Ninety-Eight Words

On 16 August 1858 Queen Victoria sent a message to President Buchanan through two thousand miles of copper and gutta-percha lying on the floor of the Atlantic. It ran to ninety-eight words and took sixteen hours to arrive.

Nobody minded. A letter took ten days. Cities held parades. And within about three weeks the cable was dead.

What they thought was down there

The Atlantic Telegraph Company had been founded in 1856 by Cyrus Field, John Watkins Brett and Charles Tilston Bright. For the route they went to Matthew Fontaine Maury, the American naval officer who had done more than anyone to map the ocean floor, and he identified a stretch that was then called the telegraphic plateau, believed to be relatively flat and relatively shallow. It was not, particularly, but it was the best guess available and the expedition went out on it.

For the electrical side the company hired two men whose views were incompatible. William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, held that a long submarine cable behaves as a capacitor, that signals through it arrive smeared out, and that the answer is to detect very small currents with a very sensitive instrument. His was the mirror galvanometer, which threw a spot of light across a scale.

The other was Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse, a surgeon by profession and an electrical experimenter by inclination, appointed Electrician to the company in 1856 and given responsibility for the testing of the cable and the design of the equipment that would send signals through it. His view was that the way to get a signal to the far end was to push harder.

Three weeks

The first official message went from Newfoundland on 16 August 1858. Over the following twenty seven days the cable carried 271 messages. Then, around 1 September, it stopped.

Whitehouse had set Thomson's galvanometer aside and connected his own apparatus, including an induction coil five feet long, capable of putting something in the region of 2,000 volts into the line. The insulation gave way, the conductor went to sea earth through the holes, and that was the end of it. He was held responsible by a board of inquiry and dismissed. He has been the villain of the story ever since.

The half that usually gets left out

Stewart Ash, a submarine cable engineer who has spent a career investigating insulation faults on working cables, went back over the failure with the benefit of what the industry now knows, and his account is less satisfying and more interesting.

Pure gutta-percha has a dielectric strength of the order of 20 to 30 kilovolts per millimetre. On that basis even a thin covering should have survived 2,000 volts applied repeatedly. The cable as designed, he concludes, ought to have withstood what Whitehouse did to it. Which means something else was already wrong.

Start with the schedule. The first 2,500 nautical miles of cable core were manufactured in six months in 1857. The same length of armoured cable today would take twelve to fourteen months. The core was made by the Gutta Percha Company in London and then split, half going to a works in Birkenhead and half to another in Greenwich for armouring.

Then the materials. The gutta-percha of the day was not pure. It carried contaminants with their own electrical properties, so its dielectric strength was lower than the textbook figure and varied considerably from batch to batch. Nobody could have told you which mile of the cable was the weak one.

Then the workmanship. Surviving cross sections show the stranded copper conductor sitting slightly off the centre of the insulation, which puts the insulation under uneven stress. The drawn copper of the period could be brittle and could carry protrusions, and a strand standing proud creates a point where the electrical stress concentrates.

So the honest version is that a cable of uncertain insulation, made too fast, was handed to a man who then subjected it to a test regime it might have survived had it been made properly. Whitehouse was wrong to do it, and the schedule, the gutta-percha and the workmanship were wrong before he touched it.

Doing it properly

The 1865 attempt broke and was lost. The company could not raise more money under its existing structure, so a new one was formed under the Companies Act in March 1866, the Anglo American Telegraph Company, capitalised at 600,000 pounds.

The 1866 expedition is a study in what happens when an organisation has learned something. The Great Eastern left Sheerness at midday on 30 June. Thirty nautical miles of shore end had been laid at Valentia by 7 July. Laying began at three in the afternoon on Friday 13 July. The cable tangled twice and the ship stopped twice. Fourteen days later, on Friday 27 July 1866, she came into Heart's Content, Newfoundland, with an intact and working cable behind her. There has been a working cable under the Atlantic every day since.

Then they went back for the one they had lost. The Great Eastern sailed on 9 August, and on 31 August, at the thirteenth attempt, hooked the 1865 cable and raised it to a thousand fathoms. They buoyed it, hauled it aboard, cleaned the end, connected it to the ship's instruments and sent a message to Ireland. The reply told them both cables were working. A new length was spliced on and the ship carried it to Newfoundland, landing it on 7 September. The Atlantic now had two cables for the price of one.

What it was for

Completion of the 1866 cable set off the rest. The British government wanted a route to India that did not depend on overland lines running through territory it did not control, and John Pender formed the British Indian Submarine Telegraph Company in 1869 to build one. A telegraph service between London and Mumbai opened on 23 June 1870. By 21 October 1872 it reached Adelaide.

Which is the part worth holding on to. The thing being argued about in 1858 was not a message from a queen to a president. It was whether an instruction sent from London could arrive in Bombay the same day, and after 1870 it could.

Sources

• Nigel Linge and Bill Burns, "The Cable that Wired the World" (the formation of the Anglo American Telegraph Company in March 1866 and its capitalisation at 600,000 pounds; the Great Eastern leaving Sheerness at midday on 30 June 1866, the shore end laid by 7 July, laying beginning at three in the afternoon on Friday 13 July, the two tangles, and the arrival at Heart's Content on Friday 27 July after fourteen days at sea; the departure on 9 August to recover the 1865 cable, the hooking at the thirteenth attempt on 31 August, the raising to a thousand fathoms and the landing of the second cable on 7 September; the observation that a working cable has linked Europe to North America from that day to this; and the formation of the British Indian Submarine Telegraph Company in 1869, the London to Mumbai service opening on 23 June 1870 and the extension to Adelaide by 21 October 1872).
• Stewart Ash, History of the Atlantic Cable and Submarine Telegraphy, "Electrical Failure of the 1858 Atlantic Telegraph" (Whitehouse as a surgeon by profession appointed Electrician in 1856 and responsible for testing and for the transmitting equipment; the dielectric strength of pure gutta-percha at 20 to 30 kilovolts per millimetre and the conclusion that the cable as designed should have survived the 2,000 volts his equipment could deliver; the impurity of the gutta-percha actually used and its variation between batches; the manufacture of 2,500 nautical miles of core in six months in 1857 against twelve to fourteen months today; the splitting of the core between Birkenhead and Greenwich; and the off-centre conductor and brittle copper strands creating points of electrical stress).
• Library of Congress, "First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable Sent" (the founding of the Atlantic Telegraph Company in 1856 by Cyrus Field, John Watkins Brett and Charles Tilston Bright; the reliance on Matthew Fontaine Maury and the telegraphic plateau incorrectly thought to be flat and shallow; the hiring of Whitehouse and Thomson; and the first official message sent from Newfoundland on 16 August 1858).
• IEEE Spectrum, "The First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable Was a Bold, Beautiful Failure" (the 1858 failure and how it set up the success eight years later).
• Engineering and Technology History Wiki, "Transatlantic Cable" (the sequence of expeditions, the 98 word message from Queen Victoria taking sixteen hours, and the 271 messages carried in 27 days before the cable failed).
• Robert Charles Dudley, "The Atlantic Telegraph Cable Fleet Assembled at Berehaven" (the 1866 watercolour of the fleet, made by an artist who sailed with the expedition, released by the Metropolitan Museum of Art under CC0).