Electric Universe

by David Bodanis

  “The book of nature, which we have to read,” he’d once written, “is written by the finger of God.” He was right, and now he had shown that God was a flamboyant, hallucinatory Titian, blasting His universe with hitherto unseen, vivid streaks.

  Faraday’s insights are at the heart of modern technology, and even—as we’ll see—would eventually answer the question about why electrons don’t pile up at the end of a long phone line. But although he now held a distinguished position at the Royal Institution, he hadn’t outlived his past. Most of his English colleagues believed that he was only a clever tinkerer. They knew about his embarrassing lack of formal education; they’d seen that he couldn’t express his insights in the advanced mathematics they so easily used. To all but a few of them, his excited theories of invisible force fields seemed entirely unfounded, and so his ideas were politely set aside.

  Faraday made many more discoveries; he had audiences with prime ministers; he became greatly respected for his popular lectures. At one point a brilliant young woman became fascinated by what his electricity findings might suggest for her own research. This is one of the great “might have beens” of history, for the woman was the late Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, and she’d been working on early notions of what we’d now call computer programming. No technology of the time could entirely build what she envisaged, but who knows what Faraday might have come up with? He seemed entranced by her, but soon stepped back, probably to avoid jeopardizing his own marriage.

  He still didn’t give up, though. When he’d been criticized for his religion, he had turned to the Bible for consolation. Now, criticized by the great majority of researchers for his idea about force fields, he turned back to Isaac Newton. Although Newton was said to have had a different view about empty space, maybe that wasn’t quite true. Newton was the greatest thinker science had ever produced. Even a hint in his writings that Faraday might be right would be comforting.

  On the surface it would seem impossible, but in fact Newton had once revealed doubts about his public vision, in a brief relaxed moment in his old age. To an inquisitive young Cambridge theologian, Richard Bentley, Newton wrote, in 1693, that perhaps the universe wasn’t so empty. Perhaps, on the contrary, there really were forces, such as gravity, that sent out tendrils crisscrossing what seemed like empty space. The idea “that…one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else,” Newton daringly wrote, “…is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has…any competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.”

  Bentley had been excited and had written to find out more about what the great scientist meant. But Newton drew back. These were just an old man’s musings, and nothing further was to be said. To have gone further would have been dangerous, for this was an era when religious heretics were still burned at the stake. The authorities might misinterpret his belief that space was not empty and assume he didn’t believe God’s power was great enough to cross empty space, they might begin to investigate his private religious writings, which definitely were full of heresy. The correspondence stopped, and his brief hint of self-doubt in that letter to Bentley was soon forgotten.

  But now, more than 140 years later, as Faraday was hunting for confirmation that he hadn’t been entirely wrong, he found Newton’s very old letter to Bentley. With that, Faraday realized he wasn’t alone. Newton had been there before.

  Beyond that, Faraday couldn’t go. In old age, his memory already fading, he wrote to a young friend, the gifted Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell:

  Royal Institution

  November 13, 1857

  My Dear Sir,

  …There is one thing I would be glad to ask you. When a mathematician engaged in investigating physical actions and results has arrived at his own conclusions, may they not be expressed in common language as fully, clearly, and definitely as in mathematical formulae? If so, would it not be a great boon to such as we to express them so—translating them out of their hieroglyphics that we almost might work upon them by experiment….

  Maxwell wrote back diligently, but Faraday remained left behind. His weakness in mathematics had helped him start a major inquiry, but he was never going to be able to lead its further development in his lifetime.

  Still, Faraday consoled himself by taking a long view. He was convinced that someday there would be practical inventions that depended on what he’d seen. When that finally occurred, even the critics who dismissed him would have to accept that his hunches were true.

  What he didn’t realize, as the decades went on and he was reaching sixty, was that he would live long enough to see it happen. A giant engineering adventure was soon to take place, deep under the sea. When it was completed, there would be tantalizing further evidence that everything he’d imagined about invisible force fields really was true.

  5

  Atlantic Storms

  HMS AGAMEMNON, 1858, AND SCOTLAND, 1861

  The undersea adventure that finally resolved Faraday’s hunches began with one Cyrus West Field, who was musing, on a cool January afternoon in 1854, before an ornate globe in the library of his New York brownstone. The telegraph to which Morse had put his name was ten years old; Thomas Edison was just a seven-year-old boy in Michigan. Field had made a fortune in business, but although he was supposedly retired, he was still only in his mid-thirties, and he didn’t especially like being retired. He’d tried explorations to South America, but those were just guided tours for rich men, and the incident when he’d brought both a jaguar and an apparently nonviolent Amazonian teenager back to New York City didn’t bear remembering. He’d also tried spending time in the social world of high-caste New York, of the sort the novelist Edith Wharton would later write about, but the obsessions with tea and gossip had convinced him that the Amazon was not so bad after all.

  Now, in his study, he noticed something…annoying…about the globe. On one side there was England and its empire, the great source of proper white culture, while far away, isolated by a vast ocean, there was America. Why should these two natural allies be so crudely separated? The only way to send messages between them was by ship, and it could take weeks to make a round trip between the two nation’s capitals.

  In the past, that had produced great misunderstandings. The great battle of New Orleans in January 1815 had lost some of its grandeur when the British and American forces involved were informed that the war they were ostensibly fighting had ended several weeks before. The news had taken that long to reach deep into the South.

  By the 1850s those problems were being remedied when it came to land communications. Most great cities with an overland route between them were linked by telegraph: Washington and Baltimore, Paris and Berlin.

  A few telegraph lines had even been dipped for a few miles underwater, as with the line that had been operating for several years now across the English Channel. But the great challenge—the chief remaining adventure, Field realized—was the colossal stretch of the North Atlantic.

  Its surface was rolling and treacherous for thousands of miles, but underneath, far in the depths, was it not possible that the advanced electrical works of man, lowered cautiously to these regions, might survive, untouched, for decades on end? Many individuals may have had this vision—in just a few years the young Frenchman Jules Verne would come up with his Captain Nemo stories, about a brilliant sea captain and an advanced submarine that spends months at a time in these depths. But Field had the money to make this vision of connecting the two continents come true.

  He would build a cable, he decided, a giant ocean-spanning cable, and he would link the two great empires, and he would produce universal brotherhood, or at least great profit, and in doing so he would get to leave this cursed brownstone and the rituals of stuffy New York life and instead travel to the world’s financial center, London, and work with engineers, and sailors, and salty sea captains.

  It turned out to be agonizingly harder than he
thought. Over the next fifteen years, Field made dozens of crossings of the Atlantic, vomiting almost every time; there were cables that cost millions of pounds sterling that snapped far from shore; there were high storms, and swindlers, and parliamentary inquests, and an attack by a whale, and an embarrassing occasion when New York’s City Hall nearly burned down. But even if Field had known all that, he probably still would have gone ahead. It was better than being bored—and what did financial loss, whale attacks, and seasickness mean against the hope of glory?

  Most of all, in his heart, Field believed the actual technical operation was going to be easy. To him, the cable was like a hose or a narrow tunnel. Electric currents were some sort of crackling, hissing stuff that batteries mysteriously created. He’d just pour that into the hose. If the signal that emerged at the far end of his cable was too weak, well, he’d simply pour in more.

  Ultimately Field realized that there was far more to what happened, but for now, when he arrived in London in 1854, resplendent in the best outfit his New York tailors could prepare, he received the eager welcome that any confident American with a great sum to invest is accorded. Everyone thought he had a fine idea, a cracking idea, and those who’d worked with telegraphs assured Field that they’d done the tests to prove his ideas, or at least they were about to, but in any event the accuracy was in the bag, and if Mr. Field wanted a trustworthy partner, he couldn’t find a better soul.

  Field was polite enough, but he had made his way up in the New York textile and paper trade—where trust in human intentions was rewarded with extinction—and, like the majority of Americans arriving in London with a great deal of money to invest, he was quite aware that most of the people he met were trying to take him for a fool. He didn’t commit himself, and discreetly sought out the leading electricity theorist in the country, just to be sure his views were right.

  This was the Scottish scientist William Thomson (no relation to J. J. Thomson). One visitor who came to meet Thomson around this time was ready for a white-bearded ancient, but instead found an energetic young man in his thirties who raced up the stairs two at a time. Thomson was a fit sailor and had been a champion rower and swimmer at Cambridge. He’d also received the highest scores in his year on the final examination in mathematics—helped, most conveniently, by the fact that at least one of the questions was from his own prize-winning published papers.

  Cyrus Field knew of him because Thomson had been making a study of the few undersea cables that were already in operation. What he had found was not appropriate for wide dissemination—it could prove disquieting for Imperial morale—but a series of disturbing flaws had been noticed in each one of Britain’s cable systems.

  Although foul play by one of the opposing Great Powers could have been considered if there was only one incident, the mysterious flaw also cropped up in several Mediterranean cables, and even in the London-Brussels line. Signals that were sent in sharp and clear—a single brief flash of electricity—were no longer sharp and clear when they emerged. Instead, they were muddy and blurred.

  With a short cable the flaw was just about tolerable, but with longer distances it meant anyone who used the cables—and the Admiralty increasingly depended on them—had to send and resend important messages. On a very long cable, such as the one Field proposed to lay beneath the Atlantic, it would—unless understood, and fixed—make clear messaging impossible.

  No one had observed this problem in ordinary aboveground telegraph lines, however long. But why not? Something unique was happening in the undersea cables—and Thomson thought he understood what it was.

  Thomson was one of the few thinkers then taking Faraday’s vision seriously. He believed, with Faraday, that the surface of reality was misleading, that underneath the sparks and cracklings of a moving electric current there really was a deeper power, an invisible force field, and that was what pushed the current forward. The “sparks” (the electrons) that tumbled along inside a wire didn’t move by their own power, but were transported as though by an invisible flying carpet. For Thomson and Faraday, the carpet was the invisible force field.

  In the years since Faraday’s first conception, Thomson had taken the idea further. This invisible field is what would emerge from a battery, he believed, and that was more important than any sparks. The field would travel partly within but also alongside any wire stretching ahead of it. It would take up position along the whole length of the wire, very quickly, and then it would reach in and pull forward any charged particles—any electrons—it found near its path. Thomson imagined the field as almost a living thing, constantly writhing and twisting, as it carried this incredible pulling power.

  That’s what especially worried him, for Thomson knew that the Atlantic cable Cyrus Field was planning to build would be in three layers. Each was to be as thin as possible to save weight. There would be a thin copper strand at the center, a thin layer of rubbery insulation around that, and finally a casing of iron wrapped around the whole thing, so that the cable wouldn’t be ripped open as it was dragged and bounced along the deep ocean floor. That made sense in terms of Cyrus Field’s view, but was terrible to Thomson. For when a telegraph operator tapped his key, the field would start racing forward alongside the thousands of miles of copper, yet it would also writhe sideways across all that length of rubbery insulation, and some of it would try to pull on the electric charges hidden in the thousands of miles of iron casing, and a final part of it would even get dispersed in the millions of tons of cold seawater outside. It would be spread wide, its energy dispersed.

  This explained the delays the Admiralty and other investigators were worried about. When the human finger clicking the telegraph key lifted up between each signal, the field that had taken position along the thousands of miles of cable during the previous click would have to disperse before the next signal could go through. It would have to collapse back, down from the water to the iron, and from the iron across the insulation into the copper, and then from the copper it would disappear. If the finger tapped too soon, the new field that came charging in would collide with the old one still twisting around between copper and iron and sea. No wonder the signals in the few undersea cables that existed grew blurred and wobbly. (This didn’t happen in ordinary land telegraphs, where the wires were held up on poles, because those wires could have thick insulation. Nor was there an iron casing to lure the sinuous force field outward. Any part of the field that did escape just chased off through the air harmlessly.)

  Cyrus Field was a polite man, but these must have seemed the ravings of a lunatic. Thomson saw the field as a genie—a howling wind—struggling to get out. To get the project to work the whole structure and operation of the cable would have to be changed. For a start, the rubbery insulation would have to be much thicker to keep it in. But there were no genies in Cyrus Field’s world, no force fields. He’d already paid good money for an advance order for cable with thin insulation. He wasn’t going to change that now.

  Field gave his compliments to Thomson and selected a more practical man as chief electrical engineer for the project. This was Edward Whitehouse, who didn’t believe in preposterous, invisible flying force fields. For him, electric charges just shot out from the metals inside a battery and poured down the wire. There was no need for lurking force fields to fly alongside and speed them ahead.

  Even better, Whitehouse was able to help Field in another, somewhat delicate matter. For Field was not quite as rich as everyone believed. He’d made a fortune, but not all of his subsequent investments had done well, and unless he got funding for his cable project, and quickly, he’d have to return to New York in disgrace. He couldn’t fund the project on his own; he couldn’t fund a tenth of it, or even a hundredth. No sign of hesitancy or uncertainty could be made public until his investors were in hand.

  Whitehouse was the ideal man to guarantee that no questions were raised. He used threats to make sure that the handful of young scientists who supported Thomson’s hypothesis stayed quie
t or recanted; he even, humiliatingly, brought the elderly Michael Faraday to a public meeting to back Field’s project.

  Faraday had been suffering increasing bursts of confusion over the years—possibly due to mercury fumes coming from the floorboards of his laboratory, which can affect the brain if inhaled over long periods—and Whitehouse had carefully prepared him. Faraday’s great strength was experimentation, everyone knew that, and Whitehouse seems to have misled Faraday about experimental evidence suggesting there were flaws in Thomson’s calculations.

  Under Whitehouse’s pressure, Faraday gave an ambiguous statement suggesting that Thomson hadn’t been entirely correct. In a move that would do twenty-first-century biotech venture capitalists proud, Whitehouse and Field spun that statement to give the impression that they had Faraday’s full support for their narrow cable with only a thin layer of insulation. Respected public figures such as W. M. Thackeray started buying shares. Soon Field had enough cash for the cable factories to run full time, and for negotiations with the Admiralty and the American navy to proceed.

  Thomson realized his idol Faraday was being manipulated, but what could he do? He was convinced he was right, but recognized that all he had was still only a theory. The cable project had too much momentum, and he was now ignored. Whitehouse blocked his letters to Field. When Thomson proposed an improved transmitter for the cable, Whitehouse ridiculed it and refused any company funds to build it.

  On June 10, 1858, the British battleship Agamemnon and the U.S. Navy’s Niagara sailed from Plymouth in England, ready to lay the cable. (There had been an earlier try in 1857, but the cable had snapped in water too deep to dredge it up.) Taking into account the insulation and the metal sheath, the cable weighed so much—almost a ton per mile—that no single ship could hold enough. So the two vessels headed to a central rendezvous, where they would splice together the two halves and then sail in opposite directions—one to Ireland, one to Newfoundland—playing the cable out between them.