Professor Hughes, the inventor of the type-printing telegraph, and, subsequently, of the microphone, considered that “the cable was injured by the induction-coils, and that the intense currents developed by them were strong enough to burst through gutta-percha.” Professor Wheatstone gave a similar opinion.
Some one inquired of the electrician whether, if any one touched the cable at the time when the current was discharged from the induction-coil, he would receive a shock sufficiently strong to cause him to faint. It was admitted in reply that “those who touched the bare wire would suffer for their carelessness, though not if discretion be exercised by grasping the gutta-percha only.”
The chairman of the company (the Right Honorable J. Stuart Wortley, M.P.), in the course of a deputation to Lord Palmerston later on, stated{158} that “far too high charges of electricity were forced into the conductor. It was evidently thought at that time by certain electricians that you could not charge a cable of this sort too highly. Thus they proceeded somewhat like the man who bores a hole with a poker in a deal board; he gets the hole, to be sure, but the board is burned in the operation.”
Professor Thomson (now Lord Kelvin), writing in 1860, expressed the following opinion:
It is quite certain that, with a properly adjusted mirror-galvanometer as receiving-instrument at each end, twenty cells of Daniell’s battery would have done the work required, and at even a higher speed if worked by a key devised for diminishing inductive embarrassment; and the writer—with the knowledge derived from disastrous experience—has now little doubt but that, if such had been the arrangement from the beginning, if no induction-coils and no battery-power exceeding twenty Daniell cells had ever been applied to the cable since the landing of its ends, imperfect as it then was, it would be now in full work day and night, with no prospect or probability of failure.[50]
Summing up the cause of the untimely ending to the ill-used cable, perhaps the concisest verdict would be, in mechanical-engineering parlance, that “high-pressure steam had been got up in a low-pressure boiler.{159}”
PART III
INTERMEDIATE KNOWLEDGE AND ADVANCE
CHAPTER XII
OTHER PROPOSED ROUTES
North Atlantic Telegraph Project—Exploring Expedition—Ice Troubles—South Atlantic Telegraph Project.