The Cable

by Gillian Cookson

  John Pender. (Cable & Wireless Archives, Porthcurno)

  Salvation was therefore in sight as Cyrus Field marked the tenth anniversary of his first trip out of Boston on Atlantic company business. He had since crossed the Atlantic thirty-one times. The occasion was celebrated, in the words of Stuart Wortley, by ‘a company of distinguished men – members of parliament, great capitalists, distinguished merchants and manufacturers, engineers and men of science, such as is rarely found together even in the highest house in this great metropolis. It was very agreeable to see an American citizen so surrounded’ – gathered at Field’s table at the Palace Hotel, Buckingham Gate.

  The following day, a meeting of company shareholders heard details of tests carried out in Manchester on various cable samples sent by Glass & Elliot to the scientific committee. Based on these, and on past experience, the cable’s design was decided. A seven-strand copper conductor core would be embedded in Chatterton’s compound, and insulated with gutta percha and Chatterton’s alternately, eight layers in all. It was padded with hemp and preservative, and protected by ten solid iron wires, each clothed in yarn and preservative. The weight was almost double that of the 1857 cable, at 1.7 tons per nautical mile, with a vastly improved breaking strain of 7¾ tons, more than double that of the previous line. Coiled in one circle, it was estimated that the new cable would make a pile 58ft wide and 60ft high. The cable was relatively small, an inch in diameter, and required little charge. There would be no repeat of Whitehouse’s massive voltages. Henry Field, the minister brother of Cyrus, explained that ‘God was not in the whirlwind, but in the still, small voice. A soft touch could send a thrill along that iron nerve.’

  Improvements in conductivity, insulation and strength came at a price, one of £700,000. Another extraordinary meeting of the company was called on the last day of March, to authorise an increase of capital and allow fund-raising through bonds and mortgages. The cable would be paid for partly in shares and old debentures of the company, with later payments in old, unguaranteed, shares. Thus the Atlantic company itself need find no more than about half the cost of the cable at the outset. They had £316,000, and required perhaps a further £34,000 in order to proceed, but the scheme had been saved. For the first time, the directors dared to talk openly about the high returns which could be expected. ‘If, as we confidently anticipate, we are perfectly successful’, said Stuart Wortley, ‘we shall then be in a position to earn very large and perhaps unparalleled profits.’ Others shared this faith, for company stock was rising. Shares of £1,000 which had fallen as low as £30, now stood at £350 or more. The company proposed to issue £50,000 more in guaranteed eight per cents.

  Another celebration was in order. Field threw an inauguration banquet at the Palace Hotel on 15 April 1864, to commemorate the Atlantic company’s renewal ‘after a lapse of six years’ of the endeavour to unite Ireland and Newfoundland. The guests included the American ambassador Charles Francis Adams; John Bright, MP; Galton and many of the engineers involved, including Latimer Clark, William Fairbairn, Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and Charles Wheatstone; the banker and MP Samuel Gurney; Julius Reuter; and city financiers including Brassey and Glass as well as Pender.

  The new plans required a restructuring of the cable industry, with the merger of two leading companies. The core-makers, the Gutta Percha Co., amalgamated with Glass, Elliot & Co. to form the Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Co. Ltd, known as Telcon. This had become very big business, with the new company capitalised at £1 million. Its directors included Henry Ford Barclay, Thomas Brassey, Richard Glass and George Elliot, Daniel Gooch, John Pender and Samuel Gurney. Pender was chairman, and the dynamic accountant Glass, managing director.

  The cable had evolved, from something a few years earlier ‘regarded merely as a scientific experiment’, to being ‘now absolutely necessary for the purpose of our social system’. Moreover, it was promised to be ‘a highly remunerative investment’. Telcon could boast unparalleled experience in the field. The Gutta Percha Co. had in the previous decade made over 9,000 miles of insulated wire for the inner cores of submarine cables. Glass & Elliot, their main customer, had made and laid more than 6,500 miles of underwater cable. The merger produced a completely integrated cable-making and laying service.

  Some of Telcon’s confidence and authority, not to mention the transformed financial prospects, gave new strength to the Atlantic company, which was spurred to withdraw at last from its agreement with the British government. In practical terms the contract had proved useless, doing nothing to improve the chances of success, with a guarantee which was worthwhile only if the cable made little or no surplus. Yet the promoters knew by now, from the experience of other deep-sea lines, that once a telegraph was working, it cost little to run and could expect handsome profits. And while the government guarantee was not very helpful, it carried with it some obligations, such as priority for official messages on the line. The condition causing most inconvenience for the company was the government control of telegram prices.

  Matters came to a head in 1865, when the Atlantic company, expecting the cable to be working that summer, wanted to increase charges. This had to be justified to Gladstone. The directors reminded him of their past losses, totalling £465,000 in 1857 and 1858, and that they were now spending a further £835,000 which had been raised with difficulty. They were keen to ‘disclaim very earnestly the slightest desire to exact for themselves or their shareholders any greedy or excessive gain’. Experience from the Mediterranean cables, though, had forced a reassessment of the likely transmission rates. It was estimated that a transatlantic line could carry only about 150 messages in twenty-four hours – 75 in each direction. The company also considered how much business the cable might attract. The fastest way to send a message from London was by cable to Queenstown (Cóbh), south of Cork, where steam-powered British mail packets en route from Liverpool to New York were intercepted with packages of perhaps 200 telegrams at a time. As the ship passed Newfoundland, these were thrown overboard off Cape Race, from where they were wired to New York. This service was four days quicker than the post and despite a cost of £2 17s for twenty words, attracted plenty of business. As the cost of a direct message on the new telegraph was still fixed at £5, the company was concerned that without a price increase they would be swamped with as many as 500 telegrams a day, so that ‘the office would soon be in the greatest confusion’. This weight of messages ‘would crush the profits and destroy the usefulness of the cable’, for the company had to be able to guarantee speedy transmission.

  Did the contract with the government still have force? No one was quite sure. To the evident relief of both parties, the agreement was cancelled before the attempt to lay a cable in the summer of 1865. This left the way clear for the company to levy charges, and organise its business, as it thought fit, and spared Gladstone a decision he did not want to make.

  New technologies and new ways of working – in engineering, electricity, finance and business – had saved the day. The final part of this jigsaw of coincidences was the most dramatic. It was the arrival on the scene of Brunel’s gigantic iron steamship, the Great Eastern. Five times larger than anything else afloat, she was the only ship in the world that could accommodate the new cable in its entirety. As a cable-layer, the Great Eastern enjoyed the only successful phase of her career. At other times she brought bankruptcy to a succession of owners, losing in total $5 million. Her conversion from passenger liner to cable ship took place in the Medway in the spring of 1864, and Captain James Anderson was persuaded to take leave from the Cunard Line and assume command. Some believed that God had sent ‘the Leviathan’ purposely to carry out this great work across the Atlantic.

  The truth was more prosaic. It had long been noted that this ship, above all others, was ideally sized to lay the Atlantic cable. She had spent much of her short life idle and unproductive, passing through a number of owners. Daniel Gooch stepped in when she came on sale again, and bought her through the Gre
at Eastern Steamship Co., set up with himself as chairman and Thomas Brassey among the directors. She was refitted as a cable ship for £15,700, with three vast water-filled cable tanks spread along the ship to distribute the weight. Clifford and Canning installed improved cable-laying machinery, and for the first time there was equipment to grapple and recover the cable if it broke. Gooch’s plan made no concession to failure. The Great Eastern was to lay the cable at no charge, and only in the case of success would the owners receive payment, of £50,000 in Atlantic company shares. This was all arranged by the end of 1864, by which time Telcon had the new cable under construction and it was being stowed, and continually tested, on board the Great Eastern where the water tanks protected and preserved the gutta percha insulation.

  In April 1865, as the American Civil War finally closed in victory for the north, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. News of the president’s killing, on 15 April, was rushed across the ocean by the steamship Nova Scotian, reaching a telegraph station in Londonderry on 26 April. The despatch arrived in London two hours later and appeared in the British newspapers the following day, twelve days after the assassination. Julius Reuter, first with the news, was later accused of having personally profited on the stock market through holding back his early knowledge. The shock value of the report was somewhat muted as so much time had passed since the event. But the value of Reuter’s coup gave some perspective to the proposed costs of Atlantic telegrams.

  The Great Eastern was still swallowing ‘ship-load after ship-load’ of cable, ‘as if she could never be satisfied’. A visitor to the ship in May, when almost all the line was on board, ‘was at a loss to find it’. Stowing was finished by the end of May, although it was another six weeks before the expedition was ready to embark. There would be 500 men on board, as well as live cattle, oxen, pigs, sheep, ducks, geese and hens to provide fresh food. The projectors had taken another lesson from the Agamemnon’s misfortunes, and would not risk being reduced to eating three-year-old salted beef. There would be no spectators on the voyage, and even directors were permitted only if they had a specific job to do. Field and Gooch were the only representatives of the companies’ boards. Thomson and Varley would be there, but with strictly defined and limited powers of interference. There were several artists and one journalist, William Howard Russell of The Times, who had made his reputation describing the horrors of the Crimea, to document what was expected to be an historic event.

  Of all those on board, Cyrus Field was the only American. Nor did the Great Eastern’s escort contain any United States vessel, for Lincoln had declined to help, in view of the continuing bad relations between his victorious northern states and the Palmerston government. The expedition was to be accompanied only by two British warships, Terrible and Sphinx. The Caroline and Porcupine were also in assistance. Canning was engineer on the Great Eastern, assisted by Clifford; chief electrician was Charles de Sauty, who had been involved almost from the start in the Newfoundland lines and was also the man who had struggled alone in the telegraph station there as the 1858 cable died.

  Because of the great size of the cable-laying ship, the landing points at both sides of the ocean had to change. Instead of Valentia harbour, the cable would leave from Foilhommerum Bay five miles away, overlooked by a tower built by Cromwell after the English Civil War. In Newfoundland, Field had found an alternative landing, a deep but sheltered spot near the open sea called Heart’s Content. The shore end laid, the Great Eastern steamed away west from Ireland on Sunday, 23 July 1865.

  Only a few hours later, with eighty-four miles laid, a fault was discovered, though the line still worked. The ship retraced her course, picking up the cable, for more than ten miles. There, a minute piece of iron wire, smaller than a needle, was discovered to have pierced the cable, destroying a small section of insulation. It was repaired, and the journey continued.

  All continued well until the following Saturday, with 800 miles laid, when the line went dead. The hauling-in equipment had its first real test, in two miles of water, but without difficulty brought in the damaged section for repair. Much to Canning’s alarm, there was no doubt that an act of sabotage had taken place, for again a piece of wire had been driven through the insulation. The first fault might have been an accident, but this clearly was not. Something similar had happened before, on a North Sea expedition when a rival company was supposed to have bribed a workman to destroy the cable. On the Great Eastern it proved impossible to identify the culprit, and all that could be done was to place a watch on the cable men.

  After this, spirits lifted, for everything went well, the machinery and systems running smoothly. By Wednesday, ten days into the voyage, 1,200 miles of cable were laid and the ship was 600 miles from Newfoundland, two days away from shallow coastal waters. From Ireland, where the signals received had been so good that it was possible to detect when the ship rolled, news of the expedition’s progress was reported daily to the London papers. But suddenly there was a complete loss of communication.

  The cable-layers had noticed a small fault, which was overboard before it could be mended. Though it was a tiny one, a pin’s prick, it needed repair. There was no great alarm, and the crew prepared to haul in the cable again. As steam was got up on the small engine used for this, the ship drifted across the line and chafed it. When it was pulled over the side, this damaged section snapped, and the end of the cable disappeared into the ocean.

  Canning decided that there was only one thing to be done, to grapple for the line in the 2½ mile depths. He had been noted for impressive cable-fishing exploits in the Mediterranean, but this was much more ambitious. The grapnels, two five-armed anchors ending in hooks, took two hours to sink to the ocean bed. The Great Eastern then had to trace a new route a few miles from the broken end, across the line where the cable had been laid. She sailed back and forth all night, trying to snag the tiny line so far below. At last there was success, and the grappling irons caught the line. Canning knew that it was not just a stray object, for the strain increased as the load was pulled nearer the surface.

  For hours they worked to raise the cable. When it had been lifted three quarters of a mile from the ocean bed, an iron swivel gave way and the catch, along with two miles of rope, returned to the bottom. After a delay with fog, they tried again, and again. Three times the cable was found, brought up part of the way, and lost again as the equipment failed. Every time, more of the wire rope was lost, until, after the fourth failure, there was no rope left, and no alternative but to mark the spot with buoys and abandon the effort for the year.

  This was a strange kind of failure, for it had ‘the moral effect of a victory’. The returning ship and crew were greeted as heroes. The great ship had proved her value on such an expedition, safe and manoeuvrable in any weather. The grappling attempts had nearly succeeded. The laying machinery had been a stunning success, and hauling in had worked well. Faults had been spotted and located with impressive speed and accuracy. Best of all, though, had been the ease and clarity of sending messages along 1,200 miles of cable at the bottom of the ocean. It was now clear that eight words a minute, at the very least, were achievable.

  By the time the Great Eastern arrived back in Ireland in the middle of August, Cyrus Field, with Canning, Glass and Thomson, had prepared a prospectus for an attempt the following year. Field would not again need to dust down his well-worn arguments to keep the project alive, for it was clear that triumph was not far away. In fact the American had little trouble in convincing his fellow directors that the 1866 expedition should pick up and complete the abandoned 1865 cable, as well as lay a new line.

  Telcon was already making a new cable in September 1865, when the Atlantic company announced the share offer which would pay for it. There were to be 120,000 new £5 shares, with the promise of a twelve per cent dividend with priority over all other investors. Telcon would receive £500,000, and a bonus of £100,000 conditional on success. The shares were quickly taken up, although it later emerged that ha
lf had been sold to Telcon itself.

  The engineers were confident but far from complacent. Work to improve their instruments and systems continued through that winter. William Thomson refined his theoretical work, presenting a paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in December, ‘On forces concerned in the laying and lifting of deep-sea cables’. Willoughby Smith, formerly of the Gutta Percha Co. and now an indispensable figure in the project, devised a new method for the electrical testing of cables during submersion, which Thomson approved. This meant continuous testing of the cable insulation, and instant detection of any fault. The cable design had been again improved, the armour lighter and stronger, with galvanised iron wires to protect from corrosion so that a smaller coating of compound was needed. Grappling and hauling machinery was further refined. The company was also looking for better ways to run the line, casting around for more sophisticated telegraph codes. Frank Bolton of Chatham, racing to complete one such code, had tried an unfinished version through 2,300 miles of cable on the Great Eastern in 1865, claiming to save almost half the time of previous methods.

  In spite of all the planning and preparation, the Atlantic Telegraph Co. was still to suffer another crushing and unexpected blow. On his return to England on Christmas Eve 1865, Field was told that the Attorney General would not allow the twelve per cent preference share issue to proceed. It was illegal under the company’s own Act of Parliament. The only way to save the preference share scheme was to amend the Act, and this was impossible to achieve in the current parliamentary session. In desperation, the company again appealed to Gladstone. Could the government subscribe the quarter of a million pounds capital which private investors would not commit without the high returns of a preference scheme? The cable’s prospects had been transformed since previous requests to the Chancellor, but this final appeal was equally fruitless. What prospect was there now that money could be raised in time for the short cable-laying season of 1866?