Gillian Cookson - The Cable: Wire to the New World

John Hirst Fenton

19281994

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.

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 Cookes 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 mans 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. Hubbells 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.

Morses 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 Governors 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.