The
transatlantic telegraph cable was the first
cableA submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the sea bed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean....
used for telegraph communications laid across the floor of the
Atlantic OceanThe Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions. With a total area of about , it covers approximately 20% of the Earth's surface and about 26% of its water surface area...
. It crossed from
the Telegraph Field, Foilhommerum Bay,
Valentia IslandValentia Island is one of Ireland's westernmost points, lying off the Iveragh Peninsula in the southwest of County Kerry, Ireland. It is linked to the mainland by the Maurice O'Neill Memorial bridge at Portmagee, as well as by a ferry which sails from Reenard Point to Knightstown, the island's...
, in western
IrelandIreland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
to
Heart's ContentHeart's Content is an incorporated town in Trinity Bay on the Bay de Verde Peninsula of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The natural harbour that makes up the town is located on the east side of Trinity Bay and it is built along the northeast side and the southeast base of this...
in eastern
Newfoundland. The transatlantic
cableA cable is two or more wires running side by side and bonded, twisted or braided together to form a single assembly. In mechanics cables, otherwise known as wire ropes, are used for lifting, hauling and towing or conveying force through tension. In electrical engineering cables are used to carry...
connected
North AmericaNorth America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
and
EuropeEurope is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, and expedited communication between the two. Whereas it would normally take at least ten days to deliver a message by ship, this now became a matter of minutes.
Today, transatlantic telegraph cables have been replaced by transatlantic telecommunications cables.
Early history
Cyrus West FieldCyrus West Field was an American businessman and financier who, along with other entrepreneurs, created the Atlantic Telegraph Company and laid the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean in 1858.-Life and career:...
was the force behind the first transatlantic telegraph cable, attempted unsuccessfully in 1857 and completed on August 5, 1858. Although not considered particularly successful or long-lasting, it was the first transatlantic cable project to yield practical results. The first official telegram to pass between two continents was a letter of congratulation from
Queen Victoria of the United KingdomVictoria was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. From 1 May 1876, she used the additional title of Empress of India....
to the
President of the United StatesThe President of the United States of America is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces....
James BuchananJames Buchanan, Jr. was the 15th President of the United States . He is the only president from Pennsylvania, the only president who remained a lifelong bachelor and the last to be born in the 18th century....
on August 16. Signal quality rapidly declined, slowing transmission to an almost unusable speed. The cable was destroyed the following month when
Wildman WhitehouseEdward Orange Wildman Whitehouse was an English surgeon, better-known for his ultimately unsuccessful endeavours as chief electrician of the transatlantic telegraph cable for the Atlantic Telegraph Company.-Life:...
applied excessive voltage to it while trying to achieve faster operation. (It has been argued that the faulty manufacture, storage and handling of the 1858 cable would have led to premature failure in any case.) The shortness of the period of use undermined public and investor confidence in the project, and delayed efforts to restore a connection. A next attempt was undertaken in 1865 with much-improved material and, following some setbacks, a connection was completed and put into service on July 28, 1866. This time the connection was more durable, and increased public confidence resulted when the 1865 cable was repaired and put into service shortly afterwards.
Whereas, previously, communication between Europe and the Americas could only happen by ship, the transatlantic cable sped up communication to within minutes, allowing an inquiry and a response within the same day. In the 1870s,
duplexA duplex communication system is a system composed of two connected parties or devices that can communicate with one another in both directions. The term multiplexing is used when describing communication between more than two parties or devices....
and
quadruplexThe Quadruplex telegraph is a type of electrical telegraph which allows a total of four separate signals to be transmitted and received on a single wire at the same time Quadruplex telegraphy thus implements a form of multiplexing.The technology was invented by American inventor Thomas Edison, who...
transmission and receiving systems were set up that could relay multiple messages over the cable. In cross-Atlantic currency trading, the
pound sterlingThe pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
to US dollar exchange rate came to be referred as "cable" and this term is still in common usage today. The great utility of the cable built on itself, and multiple cables were established soon afterward.
Five attempts to lay the cable were made over a nine-year period—in 1857, two in 1858, in 1865, and in 1866—before lasting connections were finally achieved by
Isambard Kingdom BrunelIsambard Kingdom Brunel, FRS , was a British civil engineer who built bridges and dockyards including the construction of the first major British railway, the Great Western Railway; a series of steamships, including the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship; and numerous important bridges...
's ship the
SS Great EasternSS Great Eastern was an iron sailing steam ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and built by J. Scott Russell & Co. at Millwall on the River Thames, London. She was by far the largest ship ever built at the time of her 1858 launch, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the...
captained by
Sir James AndersonSir James Anderson captained the SS Great Eastern on the laying of the Transatlantic telegraph cable in 1865 and 1866.Anderson was born in Dumfries in south west Scotland and educated at the academy there....
, with the 1866 cable and the repaired 1865 cable.
Additional cables were laid between Foilhommerum and Heart's Content in 1873, 1874, 1880, and 1894. By the end of the 19th century, British-, French-, German-, and American-owned cables linked Europe and North America in a sophisticated web of telegraphic communications.
Origins of the idea
After
William CookeSir William Fothergill Cooke was, with Charles Wheatstone, the co-inventor of the Cooke-Wheatstone electrical telegraph, which was patented in May 1837...
and
Charles WheatstoneSir Charles Wheatstone FRS , was an English scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of the Victorian era, including the English concertina, the stereoscope , and the Playfair cipher...
introduced their working telegraph in 1839, the idea of a submarine line across the
Atlantic OceanThe Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions. With a total area of about , it covers approximately 20% of the Earth's surface and about 26% of its water surface area...
began to be thought of as possible.
Samuel F. B. MorseSamuel Finley Breese Morse was an American contributor to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs, co-inventor of the Morse code, and an accomplished painter.-Birth and education:...
proclaimed his faith in it as early as the year 1840 and the following decade saw a period of experimentation and growth of knowledge in underwater telegraph cables culminating in the 1850 link between England and France. That same year, Bishop
John T. MullockJohn Thomas Mullock was Roman Catholic bishop of St. John's, Newfoundland and did much to establish and develop the church in the region. Born in Limerick, Co. Limerick, Ireland, he died in St. John's and is buried in the crypt of the Basilica of St. John the Baptist.-Academic Life:Mullock became...
, head of the
Roman Catholic ChurchThe Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
in
Newfoundland, proposed a line of telegraph through the forest from St. John's to
Cape RayCape Ray is a headland located at the southwestern extremity of the island of Newfoundland in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador....
, and cables across the mouth of the St. Lawrence River from Cape Ray to
Nova ScotiaNova Scotia is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces and is the most populous province in Atlantic Canada. The name of the province is Latin for "New Scotland," but "Nova Scotia" is the recognized, English-language name of the province. The provincial capital is Halifax. Nova Scotia is the...
across the
Cabot StraitCabot Strait is a strait in eastern Canada approximately 110 kilometres wide between Cape Ray, Newfoundland and Cape North, Cape Breton Island. It is the widest of the three outlets for the Gulf of Saint Lawrence into the Atlantic Ocean, the others being the Strait of Belle Isle and Strait of Canso...
.
At about the same time, a similar plan occurred to
Frederick Newton GisborneFrederick Newton Gisborne was a Canadian inventor and electrician.Born in Broughton, Preston, Lancashire, England, he left England in 1842 for a trip around the world, finally settling in Canada in 1845...
, a telegraph engineer in Nova Scotia. In the spring of 1851, Gisborne procured a grant from the legislature of Newfoundland, and having formed a company, began the construction of the landline. However, in 1853 his company collapsed. He was arrested for debt and lost everything. The following year, he was introduced to Cyrus West Field. Field invited Gisborne to his house to discuss the project. From his visitor, Field extended the idea that the telegraph to Newfoundland might be extended across the Atlantic Ocean.
Field was ignorant of submarine cables and the deep sea. He consulted Morse as well as Lieutenant Matthew Maury, an authority on
oceanographyOceanography , also called oceanology or marine science, is the branch of Earth science that studies the ocean...
. Field adopted Gisborne's scheme as a preliminary step to the bigger undertaking, and promoted the
New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph CompanyThe New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company was a company in a series of conglomerations of several companies that eventually laid the first Trans-Atlantic cable....
to establish a telegraph line between America and Europe.
St. John's to Nova Scotia
The first step was to finish the line between St. John's and Nova Scotia, and in 1855 an attempt was made to lay a cable across the Cabot Strait in the
Gulf of Saint LawrenceThe Gulf of Saint Lawrence , the world's largest estuary, is the outlet of North America's Great Lakes via the Saint Lawrence River into the Atlantic Ocean...
. It was laid out from a
barqueA barque, barc, or bark is a type of sailing vessel with three or more masts.- History of the term :The word barque appears to have come from the Greek word baris, a term for an Egyptian boat. This entered Latin as barca, which gave rise to the Italian barca, Spanish barco, and the French barge and...
in tow of a steamer. When half was laid a gale rose and, to keep the barque from sinking, the line was cut away. Next summer a steamboat was fitted out for the purpose and the link from Cape Ray, Newfoundland to Aspy Bay, Nova Scotia was successfully laid.
Transatlantic
Field then directed the efforts to the transoceanic section with
Charles Tilston BrightSir Charles Tilston Bright was a British electrical engineer who oversaw the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858, for which work he was knighted....
as chief engineer. A special survey was made along the proposed route of the cable and revealed that it was feasible. Funds were raised from both American and British sources by selling shares in the
Atlantic Telegraph CompanyThe Atlantic Telegraph Company was a company formed in 1856 to undertake and exploit a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic ocean, the first such telecommunications link....
. Field himself supplied a quarter of the needed capital.
The cable consisted of seven copper wires, each weighing 26 kg/km (107
poundThe pound or pound-mass is a unit of mass used in the Imperial, United States customary and other systems of measurement...
s per
nautical mileThe nautical mile is a unit of length that is about one minute of arc of latitude along any meridian, but is approximately one minute of arc of longitude only at the equator...
), covered with three coats of
gutta-perchaGutta-percha is a genus of tropical trees native to Southeast Asia and northern Australasia, from Taiwan south to the Malay Peninsula and east to the Solomon Islands. The same term is used to refer to an inelastic natural latex produced from the sap of these trees, particularly from the species...
, weighing 64 kg/km (261 pounds per nautical mile), and wound with tarred
hempHemp is mostly used as a name for low tetrahydrocannabinol strains of the plant Cannabis sativa, of fiber and/or oilseed varieties. In modern times, hemp has been used for industrial purposes including paper, textiles, biodegradable plastics, construction, health food and fuel with modest...
, over which a sheath of 18 strands, each of seven iron wires, was laid in a close spiral. It weighed nearly 550 kg/km (1.1 tons per nautical mile), was relatively flexible and was able to withstand a pull of several tens of kilonewtons (several tons). It was made jointly by two English firms—Glass, Elliot & Co., of
GreenwichGreenwich is a district of south London, England, located in the London Borough of Greenwich.Greenwich is best known for its maritime history and for giving its name to the Greenwich Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time...
, and R. S. Newall & Co., of Liverpool.
The British Government gave Field a subsidy of £1,400 a year and loaned the ships to lay the cable. Field solicited aid from the United States Congress; the vote was very close with a number of anglophobe senators opposing any grant. The Bill was passed by a single vote. In the House of Representatives it encountered a similar hostility, but was ultimately signed by President
Franklin PierceFranklin Pierce was the 14th President of the United States and is the only President from New Hampshire. Pierce was a Democrat and a "doughface" who served in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. Pierce took part in the Mexican-American War and became a brigadier general in the Army...
.
The first attempt, in 1857, was a failure. The cable-laying vessels were the converted warships
HMS AgamemnonHMS Agamemnon was a Royal Navy 91-gun battleship ordered by the Admiralty in 1849 in response to the perceived threat from France by their possession of ships of the Napoléon class...
and
USS NiagaraThe second USS Niagara was a steam frigate in the United States Navy.Niagara was launched by New York Navy Yard on 23 February 1855; sponsored by Miss Annie C. O'Donnell; and commissioned on 6 April 1857, Captain William L...
. The cable was started at the white strand near
Ballycarbery CastleBallycarbery Castle is a castle 3km from Cahersiveen, County Kerry, Ireland . The castle is situated high on a grass hill facing the sea and is a short distance from Cahergall Fort and Leacanabuile Fort.-History:...
County KerryKerry means the "people of Ciar" which was the name of the pre-Gaelic tribe who lived in part of the present county. The legendary founder of the tribe was Ciar, son of Fergus mac Róich. In Old Irish "Ciar" meant black or dark brown, and the word continues in use in modern Irish as an adjective...
, the southwest coast of
IrelandIreland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
, on August 5, 1857. The cable broke on the first day, but was grappled and repaired; it broke again over the 'telegraph plateau,' nearly 3,200 m (2 statute miles) deep, and the operation was abandoned for the year.
The following summer the
Agamemnon and
Niagara, after experiments in the
Bay of BiscayThe Bay of Biscay is a gulf of the northeast Atlantic Ocean located south of the Celtic Sea. It lies along the western coast of France from Brest south to the Spanish border, and the northern coast of Spain west to Cape Ortegal, and is named in English after the province of Biscay, in the Spanish...
, tried again. The vessels were to meet in the middle of the Atlantic, where the two halves of the cable were to be spliced together, and while the
Agamemnon paid out eastwards to Valentia Island the
Niagara was to pay out westward to
Newfoundland. On June 26, the middle splice was made and the cable was dropped. Again the cable broke, the first time after less than 5.5 km (three nautical miles), again after some 100 km (54 nautical miles) and for a third time when about 370 km (200 nautical miles) of cable had run out of each vessel.
The expedition returned to Queenstown and set out again on July 17 with little enthusiasm among the crews. The middle splice was finished on July 29, 1858. The cable ran easily this time. The
Niagara arrived in
Trinity Bay, NewfoundlandTrinity Bay is a large bay on the northeastern coast of Newfoundland in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.Major fishing communities include Trinity and Heart's Content.-Industry:...
on August 4 and the next morning the shore end was landed. The
Agamemnon made an equally successful run. On August 5, she arrived at Valentia Island, and the shore end was landed at Knightstown and then laid to the nearby cable house.
First contact
On August 16, 1858, the first message sent across the cable was, "Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and good will toward men." Then Queen Victoria sent a telegram of congratulation to President
James BuchananJames Buchanan, Jr. was the 15th President of the United States . He is the only president from Pennsylvania, the only president who remained a lifelong bachelor and the last to be born in the 18th century....
through the line, and expressed a hope that it would prove "an additional link between the nations whose friendship is founded on their common interest and reciprocal esteem." The President responded that, "it is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle. May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of Heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world."
These messages were the signal for an outburst of enthusiasm. Next morning a grand salute of 100 guns resounded in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, the streets were decorated with flags, the bells of the churches rung, and at night the city was illuminated. The Atlantic cable was a theme for innumerable sermons and a prodigious quantity of
doggerelDoggerel is a derogatory term for verse considered of little literary value. The word probably derived from dog, suggesting either ugliness, puppyish clumsiness, or unpalatability in the 1630s.-Variants:...
.
Failure of the first cable
The operation of the new cable was plagued by the fact that the two senior electrical engineers of the company had very different ideas on how the cable should be worked. Further they were located at opposite ends of the cable and the only communication between them was via the cable itself. Lord Kelvin, located at the western end believed that it was only necessary to drive the cable from a low voltage and to detect the rising edge of the current flowing out of the cable, and once this had been done there was nothing to be gained by further monitoring (The method of sending morse through the cable was to input a positive current for a 'dot' and a negative current for a 'dash'). Lord Kelvin invented his mirror galvonometer precisely for this task of observing the current change as soon as possible.
Doctor Whitehouse (who was the company's chief electrician and actually a doctor of medicine - any electrical knowledge that he possessed was entirely self taught) was located at the eastern end of the cable. He believed that in order to have the current at the receiving end change as rapidly as possible, the cable should be driven from a high voltage source (i.e. several thousand volts from induction coils). The position was made worse because every time intelligible morse was seen on the mirror galvanometer at the eastern end, Whitehouse insisted that the galvonometer was disconnected and replaced with his own patent telegraph recorder, which was far less sensistive than the galvanometer.
The effects of the poor design of the cable coupled with Whitehouse's repeated attempts to drive the cable with high voltages, resulted in the insulation of the cable being compromised. All the while, it was taking longer and longer to send messages. Towards the end, half a page of message text was taking as long as a day to send.
In September, after several days of progressive deterioration of the insulation, the cable failed. The reaction at this news was tremendous. Some writers even hinted that the line was a mere hoax, and others pronounced it a stock exchange speculation. In the enquiry that followed, Doctor Whitehouse was deemed responsible for the failure, but the company did not escape critism for employing an electrical engineer with no recognised qualifications.
Field was undaunted by the failure. He was eager to renew the work, but the public had lost confidence in the scheme, and his efforts to revive the company were futile. It was not until 1864 that with the assistance of
Thomas BrasseyThomas Brassey was an English civil engineering contractor and manufacturer of building materials who was responsible for building much of the world's railways in the 19th century. By 1847, he had built about one-third of the railways in Britain, and by time of his death in 1870 he had built one...
and
John PenderSir John Pender , British Submarine communications cable pioneer, was born in the Vale of Leven, Scotland, and after attending school in Glasgow became a successful merchant in textile fabrics in that city and in Manchester; where he had a warehouse in Peter street near The Great Northern Warehouse...
he succeeded in raising the necessary capital. The Glass, Elliot, and Gutta-Percha Companies were united to form the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company (Telcon, later part of
BICCBritish Insulated Callender's Cables was a 20th century British cable manufacturer and construction company, now renamed after former subsidiary Balfour Beatty.-History:...
), which undertook to manufacture and lay the new cable. C.F. Varley replaced Whitehouse as chief electrician.
Much experience had been gained in the meantime. Long cables had been submerged in the Mediterranean and the
Red SeaThe Red Sea is a seawater inlet of the Indian Ocean, lying between Africa and Asia. The connection to the ocean is in the south through the Bab el Mandeb strait and the Gulf of Aden. In the north, there is the Sinai Peninsula, the Gulf of Aqaba, and the Gulf of Suez...
. With this experience an improved cable was designed. The core consisted of seven twisted strands of very pure copper weighing 300 lb per nautical mile (73 kg/km), coated with
Chatterton's compoundChatterton’s compound was an adhesive waterproof insulating compound that was used in early submarine telegraph cables.Its constitution is as follows:*3 parts gutta-percha*1 part rosin*1 part Stockholm tar...
, then covered with four layers of
gutta-perchaGutta-percha is a genus of tropical trees native to Southeast Asia and northern Australasia, from Taiwan south to the Malay Peninsula and east to the Solomon Islands. The same term is used to refer to an inelastic natural latex produced from the sap of these trees, particularly from the species...
, alternating with four thin layers of the compound cementing the whole, and bringing the weight of the insulator to 400 lb/nmi (98 kg/km). This core was covered with hemp saturated in a preservative solution, and on the hemp were spirally wound eighteen single strands of high tensile steel wire produced by Webster & Horsfall Ltd of Hay Mills
BirminghamBirmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
, each covered with fine strands of
manilaManila hemp, also known as manilla, is a type of fiber obtained from the leaves of the abacá , a relative of the banana. It is mostly used for pulping for a range of uses, including speciality papers. It was once used mainly to make manila rope, but this is now of minor importance...
yarn steeped in the preservative. The weight of the new cable was 35.75 long
hundredweightThe hundredweight or centum weight is a unit of mass defined in terms of the pound . The definition used in Britain differs from that used in North America. The two are distinguished by the terms long hundredweight and short hundredweight:* The long hundredweight is defined as 112 lb, which...
(4000 lb) per nautical mile (980 kg/km), or nearly twice the weight of the old. The Haymills site successfully manufactured 30000 miles (48,280.2 km) of wire (1,600 tons), made by 250 workers over eleven months.
Repairing the cable
Broken cables required an elaborate repair procedure. The approximate distance to the break is determined by measuring the resistance of the broken cable. The repair ship navigated to the location. The cable was hooked with a grapple and brought on board to test for electrical continuity. Buoys were deployed to mark the ends of good cable and a splice was made between the two ends.
The Great Eastern
The new cable was laid by the ship
Great EasternSS Great Eastern was an iron sailing steam ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and built by J. Scott Russell & Co. at Millwall on the River Thames, London. She was by far the largest ship ever built at the time of her 1858 launch, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the...
captained by
Sir James AndersonSir James Anderson captained the SS Great Eastern on the laying of the Transatlantic telegraph cable in 1865 and 1866.Anderson was born in Dumfries in south west Scotland and educated at the academy there....
. Her immense hull was fitted with three iron tanks for the reception of 2300 nautical miles (4,259.6 km) of cable, and her decks furnished with the paying-out gear. At noon on July 15, 1865, the
Great Eastern left the Nore for Foilhommerum Bay, Valentia Island, where the shore end was laid by the
Caroline. This attempt failed on July 31 when, after 1,062 miles (1968 km) had been paid out, the cable snapped near the stern of the ship, and the end was lost.
The
Great Eastern steamed back to England, where Field issued another prospectus, and formed the
Anglo-American Telegraph Company, to lay a new cable and complete the broken one. On July 13, 1866, the
Great Eastern started paying out once more. Several times in unrolling the cable they observed that nails had been recently forced into it, evidently with the motive of destroying it. Captain Anderson had it posted up that if the offender were caught on board, he would be thrown into the sea without further trial. From then on the criminal act was not repeated. Despite problems with the weather on the evening of Friday, July 27, the expedition reached the port of Heart's Content in a thick fog. The next morning at 9 a.m. a message from England cited these words from the
leaderAn opinion piece is an article, published in a newspaper or magazine, that mainly reflects the author's opinion about the subject. Opinion pieces are featured in many periodicals.-Editorials:...
in
The TimesThe Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
: "It is a great work, a glory to our age and nation, and the men who have achieved it deserve to be honoured among the benefactors of their race." "Treaty of peace signed between Prussia and Austria." The shore end was landed during the day by the
Medway. Congratulations poured in, and friendly telegrams were again exchanged between Queen Victoria and the United States.
On August 9 the
Great Eastern put to sea again, in order to grapple the lost cable of 1865, and complete it to Newfoundland. They were determined to find it. There were some who thought it hopeless to try, declaring that to locate a cable two-and-a-half miles down would be like looking for a small needle in a large haystack.
Robert HalpinRobert Charles Halpin, Master Mariner, born 16 February 1836 at the Bridge Tavern Wicklow, Ireland – 20 January 1894 and died at Tinakilly, Wicklow. He captained the Brunel-designed leviathan SS Great Eastern which laid transoceanic telegraph cables in the late 19th century. He was, arguably, one...
navigated the ship to the correct location. For days, the
Great Eastern moved slowly here and there, "fishing" for the lost cable with a grapnel at the end of a stout rope. Suddenly, the cable was "caught" and brought to the surface, but while the men cheered it slipped from the grapnel's hold and vanished again. It was not until a fortnight later that it was once more fished up; then it took 26 hours to get it safely on board the
Great Eastern. The cable was carried to the electrician's room, where it was determined that the cable was connected. All on the ship cheered or wept as rockets were sent up into the sky to light the sea. The recovered cable was then spliced to a fresh cable in her hold, and paid out to
Heart's Content, NewfoundlandHeart's Content is an incorporated town in Trinity Bay on the Bay de Verde Peninsula of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The natural harbour that makes up the town is located on the east side of Trinity Bay and it is built along the northeast side and the southeast base of this...
, where she arrived on Saturday, September 7. There were now two working telegraph lines.
Communication speeds
Initially messages were sent by an operator sending
Morse codeMorse code is a method of transmitting textual information as a series of on-off tones, lights, or clicks that can be directly understood by a skilled listener or observer without special equipment...
, a series of dots and dashes. The reception was very bad on the 1858 cable, and it took two minutes to transmit just one character (a single letter or a single number), which translates to about 0.1
words per minuteWords per minute, commonly abbreviated wpm, is a measure of input or output speed.For the purposes of WPM measurement a word is standardized to five characters or keystrokes. For instance, "I run" counts as one word, but "rhinoceros" counts as two...
. This is despite the use of a highly sensitive
mirror galvanometerthumb|right|200px|A mirror galvanometerA mirror galvanometer is a mechanical meter that senses electric current, except that instead of moving a needle, it moves a mirror. The mirror reflects a beam of light, which projects onto a meter, and acts as a long, weightless, massless pointer...
, a new invention of the time.
The first message on the 1858 cable took over 17 hours to transmit. For the 1866 cable, the methods of cable manufacture, as well as sending messages, had been vastly improved. The 1866 cable could transmit eight words a minute —80 times faster than the 1858 cable. Heaviside and Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin in later decades understood that the problem was an imbalance between capacitive and inductive reactance, to be solved by iron tape or by load coils. It was not until the 20th century that message transmission speeds over transatlantic cables would reach even 120 words per minute. Despite this, London had become the world centre in telecommunications. Eventually, no fewer than eleven cables radiated from
PorthcurnoPorthcurno is a small village in the parish of St. Levan located in a valley on the south coast of the county of Cornwall, England in the United Kingdom. It is approximately to the west of the market town of Penzance and about from Land's End, the most westerly point of the English mainland...
Cable Station near
Land's EndLand's End is a headland and small settlement in west Cornwall, England, within the United Kingdom. It is located on the Penwith peninsula approximately eight miles west-southwest of Penzance....
and formed with their Commonwealth links a "live" girdle around the world.
Repeater
The original cables were not fitted with
repeatersA repeater is an electronic device that receives asignal and retransmits it at a higher level and/or higher power, or onto the other side of an obstruction, so that the signal can cover longer distances.-Description:...
, which would have amplified the signal along the way. This was because there was no practical way to power the relays. As technology advanced, intermediate relays became possible.
In fiction
- The cable is one of the many underwater landmarks observed by the Nautilus
The Nautilus is the fictional submarine featured in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island . Verne named the Nautilus after Robert Fulton's real-life submarine Nautilus...
in Jules VerneJules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...
’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the SeaTwenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne published in 1870. It tells the story of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus as seen from the perspective of Professor Pierre Aronnax...
”.
- The 2003 novel Signal & Noise, by John Griesemer, tells a fictionalized story of the project, including many incidents from real life.
- In the novel Open the Door! (1918) by Catherine Carswell
Catherine Roxburgh Carswell was a Scottish author, biographer and journalist, now known as one of the few women who took part in the Scottish Renaissance...
, the Bannermans visit the Great Eastern, which lay in Liverpool harbor as a show ship before being broken up; Linnet Bannerman's imagination has been captured by the cable.
See also
- Robert Halpin
Robert Charles Halpin, Master Mariner, born 16 February 1836 at the Bridge Tavern Wicklow, Ireland – 20 January 1894 and died at Tinakilly, Wicklow. He captained the Brunel-designed leviathan SS Great Eastern which laid transoceanic telegraph cables in the late 19th century. He was, arguably, one...
—Captain of the Great Eastern
- Transatlantic telephone cable
A transatlantic telecommunications cable is a submarine communications cable running under the Atlantic Ocean. All modern cables use fibre optic technology....
- Western Union Telegraph Expedition—overland alternative via Russia
- 1929 Grand Banks earthquake
The 1929 Grand Banks earthquake, also called the Laurentian Slope earthquake and the South Shore Disaster, was a magnitude 7.2 earthquake that occurred on November 18, 1929 in the Atlantic Ocean off the south coast of Newfoundland in the Laurentian Slope Seismic Zone.The earthquake was centred on...
- Commercial Cable Company
The Commercial Cable Company was founded in the United States in 1884 by John William Mackay and James Gordon Bennett, Jr. Their motivation was to break the then virtual monopoly of Jay Gould on transatlantic telegraphy and bring down prices .The technology was well established by this time, and...
- Enderby's Wharf
Enderby's Wharf is a wharf and industrial site on the south bank of the Thames in southeast London, associated with Telcon and other companies...
Further reading
- Rozwadowski, Helen. Fathoming the Ocean (2005). Devotes a good deal of space to the description of cable-laying.
- Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet (1998). ISBN 0-75380-703-3. The story of the men and women who were the earliest pioneers of the on-line frontier, and the global network they created—a network that was, in effect, the Victorian Internet.
External links