Makers of Electricity

by Brother Potamian; James J. Walsh

As early as 1850, Bishop Mullock, of St. John's, N. F., addressed to an American newspaper, called the Courier, a letter in which he advocated a telegraph line from Newfoundland to New York, so that the news of mail steamers could be intercepted and wired to that City. In 1852, the "Newfoundland Electric Telegraph Company" was formed for the purpose of carrying out a similar plan. This was to be accomplished by means of a telegraph line from Cape Race, at the eastern extremity of Newfoundland to Cape Ray, on the western, as well as by short cables over to Cape Breton Island, to Prince Edward Island and the mainland, and thence by ordinary telegraph lines to Canada and the United States. But owing to the want of money, nothing was done.

The first attempt at laying a cable under the Atlantic was made by the Atlantic Telegraph Company in 1857, after a careful survey of the ocean had revealed the existence of a submarine plain, or extended table-land, on which the cable could rest undisturbed by passing keels, monsters of the deep or angry billows. The result was the first of a series of failures, which caused great perplexity and depression at the time; for, after 330 miles had been paid out from Valentia on the Irish coast, the cable suddenly parted, burying in 2000 fathoms of water an electrical conductor which had cost $150,000 for its manufacture.

A second attempt was made in 1858, when the U. S. frigate Niagara and H. M. S. Agamemnon, each carrying half of the cable, met in mid-ocean; and, after splicing the two ends together, steamed away in opposite directions, the Niagara toward Newfoundland and the Agamemnon toward Valentia. Fortunately for the enterprise, Prof. Thomson was on board the English ship as chief electrician. No doubt, his mind turned many a time during those anxious days to Fourier's differential equation for the flow of heat along a conductor, and his own application of it to the conduction of the electric current through the copper core of the cable as it came up from the tanks, trailed out behind the ship, dipped silently into the blue water and slowly settled down to its bed of ooze on the ocean floor.

After a series of disheartening mishaps, necessitating as many returns of the ships to the rendezvous in mid-ocean, the Agamemnon landed the shore-end safely in Valentia; and the Niagara, after rolling and pitching for days and nights in tempestuous seas, landed hers in Trinity Bay on the morning of August 5th, 1858, on which historic date the telegraphic union of the two worlds was finally consummated and the great feat of the century accomplished.

Though not fully realized at the time by the capitalists who financed his scheme, by the engineers and electricians who carried it out, or even by statesmen, economists and social reformers, the slender copper cord, buried away from human ken amidst the débris of minute organisms, was destined to effect a revolution in the affairs of men greater than any achieved by the wisdom of sages or the policy of legislators.

Owing to the electrostatic capacity of the cable, signaling would have been difficult and unsatisfactory had it not been for the resourcefulness of Prof. Thomson, who devised his reflecting galvanometer to serve as receiving instrument. The principle of the mirror applied in this way was not new, for it had been suggested by Poggendorff and even used by Gauss in connection with very heavy magnets. The magnets used by Thomson, on the other hand, were strips of watch-spring weighing about a grain each, so that even a very weak current coming through the cable would be sufficient to produce strong displacements of the spot of light on the scale. Thomson was clearly the first to insist on small dimensions in magnetic instruments, and to show that reduction in size would be attended with corresponding increase in sensitiveness.

The mirror galvanometer, surrounded with a thick iron case to screen it from the magnetic field due to the iron of the ship, the "iron-clad galvanometer" as it was called, was used for the first time on the telegraphic expedition of 1858.

The instrument itself, which was fitted up on board the Niagara and which was connected with so many episodes of thrilling interest, was placed by Prof. Thomson in the collection of historical apparatus in the University of Glasgow, where it is at the present day.

Beautiful as was the invention of the mirror galvanometer, it gave neither warning of the beginning of a message nor a permanent record of it. Sitting in his dark room, the operator had to be always on the alert for the first swing of the spot of light over the scale. To obviate these drawbacks, Thomson, after some thinking and more talking with his friend White, of Glasgow, finally patented the siphon-recorder, in which a glass siphon of capillary dimensions is pulled to the right or left by the action of the current flowing through a light movable coil, and is thus made to register signals in ink on a vertical strip of paper which is kept in uniform motion by a train of clockwork. It is by this simple but very ingenious instrument that messages are received and recorded to-day at all the cable-stations of the world.

The inaugural message through the cable came from the Directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company in Great Britain to the Directors in America, saying: "Europe and America are united by telegraph; glory to God in the highest, on earth peace and good will toward men."