The Transatlantic Telegraph Cable

before the telephone, and way before stuff like fiber optics. Now, some early tests of undersea cables showed that while there were significant challenges to overcome, it could totally work. However, there were some peculiar issues that cropped up, especially as you worked with longer and longer subsea cables, and we talked a little bit about that, but I wanted to follow up on that specific part. So one person who quantified this issue was William Thompson, later known as Lord Kelvin.

He would be knighted and then made a member of the Peerage, largely for his contributions to telegraphy, and we talked about him a little bit in the last episode. We'll talk about him a lot more in this one. He had described the relationship of a signal speed passing through an undersea cable as being inversely proportional by the

to the cable's length the square of the cable's length. Actually, he said that as the square of the length of the cable increases, for any given diameter of a core conductor, the speed of the signal passing through that conductor would decrease. Uh He had discovered that a conductive cable insulated by some sort of material like Gutta percha or later synthetic rubber. UH the surrounded by a conducting medium like saltwater acts

as a type of condenser. Now we are not talking about the kind of condenser you find in an air conditioner or a refrigerator. Condenser in this sense means capacitor. It's kind of an old word for what we would call a capacitor today. And a capacitor stores electricity. It stores an electrostatic charge in an electric field, and it builds up this electrostatic charge and it can rapidly discharge under the right conditions. So a typical capacitor consists of

a pair of conductive plates. They are separated by a non conducting substance we call dielectric. So if you want to think of it like a sandwich. The bread of our sandwich are a pair of metal plates, one of which has a positive charge, one which has a negative charge, and the filling in our sandwich is tasty, tasty, non conductive dielectric. So an electric terminal connext to each of those plates. So, like I said, you have a positive side and a negative side pause of a negative electric charge.

In other words, so when you connect this to a battery, the negative plate builds up electrons, it has a stronger negative charge. The other plate loses electrons. It becomes positively charged. But the electrons from the negative plate cannot immediately pass to the positive plate. You know, they want to do

that because opposite charges attract, so positive attracts negative. But because we have that crumby dielectric sandwich filling coming up the two plates, the electrons cannot make that journey, so they just keep accumulating and the negative charge on that plate continues to grow. Effectively, we're storing that electric charge in this capacitor. In fact, if we disconnect it from the battery, that electric charge will still be in that capacitor for a good long while, as long as you

haven't created a way for it to discharge. So, in other words, it's not connected to any other kind of circuit. And this is why if you've ever seen a video of someone smashing up old you know, cafod ray tube, television or monitor, you might have seen some some sparks fly like almost like a little explosion. Well that's because there are powerful capacitors in these old monitors and they can still have a significant and harmful charge of electricity

inside them because, like I said, capacitors store electricity. This is why it's a good idea to you know, not smash them. Anyway, let's get back to capacitors. So you got this capacitor and it's stored up an electric charge from a power source. But if you connect that capascitor to a circuit with a load on it, such as a flash bulb for a you know, a film camera, it allows the capacitor to release or you know, dump that entire electric charge all at once, you know, just

in an instant. So you get this sudden electric discharge, which is useful for your applications, like having a flashbulb go off. You see, energy from a battery has this sort of ramping up situation. So if you had the flashbulb just attached to a switch with a battery attached,

then the bulb would not go off as quickly. It wouldn't just go off in an instant It will come on slightly more gradually and turn off more gradually, and thus not be suitable for you to take a picture with like a film camera, where you want the aperture to have just the right amount of light exposure when it opens. And it might seem to us when you're using a battery that things are coming on instantly, are going off instantly, but when you're talking about super high

speed applications, that really makes a difference. A capacitor makes it seem truly instantaneous to us. Anyway, the future Lord Kelvin was kind of sussing all this out, that these cables under the ocean can start to act like a capacitor and store up an electric charge which interferes with signals passing through. And he saw that subseat cables wouldn't behave the same way as terrestrial ones, would you know,

the ones above the waves. With terrestrial cables, you didn't encounter the same issues of signal RETARDA is what they called it the signal being slowed down like they overland they weren't seeing this, but under the oceans they were. So he was advising engineers to consider this challenge and to find new ways to approach subsea cables to account for those differences. And one thing he advised was that the cable should be a large diameter core cable, in

other words, thicker copper wires. He felt that a pure copper cable, like something as pure as you can make it, with a pretty thick diameter would reduce the electrical resistance of the cable, and he was right. But there were other people like Michael Faraday, another brilliant engineer, and Samuel Morse who was he was pretty sharp himself. They felt that the copper wire really needed to be very narrow, very thin, in order to reduce the effects of signal retardation.

They felt that that by being isolated from the water, in other words, having it thinner and surrounded by more installation, that that would solve the problem. Now, Thompson had his own supporters, including another very important person on the team who were you know, figuring this stuff out. But the narrow cable also had lots of supporters, and perhaps more importantly, a narrow cable would represent a cheaper option because you needed less copper. Right, you weren't making as thick a

copper wire. So I bet you can guess which one the Atlantic Telegraph Company went with. And now just a quick digression. One thing that the pandemic has really taught us today is that not everyone accepts scientific explanations as being realistic. And I do grant that the process of science means that you have to do lots of testing of hypotheses in order to see if they actually hold up. You can't just accept a hypothesis on the face of it,

because sometimes we make hypotheses that are wrong. Sometimes we make some that are really wrong. But when we actually have tested them and they have stood those tests, we should be ready to accept those scientific results. C. Thompson was pretty thorough in his analysis, and others could have followed his lead and tested his findings themselves to their satisfaction,

but they didn't really do that anyway. The reason I even say all this is Lord Kelvin's work wasn't immediately embraced by telegraphy companies because, for one thing, if he was right, it would mean that these companies would all have to spend way more money to make cables. Those cables would be far more expensive. Um. And there were some who just figured that all you really need to do was increase the voltage to sufficient levels to push a signal through a very long cable, and that would

end up causing issues. Um. Just as a reminder, voltage in an electrical system is kind of like water pressure in a plumbing system. It's not how much electricity there is, rather the difference in positive to negative electric charge, or you know, you can think of it as how much ooth the electricity has behind it. So you can have high voltage with a low current, which means you're pushing out a tiny stream of electricity at incredible pressure. Or

you can have low voltage but high current. In that case you're moving a lot of electricity but not with a whole lot of ooth behind it. Or you can have both voltage and current be high or low. But that's enough, because I talked about that in the previous episode.

So while the Future Lord Kelvin was exploring the limitations of contemporary technology with regard to subsea cables, companies began to lay more of those subsea cables over relatively short distances, and because you know, Lord Kelvin's discoveries showed that we'd really only encounter significant limitations over great distances. Subsea cables worked good enough in most cases, though companies would have to replace them every couple of decades due to wear

and tear. But well before all those replacements, in the mid eighteen fifties, there was a growing interest in creating a cable long enough to connect Europe to North America. Now, this would be significantly longer than any subseed cable produced up to that point. One person in America who was really pushing for this was a businessman named Cyrus west Field.

I've talked a lot about engineers and scientists in these episodes, but we also have to remember that financiers and business folk are really important too, because you know, that's where the money comes from. So Field had made his fortune

in the paper industry, uh, though not always smoothly. It took him a while to get there, but by his early thirties he was so wealthy that he decided to retire the rotten wats it anyway, he became interested in telegraphy and he joined a venture proposed by and English electrician Frederick in Gisborne, who was living in Canada and Gisborne wanted a cable that connected Newfoundland with Nova Scotia and to go across a body of water along the way.

So Field helped secure investors and the cable had been designed and built and laid, though the project ended up taking much longer than Field had estimated due to the rugged terrain of Canada and the fact that Canada has a lot of natural dangers in it, such as bears, wolves, and tim Horton's but the cable's success convinced Field that a subsea cable connecting North America to Europe would be invaluable, particularly for business purposes, like if you have a partnership

and you've got, you know, a partner in London and you were in New York, it would be really useful to be able to communicate with that person in near real time. So the route that seemed the most promising would be Newfoundland to Ireland. That was a distance that would equal somewhere between six hundred to two thousand miles. So Field attracted supporters and investors both in America and in England. Our Buddy Billy the Future, Lord Kelvin Thompson

joined that project. Uh. Samuel Morris did as well. John Watkins Brett, who had overseen the first commercial subsea connection between Dover, England and Calais, France, which we talked about in the last episode. Uh, he also was part of this endeavor. And Field brought on a British surgeon with the amazing name Edward Orange Wildman white House to serve as chief electrician. And you might think, huh, that's weird bringing a surgeon in to act in that capacity. Pun intended.

But this was a time when the fields of medicine and science we're pretty darn mixed. Like you had engineers whould become the positions and physicians who become an engineers, etcetera. And we were just starting to see people begin to specialize in specific fields. Also, how do you say no to a guy named wild Man? So the project got started around eight fifty four, but it would take years of work before the cable would be built, let alone deployed.

For one thing, the Atlantic Telegraph Company really needed to find a good route to avoid issues with the c floor. They knew they wanted to go from Newfoundland to Ireland. But they need to plot the exact course. Now, there was no way to send signals down through the water, to bounce off the cea floor and come back up and give us kind of a map of what the bottom of the ocean looked like, which meant that you had to do things in a much more low tech way.

That way involved a heavy weight on a rope. You know, you might use something like a cannon ball, and you would need a really long rope, you know, a couple of miles long at least, and you would typically mark off links of the rope so that way you can see how deep the ocean is at any given point by plopping the weight over the side of the boat, letting it sink all the way to the bottom, and then reading off where on the water line the rope. It's like like, where on the rope is the waterline?

Is what I really meant to say. And you would need to do that many times as you went down your proposed path, because what if the depth increases or decreases. So using this method, ship Cruise found a route that was at a depth of around two miles from the surface, with a relatively flat seabed, and that was chosen to be the site for the cable between Newfoundland and Ireland.

The cable would rest against the seabed without risk of rubbing against like craggy rocks and breaking apart, and the cable's design meant that it would be heavy enough to sink down on its own without the need for additional weights. Wildman designed the cable, which had seven copper wires in it to carry signals that were kind of UH coiled together. The wires were insulated by a triple layer of gutta percha. Now, in case you don't remember what that is, I talked

about in the previous episode. That was an extract from a plant that had the same name, and the extract could be heated to be made pliable and then would behave pretty much like rubber does UH. And that meant that it was also an electrical insulator. So the wires

and gutta percha were nearly half an inch in diameter. UH. This core of the cable would then't have a layer of yarn soaked in tar, beeswax and other materials wrapped around it, which added thickness and stability to the cable, protecting the copper from damage, and then would come the armor, which was made up of a weave of seven iron wires uh the core of the cable weighed one seven pounds per nautical mile. This was about a quarter of

the weight that William Thompson had recommended. But the fully armored cable is weight, you know, once it had the iron sheath on it. That was a ton for every mile of cable, and the route chosen was about six miles long. At the cable was about half an inch in diameter total at five eighths of an inch. By eighteen fifty seven, the cable was ready. The United States and UK governments each supplied a steam powered ship for the purpose of laying the cable, and the American ship

was called the Niagara. The British ship was called the Agamemnon. Each ship would carry half the length of the cable. Is too much cable for one ship to carry At that point, there was some disagreement over how this should be done and how to join the two lengths of cable together. One of the project's leaders, an engineer named Charles Tilston Bright, who was one of you know, William Thompson's allies. One of the people who sided with Lord

Kelvin about what the cable should be like. He said that what they should do is send the two ships to sail to the middle of the Atlantic, join the ends of the length of cable together to make one single cable, and then have one ship sailed to the east, which would be toward Ireland, and one ship sailed to the west towards Newfoundland, and that they just bring the whole length of the cable out to the end destinations. The two ships could remain in contact with each other

because they could send signals over that cable. They could connect those to their instrumentation and actually send electric signals from one ship to the other to make sure that everything was working correctly. But the rest of the project did not really like this um They felt that this was not the best way to do it. You know. Bright was saying, Hey, if we do it this way, then each ship is spending half the amount of time out in the ocean once we start. That reduces the

chance that we run into bad weather. They said, no, that sounds too risky. We would rather start in Ireland, have both ships go across the ocean, and when the length of cable runs out for ship number one. Ship number two will splice the end of its cable to that one and continue the rest of the way to Newfoundland. So in the summer of eighteen fifty seven, numerous barges transported the lengths of cable to these two ships, and once loaded, each coil of cable measured twelve feet high

and forty ft in diameter. And the plan was for Niagara to go ahead and lay the first half of the cable, with Agamemnon following with the second half, and once Niagara would reach the end of its cable supply, that's where they would splice it all together. Unfortunately, it wouldn't work out that way in eighteen fifty seven. And I'll explain more if we come back from this break. Okay, we had the Niagara and the Agamemnon, but those would not be the only ships involved in this little project.

There were also support ships. There was the HMS Advice, the HMS Willing Mind, and the HMS Cyclops. There were also two escort ships, the u s S Susquehanna and the HMS Leopard. They all set sail to lay the cable on August eightifty seven and right away, there were problems. So the first segment of the cable was the shore cable. This was a shorter length that wasn't the full subsea cable. This was the version of the cable that was to lay close to the shore, thus called the shore cable.

It was more heavily armored because it was going to be subjected to more wave action and potentially rub up against stuff like rocks. Plus there was always the danger of a ship anchor snagging the cable, so they wanted it to be very heavily armored. But before Niagara could even go five miles, the thicker part of the cable, this shore cable, caught up in the machinery that was used to feed the cable out into the ocean, and

the cable broke. Now, the crew of the Willing Mind, which sounds like kind of an HP Lovecraft story, they were able to retrieve the end of the snapped cable under the sea, and the crew of the Niagara was able to splice it back into place um and so they were able to repair the cable and try again.

Uh they were able to lay the rest of the shore cable segment without further incident, and then they spliced the end of the shore cable to the length of the sub sea cable, the the main cable they were carrying. So now, over the next several days, everything worked pretty much as planned. Uh, I mean there were some drawbacks. Samuel Morris, who was on board the Niagara, got terribly

sea sick and so he was pretty much incapacitated. But the other members, including William Thompson, they were fine, and they remained in contact with wild Man white House, who remained back in Ireland, using the cable to send signals even as they were you know, spooling it into the ocean. Now, I said that things worked more or less his planned, But but that's smoothing over some stuff that was pretty tricky.

For one thing, the machine that was spooling out the cable had a grooved wheel kind of like a pulley, and the cable fit into this groove to be fed out into the ocean. But sometimes the cable would slip off the wheel. That meant that they had to stop in order to you know, get the cable back on the wheel to get it back in place. Also, the cable, if you remember, had a layer of yarn soaked in tar.

Some of that tar would occasionally seep outside of the cable and get on the wheel, so they would have to stop occasionally in order to clean the wheel off, because otherwise the cable was sticking to it, so that also made things a little slow. On August eleven, eighty seven,

the Niagara's crew ran into a serious problem. Now, the intent was to lay the cable down at the same rate of speed as the ship's movement, but several days after Niagara had, you know, started this run, they noticed that the cable was starting to feed out faster than

the ship was moving. So, in other words, they were they were putting too much cable into the ocean as they were going along, which could potentially mean that the ship would run out of its length of cable too early, and that there was a chance that the cable wouldn't reach all the way across the Atlantic, kind of like an extension cord that's just a foot too short for

doing whatever it is you planned on doing. Now, the Niagara's crew hit the brakes on the machine that was feeding the cable out into the ocean on this spinning wheel, if you you know, if you want to imagine it, and the weight of the cable was such that the cable's tensile strength couldn't match the weight of the cable itself, and uh Niagara was in the low point of a wave when the brakes had engaged. But then, obviously waves

have troughs and they also have crests. So as the wave was crusting and Niagara went up the wheel had its brakes on, it wasn't going to move at all, and that amazing amount of tension on the cable was enough to make it snap. The machines brakes should have released automatically once a certain amount of tension was achieved, but it failed to do so, so there is no salvaging the lost cable. It was a couple of miles

down on the ocean floor. The first attempt of laying the Transatlantic telegraph cable was just a failure, but from failure comes lessons learned, and the team was determined to try again the following year. So joining the project at this point was William Everett, now the chief engineer for the expedition. Everett went to work designing a new machine

to feed out the cable to the ocean. He created a new breaking system to avoid making the same mistakes as the eighteen fifty seven voyage, and in that year, between two attempts, William Thompson, the future Lord Kelvin, would create a sensitive instrument designed to detect electrical currents, even a very weak electrical current, for example, the kind of current that might pass through a very long cable that's under the water. This was his mirrored galvanometer. Uh and

you might wonder what the heck is a galvanometer? Okay, So let's consider for a moment how the European telegraph machines work. They had pharro magnetic needles, So passing a current through an electro magnet would create a magnetic field that would attract the needles and make them deflect from their normal orientation. The strength of that magnetic poll would determine how much the needles would deflect. But what if

you have a very weak signal? Well, Thompson wanted to create a device that was more sensitive and capable of detecting those very very weak signals that would pass through a transit lane cable. His approach was truly ingenious. He created a housing that held a coil of conductive wire, with the coil held in a horizontal orientation. So if you're thinking, think of like, you know, a spring, but you're holding the spring horizontally, you know, left to right.

And from this coil he suspended a small mirror using some silk thread so that the mirror would hang in the middle of the coil. And attached to the mirror were permanent magnets, so when a current passed through the coil, it would create a magnetic field that would either attract or repulse the permanent magnet, turning the mirror slightly, having it tilt a bit. Now that's one half of the gadget. You would have that set up on, say a nice

sturdy desk. Across from that you would have the other half, which was a calibrated scale that would be facing the mirror of the first half. So the mirror is pointing back at the scale, and behind the scale he put an oil lamp. Now the scale above where the actual calibrated scale was. But you know, set in a little panel of wood, was a narrow aperture, so the lamp is behind this right, think of like almost like a cabinet. The lamp is behind the cabinet, but you have this

very narrow aperture. So some light can go through, kind of like a crack in a door. So light is passing through this aperture. The light would come through, hit the mirror, the mirror would reflect the light, and the light would get reflected onto the calibrated scale. So think of almost like a ruler, and you have this thin ray of light essentially hitting the ruler on a specific point. If a current were to pass through the coil, it would cause the mirror to shift a bit. And that

was Thompson's genius because it created a system. And when a telegraph operator sending a dot in Morse code would cause the mirror to tilt one way, so you would see the light shine like let's say our argument's sake a little to the left of where it's resting position was, and a dash would make it go the other way, so now you would see the light move over to

the right of its normal rest position. It was very very sensitive, so even weak signals would cause the mirror to shift a bit, and if you were just paying attention to the light, you could see what someone on the other end was sending through, what sort of signals they were sending through. It would become incredibly important because again, those signals once they went from you know, one coast

to the other, pretty darn weak. Now in the summer of eighteen fifty eight, the second expedition was ready to try and once again they would rely on the agamem Non and the Niagara. And this time they decided to go with Bright's plan. That is, they were going to start in the middle of the Atlantic. They would join the ends of the cables of the two ships together, and then they would lay the cables out as Niagara

headed to Newfoundland and Agamemnon headed to Ireland. They met at approximately fifty two degrees north thirty three degrees west in the middle of the Atlantic. It's more precise than that, but I didn't want to go through the entire coordinates anyway, Just getting to that location was rough. The weather had turned as the ships headed to the middle of the ocean, and at one point Agamemnon was actually pushed two hundred

miles off course due to the weather. Forty five crew members were injured during the passage because the ships were kind of pitched back and forth, and you know, they had this massive heavy coil on board the ship. But fortunately no hands were lost On June, the two ships met at the appointed spot and they spliced the cable together and then they set off and for about one kilometers the two ships were able to stay in contact

by sending messages through the joined cable. But then both ships reported a failure in the line, and both crews assumed that the problem had to be on the other ship. Like that, Niagara was saying, ha, something's happened on the Agammemnon, and the people on the agam m Now we're saying, those yokels over at Niagara have totally mucked it up.

So they both returned to the origin point where they first met, in the middle of the Atlantic, and then they said, you know what, we're burning daylight, so let's just cut the cable. So it was like a hundred kilometers worth a cable that they cut, and they spliced together again. They made a new splice and started off second time. This time the Agammemnon ran into some problems

with the cable snapping. After the ships were hundreds of kilometers apart from each other, the two ships both headed back to Ireland and it looked like the project was doomed, except Cyrus Westfield, the businessman and optimists, and Anglo File convinced his partners to keep trying, and so on July fifty eight they went for it yet again. And I guess the third time was the charm, because this time the ships were able to lay the cable in fair weather.

Niagara reached Newfoundland with the cable intact on August four, eighteen fifty eight, and the Agamemnon made it to Ireland with its cable still working on August five, eight. So on August ten, operators sent some test messages across the cable, and by gum it worked. Europe was now connected via wire to North America. The signals took a long time to cross because the issues with induction on the ocean floor were significant and the signal was quite weak, but

it was detectable thanks to Thompson's galvanometer. Now, when we come back, I'll talk a bit about a very special message sent across that cable, but first let's take another quick break, Okay. On August six, eighteen fifty eight, we had an historic first. Queen Victoria, Regent of the United Kingdom, sent a telegraph message to US President James Buchanan, and it said, Dear Jimmy BRIT's rule Americans drul love Vicky. Okay,

I'm kidding. It didn't say that. It said, quote to the President of the United States, Washington, the Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of this

great international work. So then U. Buchanan reply back with quote, may the Atlantic Telegraph, under the blessing of Heaven proved to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument designed by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world end quote. So this was a huge deal. Okay, Like, it's very hard for us to put this in the context because in our world, instantaneous communication is the norm.

We can even chat with astronauts aboard the space station, so it's pretty incredible. But back then this was truly monumental, and there were huge celebrations to commemorate the event. Things got pretty rowdy, so much so that City Hall in New York City got set on fire, not on purpose, I should add, this actually happened because of some fireworks that went off. Course, the Atlantic Telegraph Company saw a huge surge of investments because now we suddenly had a

connection between Europe and North America. Charles Bright received a knighthood for his work on the project, and the crews didn't need to use the full length of cable they had on hand. They had some left over, so the America's side, the Niagara side, those leftovers became sought after keepsakes. So the famous jewelry company Tiffany and Company purchased the excess cable and chopped it up into ten centimeter lengths and sold it off at fifty cents a pop as

souvenirs because capitalism. Alright, So the cable had been laid and a few messages have been sent across it, but the signal was pretty weak, and what's worse, it was growing weaker. So Wildman white House, you know, the chief electrician for this project, decided to go all Tim Allen

on the cable and he called for more power. He wanted to increase the voltage across the cable to try and push signals through and overcome the electrical resistance, pushing it to somewhere around two thousand volts, which was a tremendous voltage at the time. So he really wanted to try and overcome the problems that William Thompson had been

warning everyone about for the last couple of years. But remember, the company had decided to go with the thin wire design that Michael Faraday and Samuel Morris had proposed, and you know, Wildman white House was also part of that group. He was also of the opinion that the narrow where wires were the way to go. Now we cannot be certain what ultimately caused this cable to fail just a few weeks after it was connected, because I did happen,

But the contemporaries at the time blamed white House. They said that the increased voltage across the line led to the cable essentially melting through its installation, and once that happened, enough of the cable lost its signal to the salty water around it. So, in other words, white House would take the fall for the failure of the cable. Now do I think he was responsible, I'm not entirely sure.

I figure he's probably at least partly to blame because he seemed to think that the stage was the solution to any transmission problem. You know, just use enough voltage and you can force your way through any obstacle, and since he sided with Faraday and Morris, it did mean that the cable had a much higher electrical resistance to

overcome than what Thompson was suggesting. However, there is a historian named Donard de Coogan who investigated this matter in the nineteen eighties, and he examined some retrieved cable that was to be used on the project and noted that the manufacture of the cable itself was not great. In other words, he was saying that the quality of the cable was rather faulty and might have contributed to the failure.

He said the core of the cable was not uniformly in the center of the insulator, so like your copper wire wasn't in the center of the cable the way it should have been, and that at some points along the length of the cable it was really close to the iron armor, so if the copper and the iron were to touch, that would be almost like a short circuit. He also noted that the Gutta purchase installation had likely deteriorated over the months between eighteen fifty seven when uh

the unused cable. After after it snapped, crews returned with the unused cable, and they put it in storage, and they used that same cable for the eighteen fifty eight expedition. Sod Cogan said, it's quite possible that there was a lot of deterioration within that year, that they didn't store it properly, and that the the installation began to kind of rought away from the copper. So the cable's usefulness was likely limited from the get go, whether you put

more voltage through it or not. I think there's probably a mixture of these two explanations going on here. That white House was partly to blame, but the construction and storage of the cable probably contributed to its failure as well. And my guess is that no matter what, the cable

would have ultimately failed before a year had passed. But the nice thing about having a person to point to and say that's the guy who fouled it all up is that the rest of the partners for the Atlantic Telegraph Company were able to find more investors to do the whole darned thing over again. You know, they had proven that the cable actually worked, It could connect Europe and North America. It was definitely possible. They just needed to make some improvements so that it would work beyond

just a couple of months. Fun side fact, the failure of the cable ended up being a big blow to Tiffany and Company because they had bought all that excess cable and then chopped it up to sell it as souvenirs. But no one was really eager to buy a length of cable for a cable that stopped working just a few weeks after it went live, what say. So a lot of those pieces of cable ended up just finding their ways into all sorts of different you know, warehouses

and collections and stuff. You can still occasionally find it today, which is kind of cool. But yeah, um it was. It was not not the big financial windfall that Tiffany and Company expected it to be. Following the eighteen fifty eight failure, the Atlantic Telegraph Company took several years before making another attempt, and part of that was because the British government was conducting a thorough inquiry into the affair.

Uh this gave Charles Bright and William Thompson plenty of opportunity to talk about their discoveries with regard to electrical transmissions across great distances through undersea cables, and the inquiry committee found those explanations to be really compelling, and so the Atlantic Telegraph Company would defer to Thompson and Bright's

recommendations for the design of the next cable. So Thompson's design would be much more expensive because he was calling for the purest copper that they could get hold of, and to make thicker copper wires seven of them. Again, he also called for better installation and had suggested as to the amount needed of insulation to copper in order to really give significant protection to the copper wires at

the core. The company named Thompson an electrical consultant. Now, he didn't possess direct authority over any of the project. It's not like he could send out directive commands to the engineers who were working on building the cable. However, he could make recommendations to the A. T. C. And the company could then take those suggestions seriously, and they did, and they became an important part for the next expedition. This one would not take place until eighteen sixty five,

probably for a few reasons. I mean, between eighteen fifty eight and eighteen sixty five, the United States had a little Civil War, so that probably was a deterrent to giving a transatlantic cable laid while you're also link with a war you know, going on within one of the countries. Um, But it also just took time to re engineer things. The new cable would have seven copper wires of greater

diameter than the eight fifty eight version. They were insulated with four layers of gutta percha as well as some other stuff that made up the outside layer of of insulation. The main length of cable had an armored sheath of ten wires, uh the shore end cables had an additional layer of twelve triple stranded iron wires to add heavier armor for near the shore. A company called Telegraph Construction and Maintenance made the cable, and another company called Webster

and Horsefull provided the iron wires for the armoring. This time it would be a single ship, a big steamship called the Great Eastern that was used to lay the cable, and it would carry the entire length, so there was no need for a second cable ship. The Great Eastern left in the spring of eighteen sixty five from Ireland. Unfortunately, after traveling hundreds of miles and getting past the midway point in the Atlantic. As they were feeding out the cable,

it snapped. This still was not the end of the Atlantic Telegraph Company's attempts. The company planned once again to try and connect Europe with North America, and they would do this in eighteen sixties six. Samuel Canning, an engineer who had been part of all the previous expeditions, was named the leader, the engineering leader for this project, and it was July eighteen sixty six to lay out a new cable. The Great Eastern took its journey. The cable held.

It took two weeks for the Great Eastern to cross the ocean, but on July the Great Eastern arrived at Heart's Content, Newfoundland. But that wasn't all. They weren't going to rest on their laurels having successfully connected North America to Europe with another stronger telegraph cable. No, they had even more planned. I'll explain after this last break. So the Great Eastern set sail. You say, set sail, it's

a steamship. I guess you do. It set sail again on August nine, eighteen sixty six, and it headed back to the point in the Atlantic Ocean where the eighteen sixty five cable had snapped. The previous crew on the eighteen sixty five expedition had actually marked the location of the snap with a buoy. They had anchored a buoy at that spot. So the Great Eastern found the buoy and several ships took art in an effort to define

where the line was. They used you know, soundings to try and seek out where the line was along the sea floor, and they marked the path with more buoys. The Great Eastern tried to hook the eight six cable, and hooking meant using a very large grapnel kind of like what you see in spy movies where people are throwing a grapple up the like a grappling hook up a wall so that they can scale it. Same sort of thing, only way bigger and way more heavy duty. And attached to this was a rope or line that

measured six and a half inches in circumference. The rope was made out of iron and twisted hemp, so not just a you know, a rope made out of rope, It was a rope made of iron as well. It had to be super strong to carry the immense weight of the cable should they hook it. And this one was rated to carry up to thirty The rope was wound around a drum connected to a steam powered winch.

And because they were anticipating that they would be pulling a weight of several tons, the winch had to be a real monster, and that that engine to turn it also had to be And the idea was to lower the grapnel down to the sea floor and then drag it slowly across the sea floor in an attempt to snag the cable. Now, how would you know if you got a quote unquote bite. Well, an engineer monitored a dynamometer.

Now these days, a dynamometer measures engine torqu and r p m s. In the original days of dynamometers from the eighteenth century, they were meant to measure muscle output, so like actual human or animal muscle output. But at this point we're talking about steam engine dynamometers, and they measured steam pressure inside engine cylinders. I'll read a description of much a device. This comes from the Victorian collections.

They actually have one in their collection, and here's the description. Quote. It has an oscillating recording drum with vertical silver clip attached for holding paper in place around the drum. The drum oscillates left to right. There is a pulley attached to a length of cord which is attached to the drum. Beside the drum is a fine metal arm vertically adjustable small hole in the end to hold a pencil end quote. Now, whether the one aboard the Great Eastern resembled the one

that's in the Victorian collections, I don't know. I have no clue if it does or not, nor do I actually fully understand the working mechanism of this device. I almost started to look into it, but then I figured I've done enough tangents for this episode already, so we'll just say that this was acting like you know, when you cast a fishing line and you've got that little bobber on the surface of the water, and you watch the bobber and when you see the bobber jiggle around,

you know you've got a bite. Same sort of thing, except you're looking at an indicator, and when you see that there's an indication that the engines having to work harder, like the pressure is increasing. You can, you know, deduce the reason why the engines having to work harder is because it's pulling more weight. It's snagged that cable. It took two weeks of attempts to do this, but they

finally succeeded. They actually partially succeeded a couple of times, but they lost the grip on the cable, but they kept at it, and after two weeks they finally got it. They pulled the end of the cable aboard the Great Eastern and they brought that end to the ship's instrument room, and there they connected it to a signaling device. So they sent a signal over the cable back to Ireland, and then they waited and after a couple of minutes

they received an answer. So the cable was still operational even after being under the ocean for a year, and because it still worked, it meant the crew could splice some new cable to the end of the snapped one. Actually, technically the new cable was unused cable from eighteen sixty five. It was the amount that had remained on board after the cable had initially snapped. So they repaired the cable and they laid it again, and they returned to Heart's Content.

So this meant that in eighteen sixty six the Atlantic Telegraph Company successfully laid not one but two transatlantic cables. So this was a huge success. The investment in eighteen sixty five was no longer a literal sunken cost, like people have pretty much written that one off, But now it was actually working. So the thing that they had funded a year ago was now actually operational, and it meant that they had twice the signaling capacity as they

did before. Like if eighteen sixty five had been successful, then they would have done the eighteen sixty six expedition and they would have had half the capacity. Now they had twice what they had planned. So the eighteen sixty six cable was actually a huge improvement over the one that they laid in eighteen fifty eight, the one that only worked for a few weeks. The transmission speed on the eighteen fifty eight line was painfully slow. Seems like

it's an understatement. It took two minutes for a single character in Morse code to transmit from one side to the other. Two minutes just for one letter or number. So when Queen vic sent that message to Jimmy the Buke, it took about sixties seven minutes to just send that one message. I read earlier, but the eighteen sixties six cable could carry eight whole words per minute, not characters.

I'm talking words now. Yes, this was still incredibly slow, but at least could be practical compared to the eighteen fifty eight version. But then considering that the alternative was to take a two week journey on a steamship to carry a message from say, London to New York, and then another two week voyage to take the return message from New York to London, this was a huge improvement. You weren't waiting a month to hear back about the

thing that you wrote about. The eighteen sixty six expedition was the culmination of more than a decade of work and experimentation and a lot of failures. Then those failures taught us a ton of lessons. William Thompson made several observations that later generations of scientists and engineers would build upon.

They would solve engineering problems to make faster communication possible across subcede lines, and of course, much much later we had telephone lines and then subsee power lines and fiber optic lines. Now a lot more had to happen to get to the point where we are today, and we are not still relying on those old telegraph wires like those days are over. However, that being said, the process of laying modern lines across the ocean is pretty darn similar to the way we did it back in the

old days. I mean, it's about spooling up these enormous power lines or transmission lines and then unspooling them as a ship sails across the ocean. It's it's pretty much the same thing we did back in the nineteenth century. So some stuff hasn't changed all that much. Now. If there's interest, I'll do some more episodes about subseded cables.

We'll talk about the various inventions that made stuff like signal boosting possible below the waves, because a lot had to happen to make these powerful enough so that we could do things like transmit Internet signals, for example. Obviously, if you were relying on the transmission speed of the eighteen sixty six cable for your Internet, you would never

get anything done. It would take way too long. So there are things that we've devised that improve signal transmission in subsea cables that we're not really possible back in the eighteen sixties when this first cable had been laid. So if there is interest, I'll continue down this pathway and we'll talk about some of those uh inventions. But for our next episode, I anticipate talking about a different topic.

It's just if I hear people say, hey, I want to know more about like how those subsea cables evolved over time, We'll totally come back and talk about it more. This was a fun thing to research, tons and tons of reading of historic documents, which was a blast. It was a lot of fun. Actually got a little tiresome because, let me tell you, those writers must have been paid

by the word because you think I'm wordy. I mean I am, but these these journalists of days of old, they make me seem rather curt and uh and quick of speech by comparison. All right, well, that rouse up this episode. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle we use for the show is text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. YEA. Tech Stuff is an I

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