Field was on board the Agamemnon, and so was a tough chief engineer, Charles Bright, but when it came time to sail, Whitehouse didn’t show up. The British navy had lost many big ships in Atlantic storms over the years, and Whitehouse knew that it never hurt to be too careful. He also wanted to avoid William Thomson, who had talked his way on board.
Thomson knew that Field didn’t believe his untested deductions, but he wanted the chance to show that his and Faraday’s ideas really were true. Also, he liked Cyrus Field and was going to help him succeed, whether he wanted it or not. Whitehouse had happily bullied Thomson in their correspondence, but he knew of Thomson’s intellectual reputation and was not about to dare having a technical argument with him in front of Field.
Anyone who joked about Whitehouse’s unnecessary caution would have changed his view when the storm of late June 1858 broke. It was one of the worst recorded in the North Atlantic in the nineteenth century. The Agamemnon’s captain, George Preedy, seems not to have worried too much when his ship tilted sideways so far that its masts dragged in the bursting waves, but when its coal supplies started flying up through the splintering deck, and then the tons of cable started following them, he did confide to a London Times correspondent on board that it was not, perhaps, ideal weather for laying a telegraph line.
The battered ships met in mid-ocean, but there were more storms, and repeated snapping of the cable, not to mention the attacks by a whale, and a layover in Ireland while the cable was repaired and fresh coal was taken aboard. Nevertheless, Captain Preedy was damned if he was going to pull his ship out if the Yanks on Niagara were going ahead, and the U.S. captain of course reciprocated his views, which their respective seamen had no doubt emphasized to one another when they’d met for polite, articulate discussion at various waterfront pubs during the Irish break. And then, late in July 1858, the weather cleared, and for more than a week the Atlantic was as calm as an inland pond, the Niagara’s cable was pulled ashore in Newfoundland, and the Agamemnon’s dragged up to Valentia Bay, in Ireland.
As the news of the August 5 landing came out, the newspapers went wild. This was harmony within the dominant Anglo-Saxon breed, this was technology conquering the planet, and suitable celebrations were in order. In Britain, church bells were decorously rung, knighthoods were granted (including one to chief engineer Charles Bright, only twenty-six years old), and a formal congratulation from the Queen was printed in The Times. In America there were cannon barrages, preachers taking credit for the achievement, and torchlit parades (hence the unfortunate incident in which a lit torch met the highly combustible cupola atop New York’s City Hall).
Field was a hero, and Whitehouse—who quickly took up position in the telegraph hut in Ireland, kicking out Thomson, who’d started connecting the wires before he arrived—was now going to be his prophet. For there were dozens of messages stacked up waiting to be telegraphed, and although the first few had been transmitted with no difficulty by Thomson, Whitehouse was determined to get credit for the rest.
He soon came to the greatest one—the formal congratulation from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan. The Newfoundland telegraph transcribers were ready; special correspondents from U.S. newspapers were standing by as well.
But something was wrong. The first telegrams had been transmitted without flaw, but now it seemed as if something inside the cable was changing. The Queen’s telegram was only ninety-nine words, and a skilled operator could have tapped it out in a few minutes. Yet hours passed, there were hushed reports of members of Field’s staff hurrying grimly in and out of the telegraph huts, and only well into the next day, after sixteen and a half exhausting hours of transmission, did the full text make it through.
The telegraphers’ efforts went downhill from there. It took more than thirty hours of struggle with sending and resending to transmit Buchanan’s equally brief telegram back to the Queen. Surviving documents show that the cable was increasingly taken up with messages of “Send more slowly,” or “Repeat,” or, most plaintive of all, long repeats of “What???” Newspapers became suspicious, the grand complimentary speeches turned to sarcasm, and soon Field’s representatives no longer let themselves be seen in public.
And the cause of it all, increasingly frantic inside the Ireland transmission hut, was Edward O. Whitehouse. He was truly out of his element now, for everything Thomson had talked about was now coming true. Whitehouse’s operators tapped in sharp signals, but they got blurry and spread out, becoming impossible to recognize by the time they’d crossed the Atlantic.
Whitehouse did what any bully might do when he’s been caught in a bluff. He panicked. He had installed big backup generators at great expense in the Ireland hut—devices five feet high, like giant batteries, that could blast into the cable great amounts—well, of what? Whitehouse thought what came out of a battery was merely like the sparks from a welder’s torch, only smaller; in later terminology, that a battery’s job was just to launch fleets of powerful charged electrons into the wire, which then tumbled forward all the rest of the way on their own. Thomson didn’t believe that. In his view, what shot out from a battery was a wild, powerful force field. Feeding more battery power into the undersea cable simply meant you were feeding in more of this howling field. That’s why it was imperative, he’d explained, never to use the big batteries.
Whitehouse ignored him. He was a tough, practical man, who had made his own way up in English society. Strength had brought him this far, and strength would get him the rest of the way. There was nothing mysterious now, either. The signal wasn’t getting through, so, he felt, he just needed to force in more of the tiny particles that were pouring out from the metals of his battery. In the time-honored English tradition of speaking louder to a foreigner—in the hope he’ll understand you better if you shout—he told his underlings, now in these last weeks of August 1858, to hook up the five-foot coils and let them rip.
It was an astoundingly bad choice. Many people have noticed the peculiar warning on televisions and computers: BE CAUTIOUS IN OPENING DEVICE EVEN WHEN UNPLUGGED. Why should it matter, once the plug is out? The reason is that inside a TV or computer, electric charges can build up on various metal surfaces. When the sweaty probing finger of an amateur repairperson pokes around and happens to place itself between two such surfaces, the electric charges on either side of the finger—waiting on those previously separated metal surfaces—suddenly have an easy path to travel across.
The inside of a small laptop would likely give you only a slight shock. But with the powerful batteries Whitehouse had hooked up, the inside of the Atlantic cable was now suffering contortions that made it much, much worse. He was pouring in a force field hundreds of times more powerful than Thomson had ever imagined deploying. Some of the force field reached into the central copper wire and pressed against the electric charges there, but much of it easily twisted sideways through the thin, rubbery insulation, and ended up using its energy to stir up electric currents in the cold iron outer casing. But remember how the filament in Edison’s lightbulb would heat up when a lot of electric charge was pushing through it, bumping and skidding against the main body of the metal atoms in the filament. The same thing happened here under the Atlantic. The central copper wire heated up, and the outer iron casing heated up, and the rubber in between was caught.
Each time Whitehouse commanded his operators to send yet another telegram, they had to make hundreds of Morse code keystrokes. This meant they were sending hundreds of surges of the invisible force field down the cable. The copper core and the iron sheath quickly got hot as this leaping field made strong currents start up in both of them. Eventually the rubbery insulation, sandwiched in between, didn’t just get a little bit warmer. It began to melt. At each point where that happened, the charged particles inside the cable no longer had to travel the full, two-thousand-mile path forward. They could take a shortcut instead, simply traveling the now-unshielded single inch sideways from copper to iron. It was literally a “shorter�
�� circuit—whence the common expression “short circuit.”
The more Whitehouse tried to fix things—the more frantically he revved up his huge batteries—the worse the cable got. After a few days Whitehouse junked his own equipment, and—surreptitiously, swearing his operatives to secrecy—went back to Thomson’s original, far more gentle transmitters and receivers. But the damage had already been done. Too few of the crackling electrical particles were able to travel undiverted through the long central copper wire; more and more took the nice convenient short circuits sideways to the iron insulation so nearby. Once there, they would fizzle off into the ocean, heating up the sea water slightly and never getting anywhere near the receiving station, thousands of miles away.
By September only fragments of words were getting across, and by October 20 so much insulation had melted that no signal at all could get through. The cable went dead and was never used again. Whitehouse was fired, and Thomson took over. The desperate directors of Field’s company agreed to do whatever Thomson said. Did Thomson have any suggestions for them?
He certainly did. A new cable would have to be laid, he explained, with much thicker rubber insulation, to try to keep the jumping field from getting across. Once it was connected, only very gentle battery pressure could be applied. Thomson didn’t know exactly what was inside the copper core—this was still decades before electrons were discovered—but he did know that whatever carried the electric current in there was almost ineffably light in weight, so much so that the finest jeweler’s balance scales couldn’t detect it. That slight weight was all that he needed the force field from the battery to move. He was going to give Cyrus Field a whispering genie, not a bellowing one.
Cyrus Field still seems to have had some doubts about the theory, but he recognized he had no alternative. If he gave up, the project was over. Nor could he repeat the brute-force approach with which Whitehouse had failed. He’d have to gamble that Faraday and Thomson were right, and that invisible force fields that could move electric charges really did exist. It would, finally, be a detailed test of Faraday’s extraordinary predictions.
There were more struggles and more delays, and in 1865 an improved cable snapped, heartbreakingly, two-thirds of the way across the ocean, in water so deep that it was impossible to dredge it up and fix it. But in 1866 yet another cable was laid, from the world’s largest ship, the Great Eastern, and this one made it. From the time it was pulled up on shore, the new cable clicked along just fine, almost nonstop, for year after profitable year thereafter. Faraday was very old now, and very ill, but it seems that the news was delivered to him, possibly by young Thomson himself.
Thomson was proud, and Cyrus Field was rich. We know now that electrons aren’t constantly geysering out of the sockets in your house. There’s just a force field waiting at the sockets, led all the way to your house from a distant power station. When you plug something into a wall socket and turn it on, that guided field flies into your home, takes up position inside any computer or lightbulb, and simply yanks on the electrons that have already been waiting there. When you pull a plug out of the wall, the force field can no longer get in.
This, finally, answers the conundrum about why electrons don’t pile up in the phone of someone you’re speaking to. It’s because your speaking has never been pouring them into the listener’s phone in the first place! When you phone someone, all you’re doing is sending along an invisible force field, which shakes the electrons that are already waiting in your listener’s phone. The individual electrons barely travel—in fact, they drift along so slowly, barely at walking speed, that it would take over a month for a single electron to stumble all the way along a wire from New York to Los Angeles. But the weightless force field that makes the electrons jostle streaks that distance in a fraction of a second, making our seemingly instantaneous phone conversations possible.
Cyrus Field was always polite to Thomson after the success of the Atlantic cable, but seems to have steered clear of discussing invisible fields. It was still too bizarre for a businessman brought up in the era of clanking steam-engine technology to believe. Thomson, however, was convinced that electricity would be a big industry someday and would need convenient labels so that people could know how much of the pushing force that came from the invisible field they were purchasing. He probably would have wished to name that pushing force after his idol Faraday, but French officials dominated scientific naming throughout the nineteenth century, and although they had nothing against the esteemed Mr. Faraday, he did suffer the great misfortune of not being French, and also—it was almost embarrassing to have to bring up something so hurtful—he hadn’t been fluent enough to publish his original findings in their language either.
Memoranda were exchanged, there were snide letters and backroom politicking, and finally, at a conference in Paris—with a most unhappy William Thomson in attendance—the official word for the strength usable from the invisible field was decreed. When Napoleon had invaded Italy decades before, many Italian patriots had been appalled, but Alessandro Volta—he of the two metal discs in his mouth, and the first steady battery—had understood that there was a difference between purity of convictions and worldly advancement. He’d embraced the French invasion, he’d commented with flowery elegance on the graciousness of Napoleon the wise liberator, and that—combined with judicious publications in French—meant he was the one the French favored now. Although Volta had never had a clue to why his battery worked, the intensity of the pushing force that flies into our homes is measured in “volts,” not “faradays.” When you buy a computer that says it’s to be operated at 110 volts, that means it’s designed to work when a force field rushes in that has been configured to provide 110 units of that pushing force.
At that point it might seem the story of electricity is over. There are ancient charged electrons hidden inside all matter, and there are force fields that can separate out those charged electrons and make them move. But if that were all, today we would still be living in a world of grand Victorian technology; there would be elaborate lightbulbs and telegraphs, and possibly even electrically powered horseless carriages, but that would be it. There would never have been radios or televisions or cell phones; no satellites beaming down GPS signals; no WiFi or Bluetooth or any other wireless technology. Yet even in Thomson’s mid-Victorian times, there was a hint that a further aspect of electricity existed.
While the great Atlantic cable-laying was first under way, another friend of Thomson’s, James Clerk Maxwell, had begun to look more closely into the fields that Thomson was trying to control. (He was the young scientist to whom Faraday had written, asking for help, in 1857.) He realized the fields had a complex inner structure, and were actually made of two parts—an electric part and a magnetic part.
His vision was extraordinary.
Every electrically charged particle in the universe forms the center of a huge force field, he wrote. This “electric” field stretches outward like a streaming aura. We all carry these vast auras with us as we move: they travel in perfect pace with us. Normally the positive and negative charges around us balance so that we don’t see any effect. But if you scuff your feet on a rug and pick up an excess of negative electric charge from the electrons on the carpet, then the field emanating from you is denser, more intense. Lift your finger, and this slightly stronger field spreads outward, like the light from the Statue of Liberty’s lamp. We can easily get static shocks—but there’s also something more.
Whenever you shake that charged-up finger, the effect is like shaking a big bowl of Jell-O, or jostling your hand in a pond of water. The streaming field that stretches from you begins to wobble.
Now for the magical bit. If you take your jostling hand away from a real pond, then pretty soon the water’s ripples die away. The wave you’ve created will stop. But Maxwell realized that there was also a magnetic part to Faraday’s invisible force fields. As the electric part started rippling, it would power up this second, invisible magnetic
part. (Why? Because changing electric fields produce magnetic fields—it’s what Joseph Henry had realized with his electromagnets: switching on the electric current made the magnetic force appear.) But what then happened as the magnetic part of the invisible field became stronger? Well, changes in magnetic fields will make a fresh electric field pop into existence. That was what Faraday himself had shown in the great basement experiment in 1831.
What it all means is that just by jostling an electric charge, you will make an electric field begin to sway, and when those first ripples die down, they will make a fresh magnetic field appear. As that magnetic part dies down in turn, the change in its intensity makes a fresh electric field appear. When that weakens there’s another magnetic field, and…
It never ends. You have to pour in some energy at the start to get the initial electric charge to shake, but once you’ve done that, once you’ve made the first of these mutually connected fields start to wobble, you can walk away. Decades and millennia might pass, our earthly existence might be totally forgotten, but the forward-stretching ripples you started in this combined “electric-plus-magnetic” force field will keep on traveling. It is immortal. The ripples are the magic carpets flying through the heavens; they “weave a web across the sky.” Thomson had missed it, because he’d been confusing all this; he hadn’t been able to see clearly the two separate parts and how they could create each other, phoenixlike, forever. But Maxwell had finally shown why Faraday’s vision in his basement laboratory had been true.
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