As far as Cyrus Field was concerned, the war which could have stopped or delayed the Atlantic scheme, in fact stiffened his resolve. He was diverted for a time into applying his knowledge of telegraph systems to help the Union with its overland communications. After that, he turned to protecting relations between Britain and the United States, anxious to ensure that the British were not drawn in on the side of the rebels. During the early 1860s Field struck up a friendship with John Bright, the Liberal MP, a Quaker who supported the Union because of his opposition to slavery, and who was widely admired in the northern states. Field also became close to certain other American supporters of the Union in London, notably the banking partners George Peabody and Junius S. Morgan. Field at this time too cultivated a regular and friendly correspondence with Gladstone, who favoured the Confederacy.
In 1862, the British chancellor declared himself deeply impressed with religious publications and a book about the misery caused by the war, which Field had sent him. The American acted as intermediary between his government and Gladstone, obtaining copies of the 1862 diplomatic correspondence of the State Department for his friend. In April 1864 Field sent William M. Evarts, a New York lawyer, to brief Gladstone about recent events in the United States. and especially to convey the anger felt at Britain’s role in refitting vessels as warships for the Confederacy. Field’s excursion into diplomacy was not without cost, for himself and for the cable. At one point he was the target of smears by Confederate supporters in Britain, including some English newspapers, which accused him of using American telegraph companies to line his own pockets. His reputation for probity enabled him to weather that particular storm.
The friendship with Gladstone served no direct purpose for the Atlantic telegraph, but the two men remained close. Their correspondence and meetings endured long after the cable was complete, and after Gladstone became Prime Minister in 1868. Field never gave up his campaign to smooth over misunderstandings between the countries. ‘You may rely upon my doing all I can to promote good feeling between England and the US,’ he wrote in 1872. Twenty years after the cable was finally laid, Gladstone and Field were still in earnest debate, about the meaning of the first chapter of Genesis.
Field continued to visit London throughout the war, combining his political work with lobbying for the cable. In March 1862, he attended a ‘telegraphic soirée’ at the home of Samuel Gurney, the Quaker banker, MP and director of the Atlantic Telegraph Co., attended by aristocrats, politicians, financiers, engineers and many other influential members of the pacifist Society of Friends. Wires from four different land and submarine telegraph companies were extended to Gurney’s house near Hyde Park, and messages recorded in Morse code on continuous strips. ‘Here, for the first time, a gentleman’s library was brought into instantaneous communication with all the capitals of Europe, Malta, Alexandria and the East.’ Stuart Wortley proved not merely that the 1858 Atlantic cable had worked – dated publications carrying news from the other side of the ocean gave easy verification – but also its immense financial and political value. A renewal of the scheme would be ‘an incalculable advantage to this country’, he told the assembly, but more than that, would serve the interests of ‘humanity itself’. Field, for once, said very little, passing over to the electrician Cromwell Fleetwood Varley to describe recent improvements in cable-laying and management. Varley, who had a tendency to overstate the case, believed that the cable during its brief life had proved so useful that ‘if an Atlantic cable should only last twelve months, it would be cheap to the country to lay one annually’, especially as new techniques were rapidly increasing the speed of transmission, and hence the number of messages which could pass.
The Morse ink writer, 1867. (Illustrated London News)
While the American Civil War added to Field’s difficulties in many ways, it also supplied him with ammunition for his campaign on behalf of the cable. War brought a stark reminder of the dangers of misunderstandings between the United States and Europe. In fact, claimed Field when addressing the American Geographical & Statistical Society in May 1862, the war had almost delivered the cable for him. During the blockade of southern ports by the north, in the early months of the Civil War, two Confederate commissioners on their way to Europe had been forcibly taken off the Trent, a British Royal Mail steamer, in the West Indies. When news of this reached London in November 1861, such was the fury with the United States and sympathy with the Confederacy that Britain almost gave up her neutrality and entered the conflict in support of the south. War was averted only by intense diplomatic efforts. A discreet approach was at this point made to Glass & Elliot by a British government representative, asking how quickly a cable could be made and laid, and at what price. The company asked £675,000 and undertook to complete the line by July 1862. ‘Well might England afford to pay the whole cost of such a work’, argued Field, ‘for in sixty days she expended more money in preparation for war with this country than the whole cost of manufacturing and laying several good cables between Newfoundland and Ireland.’
The immediate danger following the Trent incident subsided, and any prospect of financial help for the cable from the British government again faded. But Field saw that he could capitalise on recent events to advance the cable. As the Union began to gain the upper hand in the conflict, Field brought out potent commercial arguments to enlist the support of merchants from the eastern cities. While Britain had most to gain politically from the cable, the United States, he suggested, would enjoy great commercial benefits:
The shipment of gold, which is constantly taking place, would be much diminished; the rapid fluctuations in exchange would be prevented; and the enormous depreciation of public securities would be much abated. Those speculative transactions in cotton and produce, which have often brought about financial crises in England and the United States, would be rendered almost impossible; and the gain to owners of shipping, on both sides of the Atlantic, would be incalculable, from being able to communicate constantly with their captains and agents in all the ports of Europe and America.
When Field addressed the New York Chamber of Commerce in March 1863 he pointed to the newly opened telegraph to San Francisco, which had ‘as much business as it can do, and has earned more than enough to pay the whole cost’, even though it connected with a single state of only a few hundred thousand people. As for the Atlantic cable, he did not believe that ten cables could begin to satisfy the demand. ‘The great commerce of our ports demands prompt communication with Europe. You cannot write to England and receive a reply under twenty days.’ On a single Atlantic line, his conservative estimate was an income of £413,000 a year. This would make possible a forty per cent dividend, though Field had a more ambitious plan. By distributing only eighteen per cent of the gain to shareholders, the rest could be invested in further cables and there would then be nine cables working by 1870, ‘without increasing the capital stock at all’.
He was well received, and the meeting passed a resolution stating their belief that the cable should and would be laid, and that the public be encouraged to support it. Subscriptions had then reached £195,000, including £2,000 each from Cooper and Hunt, and a thousand each from a number of other New Yorkers, with a few new supporters signed up after Field’s plea. These were useful sums, but nothing near the amounts poured in by the original directors almost ten years earlier.
Field had even less success in Philadelphia and Boston, where he addressed meetings of merchants in April and May 1863. He had hopes that the Boston men, who had contributed largely to railroad schemes, would support the telegraph for the same reasons. He argued that the telegraph would bring American commerce into line with that of Europe:
On the other side of the ocean, the work of extending telegraphic communication has been rapid. I can take my stand in the office of the Atlantic Telegraph Company at Valentia on the west coast of Ireland and communicate with every capital in Europe – to Constantinople, 3,100 miles, and even along the shores of Afr
ica – and as far as Omsk in Siberia, 5,300 miles. Consider the effect upon commerce, upon international trade. Here is Boston, a great commercial city – what an advantage to you if you could instantly communicate with those ports; if you could know when your ships arrive; and the prices ruling in the markets of Europe, so that you could direct from here what cargoes to take on board. Already your great China merchants find the immense advantages of the overland telegraph to the Pacific.
Since the transcontinental telegraph had opened, Boston ships, after sailing round Cape Horn on their way to the Far East, put in at San Francisco to collect the latest orders from home on where to go and what to buy. Finally, Field’s guiding principle, that the transatlantic cable would increase international understanding, also presented advantages to trade. He could cite the Trent incident, not eighteen months since, when ‘England nearly went to war with America because there was not a telegraph across the Atlantic’. But this also presented Field with a problem, for relations between the Union and Britain were not fully repaired, and this stood in the way of American support for the cable. ‘One feeling may embarrass the effort to raise money for this enterprise at the present time. It is the feeling towards England on account of her course towards the US since the commencement of the present war.’
Field’s audience – men who had been disappointed before by promises that an Atlantic cable was a technological certainty – needed reassurances about the safety of their investment:
Is such a telegraph possible? It is only a very few years since it was thought possible to lay a cable of any length under water. When it was first proposed to lay a cable across the British channel, it was thought a mad project, that could only end in utter failure. Even after messages were received in London, the whole thing was denounced as a hoax, an imposition on the credibility of the public.
Field pointed out to his audience that of fifty-three major cables laid, forty-five had been ‘a perfect success’. He did not mention that the ones which had failed had been the longest, and deepest. Although he would never have admitted at the time, for in truth he did not believe it in 1857 and 1858, he now said that those earlier attempts to span the Atlantic had been ‘a mere experiment’. He tried to entice the merchants by reminding them of the huge commercial success of the telegraph to the Pacific. Although it served essentially only one state, California, and had to pass thousands of miles of barren plains and mountains, that cable ‘has paid for itself in one year’. The comparison, though, between the well-tried overland technology and a submarine line, was not a real one, as Field knew. With the ocean cable, although the potential traffic was much higher, the cost was vastly more and the technology by no means certain to succeed.
Field’s efforts to raise money in America were disappointing. The cable, while it might appeal in theory to the provincial merchants of Britain and the United States, still appeared too risky a scheme for them to commit their own money. Field talked about the first cable as ‘a leap in the dark’, but he had not made that clear at the time, even if he had then believed it to be true. He assured his American audiences that much had been learned in a few short years, about instruments for testing, about cable insulation and the conductivity of copper, and about the mechanical problems involved in laying a line from a moving ship. He confessed that the work had been attempted too rapidly, and that other mistakes had been made. His optimism was undimmed, and he believed that it would, only four years later, be ‘an easy task to lay a cable constructed and submerged by the light of present experience’. But still, the central problem would not go away, that the cable’s success was not a certainty. An investor in the Atlantic Telegraph Co. stood to lose everything, as many had already. Any number of government guarantees on the rate of return could not get round this. It was clear that a working line would be vastly profitable, but a promise of great returns did not outweigh the fear of total loss. It was this, rather than the uncertainties of wartime, which deterred the merchants of the eastern seaboard, and in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, and even London, from risking their money on a new cable.
6
A Thrill along
the Iron Nerve
There was to be no cable expedition in 1863, but events turned at last in the Atlantic company’s favour. The first inkling of a real revival was late in 1862, when the cable-makers Glass & Elliot came up with an idea of how they might cover the costs.
This opened up a new way forward. The inspiration had come from Richard Atwood Glass, who had been an accountant before he became a cable-maker. There had been some timely reforms of company law in 1856 and 1862, establishing limited liability, and Glass saw how this new form of company could be an instrument to square the cable finances. In simple terms, it involved paying bills with company shares, avoiding the need for ready cash in advance. No longer would the Atlantic company have to depend entirely on individual investors – George Saward, pursuing the provincial merchants of England, had had as little luck as Cyrus Field in America – or on elusive public funding. Glass’s proposal was this: his company would take payment only for materials and labour costs, until the cable was successful. The balance of the debt could then be settled in Atlantic company shares. The cable-making company would also make an investment of £25,000 into the Atlantic project. Glass & Elliot were manoeuvring hard for the valuable contract, offering ‘the most liberal conditions’.
So the cable contractors were poised to take the place of those wealthy New Yorkers who during the 1850s had written cheques to cover the Atlantic company’s first million dollars, but who were no longer able or willing to finance the bid. Glass & Elliot’s plan meant that the contractors had a direct incentive in the venture’s success. This also satisfied one of Galton’s complaints about the arrangements in 1857. And who better to shoulder a substantial part of the burden? Submarine cable companies possessed the technical insight to understand just how far risks had decreased, and how lucrative the telegraph company shares might turn out to be. The cable-makers also urgently needed the Atlantic crossing to be completed, as its success would herald many more long deep-sea lines. Without a transatlantic line in place, the future of the cable industry would be limited indeed.
Soon after the expedition of 1858, Glass & Elliot began to recruit their own electricians and engineers and started to offer a full contracting service, including cable-laying. Their new staff, among whom were Bright’s former assistants Samuel Canning and Henry Clifford, added to their deep-sea experience on contracts for the French and Italian governments in the Mediterranean during the early 1860s. The company was doing well, moving up to leader in the field. Yet Glass & Elliot would not take on the entire risk for the Atlantic cable, ‘as we consider that would be too great a responsibility for any single firm to undertake’. They did offer ‘to stake a large sum’ as a measure of their confidence, and the partners also made large personal investments.
Despite the cable-makers’ vote of confidence, there was still a gap in the finances. The Atlantic company went ahead anyway, in August 1863, in advertising for cable-makers to tender for the contract. Applicants were asked to submit their own specifications for the cable, and all seventeen proposals received were turned over for scrutiny by the Atlantic company’s newly formed scientific committee. This consisted of Galton, Wheatstone and Thomson as well as the mechanical engineers William Fairbairn and Joseph Whitworth. To no one’s surprise the successful bidder was Glass & Elliot, by a unanimous decision. The scientific committee insisted on further tests and improvements to the winning cable design, to which Glass & Elliot willingly agreed.
Field believed that the necessary funds were in place, and told New York shareholders that in October 1863, at a meeting where his energy and perseverance were again praised by his old supporter, Peter Cooper. It had taken all of five years, said Field, ‘to restore the confidence of the public to such a degree as to make it ready to renew the undertaking. In business, as in war, it takes a long time to recover from the blow produce
d by a great disaster.’ Field credited Galton with breathing new life into undersea telegraphy. ‘This testimony revived public confidence in Great Britain, which was further strengthened by the success of other long submarine lines, especially that between Malta and Alexandria.’ The perennial optimist went so far as to predict a direct line in place between the United States and Europe in 1865. He assumed the Atlantic telegraph’s problems were over, and was already thinking of the next project.
But the marriage between ‘star-eyed Science’ and ‘sordid Mammon’, as Henry Field put it, was again delayed. The scheme stuttered early in 1864. The Atlantic company made another fruitless plea to Gladstone. Through their ‘utmost exertions’ they had received £320,000, from more than a thousand individuals; ‘each,’ it was claimed, ‘being chiefly influenced by the national character of the enterprise.’ The cable was designed ‘by a committee of eminent and scientific men after a long series of experimental tests and after a full enquiry into the whole subject’. But a deadline drew near, as the whole capital had not been pledged, so that the money raised would have to be returned to investors early in March, and the ‘great national enterprise abandoned at the very moment when it is ripe for success’. This meant no transatlantic cable for years to come, unless a national emergency demanded it, in which case the whole cost could fall to the government. But Gladstone was again unmoved.
At this point, Cyrus Field had an encounter which dramatically changed the company’s prospects, comparable to his own meeting with Gisborne in New York a decade earlier which had seen the rescue of the original Newfoundland project. The network of political contacts he had cultivated in London during the civil war turned up an unexpected bonus for the Atlantic project. John Bright introduced Field to Thomas Brassey, a financier noted for his broad and imaginative investments. Brassey grilled Field on every aspect of the scheme, paying close attention to profit predictions. He then agreed to back the cable, and to recruit other capitalists to do the same. John Pender was the second to join after Brassey. Pender, a millionaire Manchester textile merchant and MP, already had interests in telegraph companies. Daniel Gooch, best known as chairman of the Great Western Railway, also signed up in support.
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