The Cable Read online

  To my friend

  John Hirst Fenton

  1928–1994

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  1 The Mystic Voice of Electricity

  2 The Great Feat of the Century

  3 The Stride of a Full-Grown Giant

  4 Lightnings through Deep Waters

  5 Languishing by Delay

  6 A Thrill along the Iron Nerve

  Sources & Information

  Plates

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks especially to Colin Hempstead, and for information, help, advice, support and encouragement variously to Bill Burns of the Atlantic Cable website (http://www.atlantic-cable.com/); Charlotte Dando, collections manager, Porthcurno Telegraph Museum, and Allan Green, research fellow at the museum; Anne Locker, archivist of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (formerly the Institution of Electrical Engineers); Amy Rigg and Abigail Wood of The History Press; and to Neil, Joe and Francis Cookson.

  1

  The Mystic Voice

  of Electricity

  Whose idea was the transatlantic cable? Once the scheme was a success, and even before that, there was no shortage of claimants. John Watkins Brett declared in 1857, as the first Atlantic cable was being manufactured, that he and his brother Jacob had thought of it early in 1845. By then, a network of land telegraphs had spread quickly across England, following Wheatstone and Cooke’s 1837 patent. Most of these were overhead lines, but some were underground. ‘If possible underground, why not under water?’ asked the Brett brothers. And if under water, could it not lie on the bed of the ocean?

  The Bretts were convinced that the idea would work, and went so far as to register a company with the aim of establishing a telegraph from Britain to Nova Scotia and Canada. They also tried to interest the British government in an experiment, a cable through which Ireland could be ruled by putting ‘Dublin Castle in instantaneous communication with Downing Street’. This came to nothing.

  But the Bretts were much more than dreamers. They made their name in submarine telegraphs, laying the first international line beneath the sea, between France and England in 1851. In 1845, though, their idea had barely materialised into any real shape. At that time they could not conceivably have crossed the Channel, let alone the Atlantic. Years later, John Brett discovered that Wheatstone himself had also in 1845 been developing a scheme for a Channel telegraph. Yet Brett continued to insist that submarine cables were ‘purely an invention of our own’ and that ‘no man’s labours or suggestions were borrowed’.

  In the United States, Professor Samuel Finley Breeze Morse would have disputed this point. Morse was some years ahead of the Britons. Cromwell Fleetwood Varley, an eminent British telegraph engineer, later had no doubt that the transatlantic cable had originated in America: ‘It is indisputably clear that the idea of connecting the US with England practically originated in New York, that these American originators pushed on the telegraph.’ The word ‘practically’ is key. It was simple to visualise a long submarine line, but few were capable of advancing the idea any further. Morse proved that he was one of that small number by laying a cable in New York harbour, across part of the East River, in 1842. Although an anchor destroyed the line almost as soon as it was operational, he had shown beyond doubt that the feat was possible.

  Samuel Morse, who had started out as an artist, was professor of Natural Science at Yale and a pioneer of land telegraphs in the United States. His experiments on submarine cables were well recorded, so his claim that he was thinking about a transatlantic cable early in the 1840s is convincing. Morse left an account of how his ideas at that time had developed, in letters written during 1854 to General Horatio Hubbell of Philadelphia. Hubbell’s role in the ocean telegraph is insignificant, except that he too was claiming first inspiration for the idea. On the strength of this, he wrote to Morse demanding a seat on the board of a company with which the professor was involved. Morse replied at some length, explaining the evolution of his own work with perhaps more patience than Hubbell merited:

  It was quite natural that the extension of my system throughout the world should occupy my thoughts with some degree of intensity, and that in view of this anticipated world-wide extension, the connection of Europe and America was at least a possible, if not a probable subject of thought and speculation with me. Now this is a subject which occupied my mind at least as early as 1842, as printed documents before Congress elucidate.

  The idea then was ‘a brilliant but impracticable, or rather unsolved, conception’, as unreal, said Morse, as air travel. He tried to point out to Hubbell that the notion itself amounted to little:

  A claim for the original barren thought, however brilliant, is comparatively of little account in the eyes of the world. It is he who first combines facts, plans and means to carry out a brilliant thought to a successful result who in the judgment of the world is most likely to receive the greatest credit, while, nevertheless, an impartial posterity will award to each one whose mind has been employed in elaborating any part of a useful project his just share of honor in bringing it to a result.

  And Morse went on at length to list his own thought processes as the idea had taken hold of him. In 1842 there had been many great unknowns:

  First, can electricity, by means of a single electro-motor, be propelled to a distance so great as the width of the ocean? This was a problem which my experiments of 1842, 1843, were intended to solve and which was so far satisfactorily solved to my own mind, as to lead me to declare the law of propulsion, or rather the law of battery construction.

  As it turned out, this conclusion was optimistic and very premature. But Morse could certainly prove that he had been working on the question then, for he described the experiments to the secretary of the US Treasury in August 1843. His report to the Treasury concluded with the words: ‘The practical inference from this law is that a telegraphic communication on my plan may with certainty be established across the Atlantic. Startling as this may now seem, the time will come when this project will be realized.’

  Morse’s second problem was information about the state of the ocean bed. ‘This bed had not then been sounded, and, therefore, its character, whether suitable or not … for the reception of a proper conductor, was not known.’ The United States Navy had since taken ocean soundings, especially for the purpose of laying a cable, but these were still, in 1854, far from complete, so that this question was not fully resolved.

  The third problem, continued Morse, was ‘can a cable conductor of such a length be paid out to such a depth as is required?’

  This is resolved only by conjecture, and by the experience of comparatively very short distances in successful submarine crossings of rivers and wide channels. The first attempt for telegraphic purposes was made, so far as I believe, by me across the East River between Castle Garden and Governor’s Island in the autumn of 1842. Long subsequent to this submarine experiment, English companies have laid the conductors between the Irish and the English channels.

  Morse could have gone into much more detail about the host of mechanical and electrical unknowns. These questions could be resolved only by laying a long cable, and observing how well the process worked. How would the cable be constructed, protected, handled, laid? Would new kinds of instruments and electrical testing, and refined systems of working, be required? In these, as with the great electrical question of whether a signal could pass the width of the Atlantic Ocean, experiments in a laboratory or on a small scale were of limited use. The only way to know was to try.

  The fourth problem was finance. Hubbell’s efforts to lobby government for funding during the past five years had met responses on the lines tha
t ‘the world is not yet ready for such a project’. Morse knew that such an enterprise could go nowhere without massive backing from government or private enterprise. ‘Means are as essential to the project before it can be made of practical value, as all other parts of it.’ Although Morse was by then involved in such a company, and had been key to persuading it to broaden its horizons and to consider the Atlantic crossing, he knew there was a long way to go.

  It was the formation of this company – the New York, Newfoundland & London Electric Telegraph Co. – which had spurred Hubbell to approach Morse. As originator of the whole idea, he considered himself entitled to a seat on the board. Morse tolerantly explained that he had misunderstood the role of directors, and that the company was open only to ‘men of great capital’.

  Hubbell ignored the suggestion that he become a director by making a large investment. The General, undeterred by Morse’s scientific eminence, was more interested in pressing his technical views. When he proposed that the Atlantic cable should be buoyed rather than laid on the ocean floor, Morse’s patience ran out. Such a system made a cable vulnerable to ‘disturbing and disastrous agencies of storms, currents, ice and malevolence’. Morse made it clear that he was not prepared to consider Hubbell’s ideas further. General Hubbell took offence, writing a ‘discourteous and acrimonious rejoinder’, and was thereafter a small but irritating thorn in the side of the Atlantic telegraph, using patents to try fruitlessly to checkmate the project.

  The new company which so annoyed Hubbell had evolved from a less ambitious scheme in 1850. Although the Brett brothers failed in their first attempt to lay a cable across the Channel that year, a belief was growing that underwater telegraphs were a viable proposition. This planted an idea among residents of Newfoundland, the remote and inhospitable British colony at the north-eastern point of North America. In November 1850, the Roman Catholic Bishop Mullock of Newfoundland wrote to an American newspaper suggesting that a telegraph line should be built between Newfoundland and New York. This went rather further than what Morse would have called an ‘original barren thought’, for it proposed to use technology which was then becoming serviceable, on the threshold of practicability. Mullock’s scheme was for a land telegraph connecting St John’s, the island’s capital, with Cape Ray on the far west of the island, and submarine lines from there to the American mainland via St Paul’s and Cape Breton islands. For St John’s, it promised a significant new role as a communications centre. Passing mail steamers could be intercepted for messages from Europe to send on to New York, or might be handed the latest telegraphed news and cables from New York as they set sail to Ireland. Thus the time taken for mail to pass between Britain and the United States would be reduced by several days.

  About the time of the bishop’s letter, and maybe as a result of it, a similar idea came to Frederic Newton Gisborne. Gisborne was to initiate a chain of events which eventually, after many setbacks and obstacles, would lead to the first Atlantic cable. At the time when he first thought of a transatlantic line, which he later claimed happened in 1849, he was a telegraph engineer on overland cables. Born in 1824 in England, he had trained under a pupil of Samuel Morse, and by 1850 was superintendent of the Nova Scotia government telegraph lines, then the only wires in the province. Gisborne put forward a plan for a submarine cable between Newfoundland and the North American mainland at Halifax. His employers gave him leave to find support for this idea in St John’s. To the amazement of the Nova Scotia commissioners, Gisborne returned from Newfoundland with a plan which had gone far beyond the Newfoundland-Nova Scotia line, to encompass a transatlantic link to Ireland. Later there was a dispute about whether he had actually proposed an Atlantic cable, or whether his idea was merely to use fast steamers across the ocean. At that time, an Atlantic cable cannot have been much more than a theoretical prospect. But whether or not he put the transatlantic cable to them, the commissioners would not allow Gisborne to raise capital for the scheme, and he parted company with them in the summer of 1851 when the Nova Scotia telegraphs were transferred to a private company. He left for St John’s to pursue his transatlantic vision.

  The north-eastern United States and British provinces of North America.

  Gisborne’s first challenge was to find a route along the south coast of Newfoundland from St John’s to Cape Ray, on the far west of the island and the closest point to Nova Scotia. Between the two places, 300 miles as the crow flies, was terra incognita, unmapped and inhospitable wilderness impenetrable even on horseback. The forest was dense, the terrain marked with rocks and marshes, the climate foggy. Local fauna included bears and wolves. But Gisborne had a reputation for physical toughness. During a previous expedition in Quebec, he had once snow-shoed 100 miles while dragging all his possessions on a toboggan, for which his employer had presented him with a medal. He was to become known as ‘the indomitable electrician’. The New-foundland survey, though, was exceptionally arduous even by his standards. The engineering difficulties, the personal dangers and privations in this unexplored territory were formidable. The six men working for him deserted after the first hundred miles. He recruited instead four native Americans, one of whom died after a few days. Two others fled, and the fourth, who lasted to the end, never afterwards recovered his health.

  Yet Gisborne was back in St John’s in December, only three months after setting out on this hazardous and exhausting mission, and soon afterwards left for Boston in the hopes of finding support there. New York proved to be a more promising source of funds, and from there he went to London to meet John Brett. When he had set out to survey the line to Cape Ray, Gisborne expected that messages might have to cross the sea to Nova Scotia by carrier pigeon or steamship. But Brett’s success with the Dover-Calais line helped crystallise what had up to then been only an abstract idea. Gisborne bought a cable made by R.S. Newall and the Gutta Percha Co. in England, and very quickly organised the necessary finance, technology and machinery, much of it of his own design. He set up the Newfoundland Electric Telegraph Co., using capital supplied by Brett, and by two New York businessmen, Horace B. Tebbets and Darius B. Holbrooke, and secured telegraph rights on the island for thirty years:

  This company is designed to be strictly an inter-continental telegraph. Its termini will be New York and London; these points are to be connected by a line of electric telegraph from New York to St John’s, partly on poles, partly laid in the ground, and partly through the water, and a line of the swiftest steamships ever built from that point to Ireland. The trips of these steamships, it is expected, will not exceed five days, and as very little time will be occupied in transmitting messages between St John’s and New York, the communication between the latter city and London or Liverpool will be effected in six days, or less. The company will have likewise stationed at St John’s a steam yacht, for the purpose of intercepting the European and American steamships, so that no opportunity may be lost in forwarding intelligence in advance of the ordinary channels of communication.

  Compared with the scheme which followed soon afterwards, this first plan of Gisborne’s seems unambitious. Yet the goal of a six-day crossing for news and messages had still not been achieved more than a decade later, when twelve days was the best that could be managed, even for the most urgent information.

  Relations with the Nova Scotia Electric Telegraph Co. had soured further. They demanded charges which Gisborne considered exorbitant to handle messages on their lines, so the route from Cape Ray was changed, to pass further north across the Cabot Strait via Prince Edward Island, reaching the mainland at New Brunswick. Gisborne’s cable between Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, a distance of twelve nautical miles and to a depth of fourteen fathoms, laid by November 1852, was the first submarine line in America.

  The Goliah laying the first Dover-Calais cable, 1850. (Illustrated London News)

  This cable was soon afterwards broken, and Gisborne had neither the technology nor the experience to retrieve and repair it. Instead he started in ea
rnest to raise capital for the transatlantic crossing. He worked in New York with Tebbets and Holbrooke, while Brett undertook fund-raising in Britain. Gisborne had also to supervise the construction of his line across Newfoundland, a scheme which involved building a road, ‘a good and traversable bridle-road, eight feet wide, with bridges of the same width’, according to the agreement. A force of 350 labourers was employed on this vast project. Gisborne intended to lay the wires underground, but in the spring the ground was frozen too hard even to dig post-holes. The only possibility was to support poles within stone embankments made of rocks piled on the surface. Forty miles of line had been built when Tebbets and Holbrooke quarrelled over finances and refused to make any further payment to Gisborne. The engineer narrowly escaped imprisonment for fraud, lost everything he owned and had debts of over $50,000, most of it owed in wages to the workmen on the line.

  Apparently inexhaustible, Gisborne returned to his quest for funding. Brett agreed to carry on in Britain, suggesting to Gisborne that he offer the Newfoundland government free transmission of their messages if they would set up a new telegraph company and endow it with exclusive landing rights on the island for fifty years. Experience had already shown Brett that such contracts were essential to raise sufficient money for submarine cables, which had exceptionally high capital costs. Without the promise of a monopoly and high returns, investors were not willing to back such a risky project.

  The young engineer set out again for New York in the hope of raising further support. There he made the acquaintance of Matthew D. Field, a civil engineer, and through him was introduced to the engineer’s brother, Cyrus West Field. This chance meeting entirely altered the direction and the prospects of the Atlantic telegraph.