Transatlantic telegraph cable
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A transatlantic telegraph cable is an undersea cable running under the Atlantic Ocean used for telegraph communications. The first was laid across the floor of the Atlantic from Telegraph Field, Foilhommerum Bay, Valentia Island in western Ireland to Heart's Content in eastern Newfoundland. The first communications occurred August 16, 1858, reducing the communication time between North America and Europe from ten days — the time it took to deliver a message by ship — to a matter of minutes. Transatlantic telegraph cables have been replaced by transatlantic telecommunications cables.
Early history
Cyrus West Field and the Atlantic Telegraph Company were behind the construction of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. The project began in 1857 and was completed on August 5, 1858. The cable functioned for only three weeks, but it was the first such 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 Kingdom to the President of the United States James Buchanan on August 16. Signal quality declined rapidly, slowing transmission to an almost unusable speed. The cable was destroyed the following month when Wildman Whitehouse 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.)[1] The cable's rapid failure undermined public and investor confidence and delayed efforts to restore a connection. A second 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 cable proved more durable.
Previously, communication between Europe and the Americas could only happen by ship. The transatlantic cable reduced communication time to a matter of minutes, allowing a message and a response in the same day. In the 1870s duplex and quadruplex transmission and receiving systems were set up that could relay multiple messages over the cable.[citation needed] In cross-Atlantic currency trading, the exchange rate of the pound sterling to the US dollar came to be referred as "cable" and this term is still in common usage today.[2] Five attempts to lay the cable were made over a nine-year period—one in 1857, two in 1858, one in 1865, and one in 1866—before lasting connections were finally achieved with the 1866 cable and the repaired 1865 cable by Isambard Kingdom Brunel's ship the SS Great Eastern, captained by Sir James Anderson.[3]
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
William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone introduced their working telegraph in 1839. As early as 1840 Samuel F. B. Morse proclaimed his faith in the idea of a submarine line across the Atlantic Ocean. By 1850 a cable was run between England and France. That same year Bishop John T. Mullock, head of the Roman Catholic Church in Newfoundland, proposed a telegraph line through the forest from St. John's to Cape Ray, and cables across the mouth of the St. Lawrence River from Cape Ray to Nova Scotia across the Cabot Strait.
At about the same time a similar plan occurred to Frederick Newton Gisborne, 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. In 1853 his company collapsed, he was arrested for debt and he 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 considered the idea that the cable 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 oceanography. Field adopted Gisborne's scheme as a preliminary step to the bigger undertaking, and promoted the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company 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 Lawrence. It was laid out from a barque in tow of a steamer. When half the cable was laid a gale rose and the line was cut to keep the barque from sinking. The 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
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With Charles Tilston Bright as chief engineer, Field then directed the transoceanic cable effort. A survey was made of the proposed route and showed that the cable was feasible. Funds were raised from both American and British sources by selling shares in the Atlantic Telegraph Company. Field himself supplied a quarter of the needed capital.
The cable consisted of seven copper wires, each weighing 26 kg/km (107 pounds per nautical mile), covered with three coats of gutta-percha, weighing 64 kg/km (261 pounds per nautical mile), and wound with tarred hemp, 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 Greenwich, and R. S. Newall & Co., of Birkenhead. Late in manufacturing it was discovered that the respective sections had been made with strands twisted in opposite directions. While the two sections proved a simple matter to join, this mistake subsequently became magnified in the public mind.[4]
The British Government gave Field a subsidy of £1,400 a year and loaned the ships needed. Field solicited aid from the United States Congress. The vote was very close, with a number of anglophobe senators opposing any grant, but 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 Pierce.
The first attempt, in 1857, was a failure. The cable-laying vessels were the converted warships HMS Agamemnon and USS Niagara. The cable was started at the white strand near Ballycarbery Castle County Kerry, the southwest coast of Ireland, on August 5, 1857.[5] 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 Biscay, 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, Newfoundland 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.[6]
First contact
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On August 16, 1858 the first message sent via the cable was, "Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and good will toward men." Queen Victoria then sent a telegram of congratulation to President James Buchanan 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."[7] The messages were hard to decipher—Queen Victoria's message of 98 words took sixteen hours to send.[8]
These messages engendered an outburst of enthusiasm. The next morning a grand salute of 100 guns resounded in New York City, the streets were decorated with flags, the bells of the churches were rung, and at night the city was illuminated.[9] The Atlantic cable was a theme for innumerable sermons and a prodigious quantity of doggerel.
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[10]. Lord Kelvin and Doctor Whitehouse were located at opposite ends of the cable, only communicating via the cable itself.
Lord Kelvin, located at the western end, believed that it was only necessary to employ a low voltage and to detect the rising edge of the current flowing out of the cable and, once this had been done, nothing would be gained by further monitoring (Morse code used a positive current for a 'dot' and a negative current for a 'dash'). Lord Kelvin invented his mirror galvanometer precisely for this task of observing the current change quickly.
At the eastern end of the cable was Doctor Whitehouse. He was the company's chief electrician and a doctor of medicine - any electrical knowledge that he possessed was self-taught. Whitehouse 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 (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 galvanometer be disconnected and replaced with his own patent telegraph recorder, which was far less sensitive.
The effects of the poor handling and 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, sending half a page of message text was taking as long as a day.
In September, after several days of progressive deterioration of the insulation, the cable failed. The reaction to 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 criticism 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 Brassey and John Pender, 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 BICC), which undertook to manufacture and lay the new cable. C.F. Varley replaced Whitehouse as chief electrician.
In the meantime, long cables had been submerged in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. With this experience an improved cable was designed. The core consisted of seven twisted strands of very pure copper weighing 300 pounds per nautical mile (73 kg/km), coated with Chatterton's compound, then covered with four layers of gutta-percha, 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 Birmingham, each covered with fine strands of manila yarn steeped in the preservative. The weight of the new cable was 35.75 long hundredweight (4000 lb) per nautical mile (980 kg/km), or nearly twice the weight of the old. The Haymills site successfully manufactured 30,000 miles (48,000 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.[11][12]
The Great Eastern
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The new cable was laid by the ship Great Eastern captained by Sir James Anderson.[13] Her immense hull was fitted with three iron tanks for the reception of 2,300 nautical miles (4,300 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.[14]
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. 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 leader in The Times: "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.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Great_Eastern_Grappling_Hook.jpg/220px-Great_Eastern_Grappling_Hook.jpg)
On August 9 the Great Eastern put to sea again, in order to grapple the lost cable of 1865, and complete it to Newfoundland.[15] 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 Halpin navigated the ship to the correct location.[16] 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, Newfoundland, 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 code. 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), a rate of about 0.1 words per minute. This is despite the use of a highly sensitive mirror galvanometer, a new invention of the time.
The first message on the 1858 cable took over 17 hours to transmit.[17] 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[18] —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 Porthcurno Cable Station near Land's End and formed with their Commonwealth links a "live" girdle around the world.
Repeater
The original cables were not fitted with repeaters, which would have amplified the signal along the way, 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 in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
- 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, 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.
- Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Great Sea-Serpent" describes the havoc and confusion among the sea-dwellers caused by the laying of the cable.
See also
- Robert Halpin—Captain of the Great Eastern
- Transatlantic telephone cable
- Western Union Telegraph Expedition—overland alternative via Russia
- 1929 Grand Banks earthquake
- Commercial Cable Company
- Enderby's Wharf
Notes
- ^ http://atlantic-cable.com/Books/Whitehouse/DDC/index.htm History of the Transatlantic Cable - Dr. E.O.W. Whitehouse and the 1858 trans-Atlantic cable, retrieved 2010 04 10
- ^ The Money Changers: A Guided Tour through Global Currency Markets. Zed Books, 2006.
- ^ Wilson, Arthur (1994). The Living Rock: The Story of Metals Since Earliest Times and Their Impact on Civilization. p. 203. Woodhead Publishing. ISBN 978-1-85573-301-5.
- ^ Cookson, Gillian (2006). The Cable (2 ed.). Tempus Publishing. p. 73. ISBN 0-7524-3903-0.
- ^ "History of the Atlantic Cable - Submarine Telegraphy - 1857 - Laying the Atlantic Telegraph From Ship To Shore". Retrieved 2008-08-05.
- ^ "History of the Atlantic Cable - Submarine Telegraphy - Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper 1858 Cable News". Retrieved 2008-08-05.
- ^ The Queen's and the President's messages, full wording
- ^ BBC TV programme Shock and Awe The Story of Electricity by Jim Al-Khalili on 13 October 2011 Using Chief Engineer Bright's original notebook
- ^ "History of the Atlantic Cable - Submarine Telegraphy-1858 NY Celebration". Retrieved 2008-08-05..
- ^ Voice Across the Sea - Arthur C Clarke
- ^ The 1911 edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica: a dictionary of arts, sciences, literature and general information, Volume 26 Page 513-516
- ^ History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications - HOW SUBMARINE CABLES ARE MADE, LAID, OPERATED AND REPAIRED
- ^ History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy - Great Eastern
- ^ "History of the Atlantic Cable - Submarine Telegraphy - Daniel Gooch". Retrieved 2008-08-05.
- ^ "History of the Atlantic Cable - Submarine Telegraphy-Recovery of the Lost Cable". Retrieved 2008-08-05.
- ^ "Laying the French Atlantic Cable". Nautical magazine. 38. Brown, Son and Ferguson: 460. 1869. Retrieved 10 September 2011.
To have navigated the ship in a fog so exactly to her proper position was certainly a most wonderful testimony to Captain Halpin's judgment and skill, ...
- ^ "Famous Messages Received and Sent". Retrieved 2010-07-09.
- ^ [1][dead link]
- public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
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References and further reading
- Clarke, Arthur C. Voice Across the Sea (1958) and How the World was One (1992); the two books include some of the same material.
- Gordon, John Steele. A Thread across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable. New York: Walker & Co, 2002. ISBN 978-0-8027-1364-3.
- Murray, Donald (1902). "How Cables Unite the World". The World's Work: A History of Our Time. II: 2298–2309. Retrieved 2009-07-09.
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ignored (help) - 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 0-7538-0703-3. 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.
- Cookson, Gillian. The Cable. 2nd Ed (2006), Tempus Publishing. ISBN 0-7524-3903-0.
External links
- Biography of Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury by William "Maury" Morris II Ph.D.
- The Atlantic Cable by Bern Dibner (1959)—Complete free electronic version of The Atlantic Cable by Bern Dibner (1959), hosted by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries
- Atlantic Cable web site—Comprehensive history of submarine telegraphy with much original material
- PBS, American Experience: The Great Transatlantic Cable
- The History Channel: Modern Marvels: Transatlantic Cable: 2500 Miles of Copper
- A collection of articles on the history of telegraphy
- Cabot Strait Telegraph Cable 1856 between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia
- American Heritage: The Cable Under the Sea
- Alan Hall - First Transatlantic Cable and First message sent to USA 1856 Memorial
- Travelogue around the world's communications cables by Neal Stephenson
- The Old Cable House
- Atlantic telegraph cable 150th anniversary 1858-2008
- ICPC International Cable Protection Committee
- IEEE History Center: County Kerry Transatlantic Cable Stations, 1866
- IEEE History Center: Landing of the Transatlantic Cable, 1866
- The Telegraph Field - Valentia Island
- Laying Of The Atlantic Cable
- The Great Eastern - Robert Dudley Lithographs 1865