[2] The law of squares was proposed by William Thomson (later to become Lord Kelvin) in 1854 at Glasgow University.
[5] While Thomson's description of a transmission line is not exactly incorrect, and it is perfectly adequate for the low frequencies involved in a Victorian telegraph cable, it is not the complete picture.
The result that most telegraph engineers expected was that the delay in the peak would be directly proportional to line length.
[9] Even as late as 1887, the author of a letter to The Electrician wished to "...protest against the growing tendency to drag mathematics into everything.
[13] Whitehouse had no advanced mathematical education (he was a doctor by training) and did not fully understand Thomson's work.
[15] Whitehouse believed that a thinner cable could be made to work with a high voltage induction coil.
The Atlantic Telegraph Company, in a hurry to push ahead with the project, went with Whitehouse's cheaper solution rather than Thomson's.
Retardation can cause adjacent telegraph pulses to overlap making them unreadable, an effect now called intersymbol interference.
[18] In attempting to overcome this problem with ever higher voltage, Whitehouse permanently damaged the cable insulation and made it unusable.
[19] Some commentators overinterpreted the law of squares and concluded that it implied that the "speed of electricity" depends on the length of the cable.
Heaviside, with typical sarcasm, in a piece in The Electrician countered this: Is it possible to conceive that the current, when it first sets out to go, say, to Edinburgh, knows where it's going, how long a journey it has to make, and where it has to stop, so that it can adjust its speed accordingly?