The US Senate discussed the cable in January 1857. Some senators were anxious to match the British commitment while reminding the Europeans that ‘the whole enterprise has heretofore been conducted with American capital’. As in England, there seemed no doubt that the scheme would succeed. ‘On the 4th of July next, if this bill shall pass, there will be, for all practical purposes, an electric girdle round the world.’ The bill passed, but very narrowly, and despite some hostility in the House of Representatives, achieved a small majority there too. Government vessels and $70,000 a year for twenty-five years were pledged to the cable company.
The opposition had come from those alarmed that the main cable was to start and finish on territory controlled by Britain. ‘Both the termini are in the British dominions. What security are we to have that in time of war we shall have the use of the telegraph as well as the British government?’ The question of war had not been raised by the British. Other senators thought the cable would be the means of avoiding wars completely. ‘After the telegraphic wire is once laid, there will be no more war between the United States and Great Britain … I believe that whenever such a connection as this shall be made, we diminish the chances of war.’ Another interjected: ‘I am willing to vote for this bill as a peace measure, as a commercial measure – but not as a war measure; and when war comes, let us rely on our power and ability to take this end of the wire, and keep it.’ Another reminded his audience that American citizens had been the instigators of the enterprise. ‘The honor and the glory of the achievement will be due to American genius and American daring. Why should we be actuated by so illiberal a spirit as to refuse the use of one of our steamships when it does not cost one farthing to the Treasury of the United States?’
Cyrus Field’s brother Henry wrote later that the chief objection to the scheme was that it involved England:
The real animus of the opposition was national jealousy – a fear lest they should be giving some advantage to Great Britain. The mention of the name of England has the same effect on them as a red rag waved before the eyes of a mad bull. No matter what the subject of the proposed co-operation, even if it were purely a scientific expedition, they were sure England was going to profit by it to our injury. So now there were those who felt that in this submarine cable England was literally crawling under the sea to get some advantage of the United States.
But any idea of taking the line directly to the United States was put to rest by the Atlantic surveys of Lieutenant Maury and Captain Berryman. When Field had visited Washington in June 1856, he secured the use of Berryman and the steamship Arctic. Berryman took further soundings every thirty to fifty miles along the route, and also used scoops or quills to bring up specimens from the bottom, all of which proved to be a satisfactory mix of fine sand and powdered shell. He wrote to Field in November that year that a direct route from Europe to the United States would be ‘quite useless, if not impracticable’. Berryman’s views were swayed by a conviction that transmitting signals over 3,000 miles could prove to be impossible. He suggested also that the current and deep waters of the Gulf Stream would pose a problem, though the area had not been fully explored. All of this influenced him in favour of the route to Newfoundland, where the only danger anticipated was iceberg damage.
This had not satisfied all the American politicians. C.C. Chaffee of the US House of Representatives wrote to Lieutenant Maury in December 1856: ‘Is there a point, under our flag, which would answer for the western terminus?’ Maury attempted to discourage him: ‘The difficulties are manifold, and in the present state of the telegraphic art, they may be insuperable.’ He too believed that 3,000 miles was an impossible length to transmit an electric current, whereas 1,500 (nautical) miles was ‘electrically practicable’. Although there was another possible route from the United States to Europe, with a maximum unbroken length of cable of only 1,500 miles, this passed through the deepest water and across volcanic regions. It also needed a relay station in the Azores, where the cable could fall under the control of the Portuguese government.
Any idea that a line could bypass British North America and go ‘direct to the shores of the United States’ constituted a threat to the Atlantic Telegraph Co., whose resources were by then committed to the Newfoundland route. Field felt that he must fight any alternative scheme, and did so by publishing his letters from Maury and Berryman. It was rumoured that another company was being formed to project a cable direct to the United States. Field claimed not to believe these stories – for he did not think ‘that the capitalists in London or elsewhere can be found to support such a scheme’, which was for a cable twice the length of Field’s. Furthermore, he knew that no survey had been carried out. Yet he took the idea seriously enough to launch a pre-emptive strike against it. Field, the American who loved England, believed that the venture must be a joint one, and that its completion would reaffirm the strength of alliance between the old country and the New World. A joint enterprise would ‘serve as a guarantee to the world that in the case of war, that the cord is never to be broken’. He was adamant that his Liberal friends in the United Kingdom would not undermine United States interests. ‘The British government interfere with the free use of the cable, even in war! The spirit of the age is against such an act.’
Field’s global vision, which had first drawn him to the telegraph, was undiminished. Though he was certainly interested in promoting Anglo-American relations and trade, he saw a wider picture. He had been impressed by an international maritime conference in Brussels in 1853: ‘This research was not undertaken for the exclusive advantage of any one person or nation, but for the benefit of commerce, the advancement of science, and for the benefit and improvement of the whole human family.’ He also argued that it would be political folly for the United States not to be involved in the cable:
But suppose we should stand aloof, and that the enterprise now on foot should be abandoned by our citizens and government, and then suppose war to come; in less than six months after its declaration, the British government could, on its own account, have a wire stretched along this telegraphic plateau between Newfoundland and Ireland.
Morse’s underground experiments seem to have satisfied Field entirely. If he had any doubts, he did not voice them. He reminded the public of Brett’s Channel cable of 1851. ‘The result of this decisive experiment, favourable alike in its national, commercial, social, and, though last not least, in its remunerative aspects, has been such as to disarm all prejudice, and to encourage a desire for the utmost possible extension of similar undertakings.’ Again he repeated that America had missed out, while six cables already connected England to continental countries.
In November 1856 Field was able to announce a timetable, with the cable-laying planned for summer 1857, and not later than spring 1858. Two steam-ships would be used, starting in the middle of the Atlantic and taking about eight days. Once complete, the cable ‘will constitute the chief medium through which all the important business transactions between the Old and New World will be effected. The transmission of intelligence for the press in both continents will also form a most important feature of its usefulness.’ He argued that the capital involved was small, ‘compared with the magnitude and the national importance of the work’. As running expenses were very low, ‘it appears difficult to over-estimate the commercial returns that will accrue from this undertaking’. Even a very few commercial telegrams each day, with no other source of revenue, would produce a large return on the capital. He envisaged busy traffic between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. from Britain, with messages arriving in the United States in time for the opening of business.
The board of directors accepted Whitehouse’s scheme that the cable core should be slightly larger than first suggested. Its seven copper strands would be insulated with a treble layer of gutta percha, so that it measured three-eighths of an inch in diameter. The core, surrounded by jute yarn saturated with tar, pitch, boiled oil and common beeswax, would be made by the Gutta Percha Co. The armo
uring consisted of eighteen strands of seven wires each of charcoal iron bright wire, making a total weight of one ton to the mile. The breaking strain was 65 hundredweight, over three tons. It was calculated that the cable was double the strength required to support its own weight while being laid in the deepest water on its route, which was 2,400 fathoms. As there was no factory with the capacity to armour the whole cable, the 2,200 miles of line, to be completed by the end of June 1857, were split between the two leading submarine cable-makers, R.S. Newall of Birkenhead, and Kuper & Co. of Greenwich, which became Glass, Elliot & Co. during the course of the contract. These companies, both originally manufacturers of pit ropes, had developed great expertise and an even greater rivalry in this new field.
The Atlantic company’s board of directors, confirmed in December 1856, included the London bankers Thomas Baring and Samuel Gurney, provincial merchants from Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester, and the engineers William Fothergill Cooke, John Brett, Professor William Thomson and Charles Bright. The board did not include Field, Morse or Cooper, for directors must be resident in Britain. Instead, they and Wilson G. Hunt (a New York merchant), Hiram O. Alden (vice president of the American Telegraph Co.), Watts Sherman (a New York banker), Alex H. Rice (merchant and mayor of Boston), and Lieutenant Maury were made ‘honorary’ American directors, joined by the Hon. John Ross, the Hon. John Young and the Hon. George E. Cartier representing the Canadian provinces.
The move to London also effectively ended any role for Gisborne in the project. Although increasingly marginalised, he had continued as chief engineer to the New York, Newfoundland & London Electric Telegraph Co. In January 1857 his term ended and his contract was not renewed. This was in spite of his pleas that he was responsible for tying up privileges which ‘preclude the possibility of opposition or competition in transatlantic telegraphing’, and for bringing Newfoundland into a fifty-year contract with ‘some of the wealthiest and most eminent men in Europe and America’.
Charles Bright had officially become chief engineer to the Atlantic Telegraph Co. at the end of 1856, at a salary of £1,000 a year, and Whitehouse was appointed electrician on the same terms. The huge public interest in the cable attracted dozens of enquiries from people seeking jobs, as engineers and at sea, and also offering technical and geographical suggestions. Newspaper letters columns were also packed with ill-founded advice for the engineers. The idea that the cable could be buoyed just below the ocean’s surface, as Hubbell had proposed, was a popular one. Someone describing himself as a naval expert suggested that nothing more than a hand-spike was needed to control the laying of the line. Others put forward the idea that the cable should be manufactured on board ship and submerged immediately, so that no joints were needed. Albert, the Prince Consort, wanted the whole cable protected by glass tube, and had to be discreetly rebuffed.
Field was back in the United States and the British provinces of North America during February and March of 1857. The US steam frigates Niagara and Mississippi had been ordered to assist with the telegraph. In Nova Scotia, the House of Assembly granted the new company exclusive rights, and other legislation was in progress in the various jurisdictions. Realising that he could not cover all these areas personally, Field proposed that Edward Mortimer Archibald, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, a barrister and former attorney general of Newfoundland, should represent the company in the North American colonies, at a salary of £500 plus expenses. He put this for the board’s approval on his return to England in April.
In London, Field discovered that the Gutta Percha Co. had almost completed the cable core, and that 810 miles of cable were fully armoured. By mid-May, 860 miles lay finished at Birkenhead, and 780 miles at Glass & Elliot’s works in Greenwich. Charles Bright had the design and manufacture of the paying-out machinery in hand. The power for the Atlantic telegraph was to be generated by a ‘giant voltaic battery of ten capacious cells’. Its plates of platinised silver and zinc offered a surface area of over 2,000 square inches. If the zinc were periodically replaced, the battery would be ‘exhaustless and permanent’. This battery was designed by Whitehouse, modified from a type already used extensively in telegraphy. Siemens & Halske of Berlin were asked to quote prices for Morse instruments which printed signals as dots and dashes on rolls of paper. Samuel Canning, who had been in charge of cable-laying throughout the events off Newfoundland, was appointed engineer responsible for the cable on board ship.
Yet there were still anxieties about the cable itself. Bright had argued from the time of his appointment that the core and insulator needed to be larger. He was overruled by the businessmen, anxious to press ahead and complete the crossing the following summer. Morse, after all, supported their case, believing that a larger cable would be a worse conductor. Bright and Whitehouse were particularly concerned about Newall’s part of the cable in Birkenhead, and its ‘deficient insulation’. They were allowed to experiment on it in the factory, on condition that Professor Thomson was consulted and involved. This was not the only friction with Newall, an acerbic and litigious character, who was in dispute over a price for shore-end cable which the company considered too high but he declined to reduce.
Glass, Elliot & Co.’s cable works at East Greenwich. (Cable & Wireless Archives, Porthcurno)
Worse was to come. At some point, as the cable neared completion, it was discovered that the Birkenhead and Greenwich sections had been made with threads running in different directions. This mistake occurred because a hand-made specimen from Glass, Elliot & Co., ‘the lay of which happened to be opposite to that of their machine-made ropes’ had been shown to Newall. The Birkenhead contract was then based on this sample. Somehow, over the following months, the blame for this mistake became – quite unfairly – attached to Newall. The Atlantic company was growing increasingly close to Newall’s competitor, Glass & Elliot, while Newall did little to endear himself personally to his clients.
Whatever the truth behind the mix-up, Bright always denied any responsibility. The confusion had arisen during the autumn of 1856, while he and Whitehouse were preoccupied with the signalling trials with Morse, and before he was appointed Atlantic company engineer. In any case, the problem proved quite straightforward to remedy – the two parts of the cable were easily joined. Bright was sure afterwards that ‘undue importance has been ascribed to this difference of lay in the two lengths of cable’. But the conflicting threads were a simple matter for the public to understand and latch on to, far easier to comprehend than the electrical obstacles which baffled even the leading electricians. So the thread issue continued to resound, tainting Newall’s reputation further, and was later used to illustrate the company’s supposed incompetence.
Nor had the cable-handling problems been resolved. Bright and Canning calculated that Niagara, a ‘splendid new frigate’, a screw-corvette said to be the largest and finest ship in the US Navy, did not have the capacity to take her section of the line, so that a third would have to be stowed on the quarter deck. This posed a danger to the men paying out the cable. The Atlantic board enquired after the screw steamer City of Baltimore as an alternative. The Baltimore was available, but even with the cost of hire reduced to £2 7s 3d per ton per month, it was considered too expensive. HMS St Jeanne d’Arc was offered; she could house the section of cable but would not fit in Newall’s dock. There were in any case political reasons to stick with the Niagara. The frigate had arrived in London with a full complement of naval officers and a crew of 500, which certainly could not be accommodated along with her part of the cable. A temporary re-fit in the royal dockyards was decided, so Niagara set out for Portsmouth, to be adapted to take ‘her long passenger’ from Newall.
As work neared completion, Glass & Elliot’s yard was honoured with a visit by the Lord Mayor of London, transported there in ‘a corporation state barge, rich enough in flags and bunting to have satisfied the Queen of Sheba’. His party contrasted oddly with their surroundings, for the Greenwich factory was not a pleasant place at low water. �
��The shore is stony, and unsavoury in hot weather, when all the abominable flotsam and jetsam of the dirtiest river in Europe evaporate enough miasma to poison an alligator.’ Land was reached by way of a narrow plank, which:
necessitated feats on the part of stout gentlemen which in a circus would have covered them with immortal honour. Plank-walking under such circumstances is always difficult, and when the performance has to be gone through by a portly functionary in full Court dress and cocked hat, anxious to preserve his dignity, yet afraid of losing his balance, the result has no medium, but is at once either sublime or ridiculous.
Of the cable, 900 miles had been completed when the Lord Mayor called, although work was behind schedule as fine wire was being used at a rate faster than all the wiredrawers in the country could supply it. The total length of copper and iron wire in the cable’s core and armour was 340,000 miles, enough to travel thirteen times round the world, more than enough to reach the moon. The ship which would lay the Greenwich section of cable, the Agamemnon, a Royal Navy screw steam ship of 60hp which had seen service as an admiral’s flagship during the bombardment of Sebastopol in the Crimea, had not yet arrived. Her mooring of ten anchors was being prepared, designed to stop any motion while the ‘ponderous coils’ were transferred into the hold. The cable would be carried across supports fixed on ten barges between factory and ship, wound slowly by a 12hp engine into one coil, 45ft in diameter and eventually 12ft high.
The completion of Newall’s half of the cable was celebrated in mid-June with a banquet at the Birkenhead factory. The cable, 1,250 miles of it, had been coiled on board barges alongside the warehouses of the Birkenhead Float, awaiting the Niagara. It had been settled without a doubt, a day or two earlier, that a current of electricity would indeed pass the entire length of the cable. Newall’s hundreds of workmen were joined at the celebration meal by some of the Atlantic company directors, as well as local worthies. Toasts were raised to the President and people of the United States as well as to the Queen, and hopes expressed that the telegraph ‘would nip in the bud those bitter feelings which unfortunately had occasionally arisen between the mother country and her descendants’. Memories were fresh of the bloody and damaging Crimean War, for which Newall had made the submarine cable. Many were conscious that better transatlantic communications at that time might have brought the United States to the aid of Britain and France. As it was, the Russians had managed to divert the United States from the European conflict by engaging her attention in another direction, offering negotiations for the sale of Alaska at cut price.
The Cable Page 6