The Victorian Internet (7 page)

Another story concerned a woman in Karlsruhe, Prussia, who went to a telegraph office in 1870 with a dish full of sauerkraut,
which she asked to have telegraphed to her son, who was a soldier fighting in the war between Prussia and France. The operator
had great difficulty convincing her that the telegraph was not capable of transmitting objects. Rut the woman insisted that
she had heard of soldiers being ordered to the front by telegraph. "How could so many soldiers have been sent to France by
telegraph?" she asked.

As one magazine article of the time pointed out, much confusion resulted from the new electric jargon, which imposed new meanings
on existing words. "Thus, when it is said that a current of electricity flows along a wire, that the wire or the current carries
a message, the speaker takes language universally understood, relating to a fluid moving from one place to another, and a
parcel or a letter transported from place to place." One young girl asked her mother how the messages "get past the poles
without being torn." The mother is said to have replied, "They are sent in a fluid state, my dear."

And there was a widespread belief that it was possible to hear the messages as they passed along the wires. According to a
book,
Anecdotes of the Telegraph,
published in 1848, "a very general but erroneous idea, even among the better order of folks, is that the humming aeolian harp-like
effect of the wind on the suspended wire is caused by the messages passing." A typical story concerned a telegraph operator
who worked in a station in the Catskill Mountains, where the wind often whistled through the wires. One day a local man asked
how business was doing. "Lively," said the operator. "Well, I didn't think so," said the man, "I ain't heard a dispatch go
up in three or four days."

The retranscription of the message at the receiving station also confused some people. One woman preparing to send a telegram
is said to have remarked as she filled out the telegraph form, "I must write this out afresh, as I don't want Mrs. M. to receive
this untidy telegram." Another woman, on receiving a telegram from her son asking for money, said she was not so easily taken
in; she knew her son's handwriting very well, she said, and the message, transcribed at the receiving office, obviously hadn't
come from him.

a
S TELEGRAPH NETWORKS sprung up in different countries, the benefits of joining them soon became apparent. The first interconnection
treaty was signed on October 3, 1849, between Prussia and Austria, so that messages could be sent from Vienna to Berlin. It
was an inefficient system; rather than running a wire across the border, a special joint telegraph office was constructed,
staffed by representatives of each country's telegraph company, who were connected to their respective national networks.
When a message needed to be passed from one country to another, it was transcribed by the clerks at one end of the office,
who then physically handed it over to their opposite numbers at the other end of the office for retransmission.

Similar agreements were soon in place between Prussia and Saxony, and Austria and Bavaria. In 1850, the four states established
the Austro-German Telegraph Union to regulate tarriffs and set common rules for interconnection. The following year, the Morse
telegraph system was adopted as a standard to allow direct connections to be established between the four networks. Soon interconnection
agreements had also been signed between France, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and Sardinia. But if Britain was to be connected
to the growing European network, a significant barrier would have to be overcome: the English Channel.

Actually, experiments with sending messages along underwater telegraph cables had been going on almost since the earliest
days of electric telegraphy. Wheatstone had tried it out in Wales, sending messages from a boat to a lighthouse, and in 1840
he proposed the establishment of a cross-Channel telegraph. But at that time the telegraph had yet to prove itself over short
distances on land, let alone across water.

Morse, too, had a go at underwater telegraphy. In 1843, after coating a wire in rubber and encasing it in a lead pipe, he
sent messages along a submerged cable between Castle Garden and Governors Island in New York Harbor. He also succeeded in
using water itself as the conductor, with metal plates dipped in the water on each bank of a river and connected to the telegraph
wires. (Wheat­stone did some similar experiments across the river Thames in the presence of Prince Albert the same year.)
At any rate, Morse was sufficiently pleased with the results across a few feet of water that, in typical indefatigable Morse
fashion, he predicted that it wouldn't be long before there would be telegraph wires across the Atlantic.

For advocates of cross-Channel telegraphy, however, there were practical problems to be overcome. Laying a rubber-coated wire
inside a lead pipe was possible in New York Harbor; laying a pipe along the seabed across the English Channel was another
matter entirely. And if the cable was to last any length of time, an alternative to coating it in rubber would have to be
found, since rubber quickly deteriorated in water.

The solution was to use gutta-percha, a kind of rubbery gum obtained from the gutta-percha tree, which grows in the jungles
of Southeast Asia. One useful property of gutta-percha is that it is hard at room temperature but softens when immersed in
hot water and can be molded into any shape. The Victorians used it much as we use plastic today. Dolls, chess pieces, and
ear trumpets were all made of gutta-percha. And although it was expensive, it turned out to be ideal for insulating cables.

Once the question of what to use for insulation had been resolved, John Brett, a retired antique dealer, and his younger brother
Jacob, an engineer, decided to embark upon building a telegraph link between England and France. They got the appropriate
permission from the British and French governments and ordered a wire coated with a quarter of an inch of gutta-percha from
the Gutta Percha Company in London. Their plan was breathtakingly low-tech: They intended to spool the wire (which was about
the thickness of the power cable of a modern domestic appliance) out of the stern of a boat as it steamed across the Channel.
They would then connect telegraph instruments at each end, and their company, the grandly named General Oceanic and Subterranean
Electric Printing Telegraph Company, would be in business. On August 28, 1850, with their cable wound onto a vast drum and
mounted on the back of a small steam tug, the
Goliath,
they set out for France.

Things did not go according to plan. For starters, the wire was so thin that it wouldn't sink; it simply floated pathetically
in the water behind the boat. The Bretts' response was to clamp weights around the wire at regular intervals to get it to
sink. By the evening, they had arrived at Cap Gris-Nez near Calais in France, where they wired up their newfangled telegraph
instrument—the very latest automatic printing model—and waited for the first test message to be sent from England. It came
out as gibberish.

The cable was working, but the messages were being garbled because the surrounding water changed the cable's electrical properties
in a way that was poorly understood at the time. Effectively, it meant that the staccato pulses of electricity were smoothed
out, and the Bretts' high-speed automatic machines transmitted so fast that succeeding pulses overlapped and became indistinct.
But, using an old-fashioned single-needle telegraph, they were eventually able to send a few messages manually, in much the
same way that a preacher in a resonant cathedral must speak slowly and distinctly in order to be understood. However, the
next day the cable met a watery end; a French fisherman snagged it in his net, and when he brought it to the surface he hacked
off a piece to see what it was. Deciding that it was a hitherto unknown form of seaweed with a gold center, he took it to
show his friends in Boulogne.

It took the Bretts over a year to raise the money for another cable, and they would probably have had to give up altogether
but for the intervention of Thomas Crampton, a railway engineer. He put up half the £15,000 needed, and also designed the
new cable. He wanted to protect his investment, so the new cable consisted of four gutta-percha-covered wires twisted together
and wrapped in tar-covered hemp, and then encased in a cladding of tar-covered iron cords. It was far tougher than the first
cable, and it weighed thirty times as much. This meant it was harder to lay—not because it wouldn't sink, like the first cable,
but because it was so heavy it ran off the drum on the back of the boat faster than the Bretts wanted it to. It was so hard
to control, in fact, that all the cable had been paid out before the boat carrying it reached France. Fortunately, the Bretts
had brought along a spare piece of cable, which they spliced on, and in November 1851, after a few weeks of testing, the cable
was opened to the public. The first direct message from London to Paris was sent in 1852.

The success of the Channel cable led to a boom in submarine telegraphy—to the delight of the directors of the Gutta Percha
Company. With a virtual monopoly on the supply of gutta-percha, they suddenly found they were sitting on a gold mine. The
problem of laying a telegraph link across a stretch of water seemed to have been cracked: It was simply a matter of making
sure that the cable was properly insulated, strong enough not to break, and heavy enough to sink, and that messages weren't
sent too quickly along it. Before long Dover had been linked to Ostend, and after two failed attempts England was linked to
Ireland in 1853. Further underwater links across the North Sea directly connected Britain with the coasts of Germany, Russia,
and Holland. John Rrett soon turned his attention to linking Europe with Africa and succeeded in connecting Corsica and Sardinia
to Genoa on the European mainland in 1854. But the following year, he failed in his attempt to reach the North African coast,
which involved laying a cable across the deepest and most mountainous part of the Mediterranean seabed. Brett lost a lot of
money, and his failure proved that there were limits to submarine telegraphy after all. The prospect of linking Europe and
North America seemed as far away as ever.

5.

WIRING THE WORLD

The Atlantic Telegraph—that instantaneous highway of thought between the Old and New "Worlds.

—SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,
1858

T
HE IDEA OF a transatlantic telegraph had been mooted by Morse and others since the 1840s, but, much as we regard time machines
or interstellar travel today, in the 1850s it was generally regarded as something that was very unlikely ever to come to pass-though
it would certainly have its uses if it did.

The difficulties facing a transatlantic telegraph were obvious. "Fancy a shark or a swordfish transfixing his fins upon the
insulated wires, in the middle, perhaps, of the Atlantic, interrupting the magic communication for months," wrote one skeptic.
"What is to be done against the tides, when they deposit their floating debris of wrecks and human bodies? Even supposing
you could place your wires at the lowest depth ever reached by plumb line, would your wires, even then, be secure?"

Nobody who knew anything about telegraphy would be foolish enough to risk building a transatlantic telegraph; besides, it
would cost a fortune. So it's hardly surprising that Cyrus W. Field, the man who eventually tried to do it, was both ignorant
of telegraphy and extremely wealthy. He was a self-made man from New England who amassed his fortune in the paper trade and
retired at the age of thirty-three. After spending a few months traveling, he happened to meet an English engineer, Frederic
N. Gisborne, who introduced him to the business of telegraphy.

Gisborne was looking for a backer after his failed attempt in 1853 to build a telegraph cable across Newfoundland, with a
link to the mainland across the Gulf of St. Lawrence. His plan had been sound enough: Since building a cable all the way across
the Atlantic seemed both technically and financially out of the question, building a link from New York to St. John's, on
the eastern tip of Newfoundland, was the next best thing. Steamers could stop at St. John's on their way westward, and messages
could then be forwarded by telegraph to New York, reducing the time taken for messages to arrive from Europe by several days.

The trouble was, Gisborne's plan involved stringing a cable across some of the coldest, most inhospitable terrain on earth.
And even with the use of four local guides—of which two ran away and one died—he was forced to abandon his first attempt after
only a few miles of cable had been laid. So when he visited Field in January 1854, Gis­borne hoped to convince him that telegraphy
was a worthwhile business to invest in. Evidently he did a very good job because, according to Field's brother Henry, as soon
as the meeting with Gisborne was over, Field "went to the globe in his library and began to turn it over." He soon set his
heart on a much grander scheme—building a cable right across the Atlantic. Newfoundland would be merely one of the stops along
the way.

Confident that he would be able to handle the business side of things, Field wanted to make sure that there were no technical
barriers standing in his way. He wrote to Morse to inquire about the feasibility of a cable from Newfoundland to Europe. At
the same time, he wrote to Matthew Fontaine Maury, the leading hydrographer in the United States. Maury had compiled readings
from the logs of hundreds of ships into the most accurate charts of the Atlantic in existence, so he was the logical person
to suggest the route for the cable. Oddly enough, his charts had revealed the presence of a large raised plateau on the seabed
between Newfoundland and Ireland, which Maury had already realized would be ideal for "holding the wires of a submarine telegraph
and keeping them out of harm's way." Morse, who wanted to see his prediction of an Atlantic telegraph fulfilled, also gave
his backing to the scheme, and before long Field had resurrected Gisborne's old company and set about the construction of
the line across Newfoundland.

After two and a half years of hard work, the New York St. John's link was complete. By this time, Field had established the
New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company, and his next step was to go to London and drum up support for the cable
on the other side of the Atlantic. There he met John Brett, who was eager to get involved; Morse was also in London at the
time, conducting an important experiment. After connecting ten telegraph lines, each of which ran the 200 miles from London
to Manchester, Morse was able to send signals sucessfully around the whole circuit. This suggested that telegraphy would indeed
be possible over a 2,000-mile cable, and ensured that there were plenty of investors ready to support the new company Field
and Brett were establishing in London.

The Atlantic Telegraph Company was duly set up, and Field persuaded the British and United States governments to back his
project; in return for an annual subsidy and the provision of ships to help lay the cable, official messages would be carried
free of charge. Construction of the 2,500-mile cable began, following the precise specifications of the company's newly appointed
official electrician, Dr. Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse. Everything seemed to be going according to plan. There was only
one fly in the ointment: Whitehouse was totally incompetent.

T
HE FACT THAT THE JOB of designing the world's longest telegraph cable was given to an amateur like Whitehouse shows how little
the scientific understanding of telegraphy had advanced in the previous twenty years. Whitehouse had started out as a surgeon
and had taught himself everything he knew about telegraphy—which wasn't very much. In some fields, practical experience is
every bit as valuable as theoretical understanding, but Whitehouse had neither, even though he had spent years experimenting
with telegraphic equipment. Field, who knew nothing about technical matters, liked the fact that White-house didn't bother
with theory and instead trusted in his own experimental results. And since Field was running the show, the doctor got the
job. Whitehouse then managed to get nearly every aspect of the cable's design wrong.

In particular, his experiments led him to conclude that messages should be sent over the cable using high voltages generated
by huge induction coils and that the conducting wire should have a small rather than a large diameter. Whitehouse claimed
that "no adequate advantage would be gained by any considerable increase in the size of the wire." Unfortunately for the cable's
backers, he was mistaken on both counts. To make matters worse, Field had promised that the Atlantic telegraph would start
operating by the end of 1857, and he was in such a desperate hurry that the manufacture of the cable was rushed. As a result,
parts of it didn't even come up to the inadequate standards Whitehouse had laid down.

Even so, the cable was taken to sea in July 1857. It was half an inch thick and weighed a ton per mile. Since no ship afloat
could carry 2,500 tons of cable, half of it went aboard the steam frigate USS
Niagara,
the finest ship in the U.S. Navy? the other half was loaded onto the British vessel HMS
Agamemnon.
The ships, accompanied by two escorts, headed for Valentia Bay in the southwest of Ireland, which had been chosen as the best
place for the cable to come ashore. The plan was for the
Niagara
to spool out its half of the cable as the fleet headed west; in the mid Atlantic the
Agamemnon's
half would then be joined on for the remaining half of the journey. However, after a few days, when about 350 miles of the
cable had been laid, it snapped and fell into the sea.

It took Field several months to raise the money for an additional length of replacement cable and a second expedition. But
in June of the following year, the ships set out again, this time with a new plan: They would sail to the middle of the Atlantic,
join the two halves of the cable, and set out in opposite directions. This would, in theory, halve the time it would take
to lay the cable. After weathering a particularly unpleasant storm, the fleet assembled at the halfway point, spliced the
two halves of the cable, and set out in opposite directions. Twice the cable snapped, and twice they sailed back to the rendezvous
and started again. The
Agamemnon
also had a close encounter with a whale. When the cable broke for the third time, the ships went back to Ireland to take on
new provisions, before setting out once again. Eventually, on the fourth attempt, and having laid 2,050 miles of cable between
them, the
Agamemnon
reached Newfoundland and the
Niagara
reached Valentia Bay. The cable was landed on August 5, 1858. For the first time, the telegraph networks of Europe and North
America had been connected.

HMS
Agamemnon
encounters a whale during the laying of the first transatlantic cable, July 1858. Both whale and cable emerged unscathed.

T
HE CELEBRATIONS that followed bordered on hysteria. There were hundred-gun salutes in Boston and New York; flags flew from
public buildings; church bells rang. There were fireworks, parades, and special church services. Torch-bearing revelers in
New York got so carried away that City Hall was accidentally set on fire and narrowly escaped destruction.

"Our whole country," declared
Scientific American,
"has been electrified by the successful laying of the Atlantic Telegraph." The New York newspapers of August contained, according
to one writer, "hardly anything else than popular demonstrations in honor of the Atlantic Telegraph. It was indeed a national
jubilee."

Field was inundated with congratulations—"an avalanche of praise"—and his acknowledgments, in which he thanks everyone else
who helped make the cable possible, read like a very long Oscar acceptance speech. Queen Victoria exchanged appropriately
epic messages over the cable with President James Buchanan, who described it as "a triumph more glorious, because far more
useful to mankind, than was ever won by a conqueror on the held of battle." And a lot of extraordinarily bad poetry was written.

'Tis done! The angry sea consents,

the nations stand no more apart;

with clasped hands the continents,

feel the throbbings of each other's hearts.

Speed, speed the cable, let it run,

a loving girdle round the earth,

till all the nations neath the sun

shall be as brothers of one hearth.

Suitably telegraphic biblical references were unearthed by preachers, notably "Their line is gone out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world" (Psalms 19) and "Canst thou send lightnings that they may go, and say unto Thee,
here we are?" (Job 38).

Tiffany's, the New York jewelers, bought the remainder of the cable, cut it into four-inch pieces, and sold them as souvenirs.
Pieces of spare cable were also made into commemorative umbrella handles, canes, and watch fobs. "Nothing seemed too extravagant
to give expression to the popular rejoicing," Henry Field later wrote in a biography of his brother.

Books explaining the construction and working of the cable were rushed out to capitalize on the sudden interest in all things
telegraphic. "The completion of the Atlantic telegraph, the unapproachable triumph which has just been achieved, has been
the cause of the most exultant burst of popular enthusiasm that any event in modern times has ever elicited," wrote Charles
Briggs and Augustus Maverick in their hastily compiled tome,
The Story
of the Telegraph.
"The laying of the telegraph cable is regarded, and most justly, as the greatest event in the present century; now the great
work is complete, the whole earth will be belted with electric current, palpitating with human thoughts and emotions. It shows
that nothing is impossible to man."

In London, the
Times
compared the laying of the cable with the discovery of the New World: "Since the discovery of Columbus, nothing has been done
in any degree comparable to the vast enlargement which has thus been given to the sphere of human activity." Another widely
expressed sentiment, also articulated by the
Times,
was that the cable had reunited the British and American peoples: "The Atlantic is dried up, and we become in reality as well
as in wish one country. The Atlantic Telegraph has half undone the Declaration of 1776, and has gone far to make us once again,
in spite of ourselves, one people." A popular slogan suggested that the effect of the electric telegraph would be to "make
muskets into candlesticks." Indeed, the construction of a global telegraph network was widely expected, by Briggs and Maverick
among others, to result in world peace: "It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such
an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth."

The transatlantic cable was regarded as nothing short of miraculous; indeed, it was a miracle that it worked at all. The cable
was so unreliable that it was more than a week before the first message was sent successfully, and it took sixteen and a half
hours to send Queen Victoria's message to President Buchanan. The official opening of the cable to public traffic was delayed
again and again, and commercial messages started to pile up at both ends, while the true state of affairs was kept under wraps.
The reliability of the cable steadily deteriorated, and it eventually stopped working altogether on September 1, less than
a month after its completion.