Now, the London charge for the above, if forwarded to Liverpool, would be 2s. 6d.; but the American tariff for the same, on the Louisville and Pittsburgh rail, would be only one cent a word, or sixpence halfpenny English. On very long distances our friends on the other side of the steam ferry have a still greater advantage over us: for instance, a message of ten words can be sent on O’Reilly’s line, from New York to New Orleans, a distance of 2,000 miles, for sixty cents, or two and sixpence—not half the sum it would cost to send the same message from London to Edinburgh, about 500 miles. We give, as a curiosity, the scale of prices on this line:[40]—
| Per word. | ||||||||
| 200 | miles | or | under | 1 | cent. | |||
| 500 | " | or | over | 300 | miles | 2 | cents. | |
| 700 | " | " | 500 | " | 3 | " | ||
| 1000 | " | " | 700 | " | 4 | " | ||
| 1500 | " | " | 1000 | " | 5 | " | ||
| 2000 | " | " | 1500 | " | 6 | " | ||
These charges, it is true, are unusually low; but if they will pay one Company, why should they not another? There are as many as twenty Telegraph Companies in America, and consequently there is great competition, three or four competing lines in many cases running between the same towns. Great confusion has arisen from this competition, as we have before stated; but it cannot be doubted that prices have materially fallen in consequence. It is common to send a message 1,000 miles in the United States without its being read and repeated at intermediate stations; and brother Jonathan boasts that he can communicate in fine weather instantaneously between New York and New Orleans. This, if done at all, must be at the expense of enormous battery power, as 2,000 miles of No. 8 wire would expose a conducting surface of no less than 450,000 square feet to the air. The wires in America are all suspended upon poles, and those passing through the southern pine forests are in consequence particularly liable to injury from the falling of trees, and watchers are posted at every twenty miles’ distance to patrol the line. The telegraph is rarely seen in America running beside the railway, for what reason we do not know; the consequence, however, is, that locomotion in the United States is vastly more dangerous than with us. A comparison of the casualties occurring on railroads in the two countries, in the year 1852, will show this at a glance; for in the State of New York alone, during that year, 228 persons were killed out of 7,440,053 travellers, whilst during the same period only 216 people perished in Great Britain out of a total number of 89,135,729 passengers: thus the average in America was 1 killed in 286,179, and in Great Britain 1 in 2,785,491! Of course property suffers in an equal degree with life on the American lines. The people of Boston, on the recommendation of Dr. Channing, have constructed a municipal telegraph, the many uses of which will be obvious. Mr. Alexander Jones, in his historical sketch of the electric telegraph in America, gives the following account of the application of the electric wire in cases of fire:—
“A central office or station is fixed upon, at which the main battery, with other instruments, is placed. From this two circuit-wires proceed, like those of the common telegraph wires, fastened to housetops or ingeniously insulated supports. One of the wires communicates from the main fire bell-tower to all the others, and connects each with machinery, which puts in motion the largest-sized hammer, and causes it to strike a large fire-bell the desired number of blows; the other wire proceeds on a still more circuitous route, and from one local street or ward signal-station to another. Each station is provided with a strong box and hinged door and lock. Inside of this box there is a connecting electro-magnet and connecting lever, an axle with a number of pins in it to correspond to the number of the station. The axle is turned by a short crank, and in its revolutions the pins break and close the circuit, by moving the end of the lever as often as there are pins or cogs, the result of which is communicated to the central station. If the alarm indicates a fire in the local district No. 3, the alarm can be instantly rung on all the bells in the city. If it is a subject requiring the speedy and efficient attention of the police, information by alarms can be given at each police-station, or the despatches can be recorded by instruments at each place. The local street alarm-boxes are placed in the charge of a person whose duty it is to give the alarm from the local to the central station, when called upon, or circumstances require him to do so.”
Canada has also sketched out a plan of telegraphs, which every year will see filled up. Already she has lines connecting all her principal towns, and extending over nearly two thousand miles of country, all of which lock in with the American system.
In India, Dr. O’Shaughnessy has for some time been engaged in carrying out a telegraphic system proposed by Lord Dalhousie, and approved by the East India Company, which has already put all the important towns of the peninsula in communication with the seat of government and with each other. The fine No. 8 galvanized iron wire, which in Europe runs along from pole to pole, like a delicate harp-string, is discarded in this country for rods of iron three-eighths of an inch in thickness. The nature of the climate, and the character of its animal life, has caused this departure from the far more economical European plan. Clouds of kites and troops of monkeys would speedily take such liberties with the fine wires as to place them hors-de-combat. Again, the deluges of rain which occur in the wet season would render the insulation of a small wire so imperfect that a message could not be sent through it to any distance. The larger mass of metal, on the contrary, is capable of affording passage for the electric fluid through any amount of rain, without danger of “leakage;” and as for the kites and other large birds of the country, they may perch on these rods by thousands without stopping the messages, which will fly harmlessly through their claws; and the weight of the heaviest monkey is not sufficient to injure them. These rods are planted, without any insulation, upon the tops of bamboo poles (coated with tar and pitch), at such a height that loaded elephants can pass beneath without displacing them; and even if by chance they should be thrown down, bullock-carts or buffaloes and elephants may trample them under foot without doing them injury. In some places the rods, if we are rightly informed, run through rice-swamps, buried in the ground, and even here the only insulating material used is a kind of cement made of rosin and sand. The telegraph, like a swift messenger, goes forward and prepares the way for the railroad, which is planned to follow in its footsteps. When these two systems are completed, the real consolidation of England’s power in the East will have commenced, and the countless resources of the Indian peninsula will be called forth for the benefit of the conquered as well as of the conquering race.
The restless spirit of English engineers, having provided for the internal telegraphic communication of Great Britain and her principal dependencies, seems bent upon stretching out her lines to the East and to the West, so as ultimately to clasp the entire globe. The project of connecting, telegraphically, England with America is at the present moment seriously engaging the attention of scientific and commercial men. The more daring engineers are still sanguine of the practicability of laying a submarine cable directly across the Atlantic, from Galway to Cape Race in Newfoundland. Now that we have Lieutenant Maury’s authentic determination of the existence of a shelf across the North Atlantic, the soundings on which are nowhere more than 1,500 fathoms, the feasibility of the project is tolerably certain. The principal question is, whether if a line were laid an electric current can be worked to commercial advantage through 3,000 miles of cable. No doubt, by the expenditure of enormous battery power, this might be accomplished through wires suspended in the air, but it is a question whether it can be done along a vast length of gutta-percha coated wire, passing through salt-water. There is such a thing as too great an insulation. Professor Faraday has shown that in such circumstances the wire becomes a Leyden jar, and may be so charged with electricity that a current cannot, without the greatest difficulty, move through it. This is the objection to a direct cable between the two continents: if, however, it can be overcome, doubtless the ocean path would in all possible cases be adopted where communications had to be made between civilized countries having intermediate, barbarous, or ungenial lands. To escape this at present dubious ocean path, it is proposed to carry the cable from the northernmost point of the Highlands of Scotland to Iceland, by way of the Orkney, Shetland, and Ferroe islands—to lay it from Iceland across to the nearest point in Greenland, thence down the coast to Cape Farewell, where the cable would again take to the water, span Davis’s Straits, and make right away across Labrador and Upper Canada to Quebec. Here it would lock in with the North American meshwork of wires, which hold themselves out like an open hand for the European grasp. This plan seems quite feasible, for in no part of the journey would the cable require to be more than 900 miles long; and as it seems pretty certain that a sandbank ex-tends, with good soundings, all the way to Cape Farewell, there would be little difficulty in mooring the cable to a level and soft bottom. The only obstacle that we see is the strong partiality of the Esquimaux for old iron, and it would perhaps be tempting them too much to hang their coasts with this material, just ready to their hands. The want of settlements along this inhospitable arctic coast to protect the wire is, we confess, a great drawback to the scheme; but, we fancy, posts might be organized at comparatively a small cost, considering the magnitude and importance of the undertaking. The mere expense of making and laying the cable would not be much more than double that of building the new Westminster-bridge across the Thames.
Whilst England would thus grasp the West with one hand, her active children have plotted the seizure of the East with the other. A cable runs from Genoa to Corsica, and from thence to Sardinia. From the southernmost point of the latter island, Cape Spartivento, to the gulf of Tunis, another cable can easily be carried. The direction thence (after giving off a coast branch to Algeria) will be along the African shore, by Tripoli to Alexandria, and eventually across Arabia, along the coasts of Persia and Beloochistan until it enters Scinde, and finally joins the wire at Hydrabad, which in all probability by that time will have advanced from Burmah, across the Indian peninsula, to welcome it. America will shortly carry her line of telegraph to the Pacific shore, and run it up the coast as far as San Francisco. Can there be any reasonable doubt that, before the end of the century, the one line advancing towards the West and the other towards the East—through China and Siberia—will gradually approach each other so closely that a short cable stretched across Behring Straits will bring the four quarters of the globe within speaking distance of each other, and enable the electric fire to “put a girdle round the world in forty minutes?”