Transatlantic telegraph cable
It was laid from the ship SS Great Eastern, built by John Scott Russell and Isambard Kingdom Brunel and skippered by Sir James Anderson.
In the 1840s and 1850s several people proposed or advocated construction of a telegraph cable across the Atlantic, including Edward Thornton and Alonzo Jackman.
In 1856 a steamboat was fitted out for the purpose, and the link from Cape Ray, Newfoundland to Aspy Bay, Nova Scotia was successfully laid.
[12] Further reasons for the trip were that all the commercial manufacturers of submarine cable were in Britain,[8] and Field had failed to raise significant funds for the project in New York.
[14] After the remaining shares were sold, largely to existing investors in Brett's company,[15] an unpaid board of directors was formed, which included William Thomson (the future Lord Kelvin), a respected scientist.
[16] The cable consisted of 7 copper wires, each weighing 26 kg/km (107 pounds per nautical mile), covered with three coats of gutta-percha (as suggested by Jonathan Nash Hearder[17]), weighing 64 kg/km (261 pounds per nautical mile), and wound with tarred hemp, over which a sheath of 18 strands, each of 7 iron wires, was laid in a close helix.
[18] As no wire-rope maker had the capacity to make so much cable in such a short period, the task was shared by two English firms: Glass, Elliot & Co. of Greenwich and R.S.
[21] The problem was solved by splicing through an improvised wooden bracket to hold the wires in place,[22] but the mistake created negative publicity for the project.
Agamemnon arrived at Valentia Island on 5 August; the shore end was landed at Knightstown and laid to the nearby cable house.
[29][30][31]Next was the text of a congratulatory telegram from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan at his summer residence in the Bedford Springs Hotel in Pennsylvania, expressing hope that the cable would prove "an additional link between the nations whose friendship is founded on their common interest and reciprocal esteem".
May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of Heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world.
The two clashed even before the project began, when Whitehouse disputed Thomson's law of squares when the latter presented it to a British Association meeting in 1855.
[37] To test the theory, Bright gave Whitehouse overnight access to the Magnetic Telegraph Company's long underground lines.
Thomson believed that he could use the instrument with the low voltages from regular telegraph equipment even over the vast length of the Atlantic cable.
Samples showed that in places the conductor was badly off-centre and could easily break through the insulation due to mechanical strains during laying.
The Haymills site successfully manufactured 26,000 nautical miles (48,000 km) of wire (1,600 tons), made by 250 workers over eleven months.
[52] Her immense hull was fitted with three iron tanks for the reception of 2,300 nautical miles (4,300 km) of cable, and her decks furnished with the paying-out gear.
At noon on 15 July 1865, Great Eastern left the Nore for Foilhommerum Bay, Valentia Island, where the shore end was laid by Caroline.
This attempt failed on 2 August[53] when, after 1,062 nautical miles (1,967 km) had been payed out, the cable snapped near the stern of the ship, and the end was lost.
Great Eastern steamed back to England, where Field issued another prospectus and formed the Anglo-American Telegraph Company,[55] to lay a new cable and complete the broken one.
Despite problems with the weather on the evening of Friday, 27 July, the expedition reached the port of Heart's Content, Newfoundland in a thick fog.
Daniel Gooch, chief engineer of the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, who had been aboard the Great Eastern, sent a message to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Stanley, saying "Perfect communication established between England and America; God grant it will be a lasting source of benefit to our country.
"[56] The next morning at 9 a.m.[clarification needed] a message from England cited these words from the leader in The Times: "It is a great work, a glory to our age and nation, and the men who have achieved it deserve to be honoured among the benefactors of their race."
[citation needed] In August 1866, several ships, including Great Eastern, put to sea again in order to grapple the lost cable of 1865.
[57] They were determined to find it, and their search was based solely upon positions recorded "principally by Captain Moriarty, R. N.", who placed the end of the lost cable at longitude 38° 50' W.[58] There were some[who?]
However, Robert Halpin, first officer of Great Eastern, navigated HMS Terrible and grappling ship Albany to the correct location.
Oliver Heaviside and Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin in later decades understood that the bandwidth of a cable is hindered by an imbalance between capacitive and inductive reactance, which causes a severe dispersion and hence a signal distortion; see telegrapher's equations.
By the end of the 19th century, British-, French-, German-, and American-owned cables linked Europe and North America in a sophisticated web of telegraphic communications.
[citation needed] The original cables were not fitted with repeaters, which potentially could completely solve the retardation problem and consequently speed up operation.
A 2018 study in the American Economic Review found that the transatlantic telegraph substantially increased trade over the Atlantic and reduced prices.
