world was in communication by way of the Atlantic, as Field had predicted to the Boston merchants. Lines from Europe to the west turned out to be much busier and more profitable than the Far Eastern telegraphs, where there was much less commercial traffic. The delay in crossing the Pacific therefore further underlines the success of the Atlantic cables.

  So whose idea was the Atlantic cable, and whose accomplishment? The honours are not easily awarded. Samuel Morse was the first to work out practicalities, and he continued to support the project, though his authority as a leading electrician had evaporated some time before the line was complete. Frederic Gisborne’s energy and insight had given impetus to the scheme, although he too was sidelined as engineer, even before the first attempt on the Atlantic in 1857. Gisborne’s most significant feat, as it turned out, was to bring in Cyrus Field. Field had no equal in driving forward the Atlantic telegraph
. Without him, the wild and visionary scheme might not have been attempted until years, maybe decades, later. Were it not for Field’s over-ambition during the 1850s, there would have been no failures then, no Galton enquiry and consequently no hard lessons about the behaviour of electricity in long cables. Out of failure came the foundations for a monumental achievement in the 1860s.

  Cyrus Field was inspired, suffering endless frustrations when he could not inspire others to the same degree of enthusiasm and commitment. But he pursued the dream doggedly, even when it seemed doomed. Field’s essential gift, apart from his persistence, was an ability to find the very best, the most useful, talent on offer. The network he built embraced engineers and scientists, financiers and merchants, naval officers and politicians, British and American. The result was the extraordinary story of the Atlantic cable, a feat outside its time.

  Sources & Information

  The Cable is written for non-specialist readers, so does not have footnotes or a bibliography. The story is told elsewhere with full references: