If any person takes an interest in determining who was the inventor of electric telegraphy, he should study the works and mark the improvements of the natural philosophers of the last as well as of the present, century, and he can then arrive at some result without exciting national jealousy, or injuring individual susceptibilities. Humboldt assigns the credit of making the first electric telegraph to Salva, who constructed a line 26 miles long, from Madrid to Aranjuez, in 1798. Russia claims the honour of having invented aerial telegraphic lines, because Baron Von Schilling proposed a line for the Emperor from St. Petersburg to Peterhoff, below Cronstadt, in 1834, and was laughed at by scientific Muscovites for his pains. But the Baron certainly did transmit messages along wires supported by poles in the air. The Count du Moncel, in his recent “Traité de Télégraphie Electrique,” gives to Mr. Wheatstone the palm as the original inventor of submarine Cables, to which award, no doubt, there will be some dissent. Mr. Wheatstone, however, as early as 1840, brought before the House of Commons the project of a cable, to be laid between Dover and Calais, though he does not seem to have had at the time any decided views as to the mode in which insulation was to be obtained. In 1843, Professor Morse, detailing the results of some experiments with an electric magnetic telegraph between Washington and Baltimore, in a letter to the Secretary of the United States, wrote: “The practical inference from this law is that a telegraphic communication on the electric-magnetic plan, may with certainty be established across the Atlantic Ocean. Startling as this may seem now, I am confident the time will come when this project will be realised.” But for the experiments and discoveries of Oersted, Sturgeon, Ampére, Davy, Henry, and Faraday, and a long list of others, such suggestions would have remained as little likely to be realised as the Bishop of Llandaff’s notions of a flying-machine, or the crude theories of the alchemists. He who first produces a practical result—something which, however imperfect, gives a result to be seen and felt, and appreciated by the senses—is the true ποιἡτης—the maker and inventor, whom the world should recognise, no matter how much may be done by others to improve his work, each of those improvers being, after his kind, deserving of recognition for what he does. A year before Professor Morse wrote the letter to Mr. Spencer, he took some steps to show that which he prophesied was practicable. In the autumn of the year 1842 he stretched a submarine cable from Castle Garden to Governor’s Island in the harbour of New York, demonstrated to the American Institute the possibility of effecting electric communication through the sea, and submitted that telegraphic communication might with certainty be established across the Atlantic. Later in the same year he sent a current across the canal at Washington. But that was not the first current transmitted under water, for as early as 1839, Sir W. O’Shaughnessy, the late Superintendent of Electric Telegraphs in India, hauled an insulated wire across the Hooghly at Calcutta, and produced electrical phenomena at the other side of the river. In 1846, Col. Colt, the patentee of the revolver, and Mr. Robinson, of New York, laid a wire across the river from New York to Brooklyn, and from Long Island to Coney Island. In 1849, Mr. Walker sent messages to shore through two miles of insulated wire from a battery on board a steamer off Folkestone.
It was in 1851 that an electric cable was actually laid in the open sea, and worked successfully; and the wire which then connected Dover with Calais was beyond question the first important line of submarine telegraph ever attempted. In the year 1850, Mr. Brett obtained a concession from the French Government for effecting this object,—an object regarded at the time as one purely chimerical, and decried by the press as a gigantic swindle. The cable which was made for the purpose consisted of a solid copper wire, covered with gutta percha. When tested by Mr. Woollaston, it was found to be so imperfect from air holes in the gutta-percha, that the water found its way to the copper wire,—an imperfection which was however shortly repaired. This cable was manufactured at the Gutta Percha works, on the Wharf Road, City Road, under the superintendence of the late Mr. Samuel Statham; was then coiled on a drum, and conveyed by steam-tug to Dover, and in the year 1850 was payed out from Dover to Calais. The landing-place in France was Cape Grisnez, from which place a few messages passed, so as to comply with the terms of the concession and test the accuracy of the principle. The communication thus established between the Continent and England was, after a few hours, abruptly stopped. A diligent fisherman, plying his vocation, took up part of the cable in his trawl, and cut off a piece, which he bore in triumph to Boulogne, where he exhibited it as a specimen of a rare seaweed, with its centre filled with gold. It is believed that this “pescatore ignobile” returned again and again to search for further specimens of this treasure of the deep: it is, at all events, perfectly certain that he succeeded in destroying the submarine cable.
This accident caused the attention of scientific men to be directed to the discovery of some mode of preserving submarine cables from similar casualties, and a suggestion was made by Mr. Küper, who was engaged in the manufacture of wire ropes, to Mr. Woollaston and to Mr. T. R. Crampton, that the wire insulated with gutta-percha should form a core or centre to a wire rope, so as to give protection to it during the process of paying out and laying down, as well as to guard it from the anchors of vessels and the rocks, and to secure a perfect electrical continuity.
Mr. Crampton, who had already accepted the contract for laying the cable between England and France, and had given up much of his time to the study of the subject, adopted this idea, and in 1851 he and several gentlemen associated for the purpose laid the cable between Dover and Calais, where it has since remained in perfect order, constituting the great channel of electrical communication between England and the Continent. It was made by Wilkins & Weatherly, Newall & Co., Küper & Co., and Mr. Crampton. The exertions of the last-named eminent engineer in laying the first cable under water, and his devotion to an object towards which he largely contributed in money, are only known to a few, and have never been adequately acknowledged.
The success of that form of cable having been thus completely established, several lines of a similar character were laid during the following years between England and Ireland and parts of the Continent: one, 18 miles long, across the Great Belt, made by Newall & Co.; one from Dover to Ostend, by the same makers and by Küper & Co.; one from Donaghadee to Portpatrick, by Newall & Co.; one from Holyhead to Howth; and one from Orfordness to the Hague.
The superiority of a line with wire-rope cover to other descriptions of cable was illustrated in 1853. At that period the Electric and International Telegraph Company determined upon laying down four wires between England and the Continent, but they rejected the heavy cable, and adopted the suggestion of their engineer to use four separate cables of light wire. The cost of maintaining these light cables from injury by anchors, &c., was so great that they were picked up, and heavy cables of great strength were substituted, which have given no trouble or anxiety, and have always been in good order.
The Old World had twelve lines of submarine cable laid ere the United States turned their attention to the uses of such forms of telegraph. Italy had been connected with Corsica by a line 110 miles long, and Denmark had joined one of her little islands to the other, ere the Great Republic gave a thought to the matter. But there were excuses for such indifference. The Telegraphic system, to which Morse, Bain, House, and others, had given such development, although the first line was not constructed till 1844, extended rapidly all over the vast extent of the Atlantic and Gulf States. The people were on the same continent, the land was all their own, their greatest rivers could be traversed by wires; and so it was that, whilst Mr. Morse was engaged in protecting his patents, and the Americans, self-contained, were not looking beyond the limits of their shores, a British North American Province took the first step which was made at the other side of the Atlantic to lay down a submarine cable. In 1851-2 a project was started in Newfoundland, to run a line of steamers between Galway and St. John’s in connection with a telegraph to Cape Ray, where a submarine Cable was to be laid to Cape Breton, and thence the news was to be carried by means of another cable from New Brunswick to Prince Edward’s Island. The Roman Catholic Bishop of Newfoundland is stated to have been the original proposer of a scheme for connecting the island with the United States, but the credit of actually laying down the first submarine cable at the other side of the Atlantic belongs to Mr. F.N. Gisborne, an English engineer. He had been previously engaged in the telegraph department at Montreal, and had some knowledge of the subject, but he happened to be in London at the time of Brett’s success. On his return to America he applied himself to get up a Company for the purpose of facilitating telegraphic communication between Europe and the United States. After much difficulty the Company was formed, and an Act was passed by the Legislature of Newfoundland, in 1852, conferring the important privileges upon it, in event of the completion of the project in Newfoundland, which are now possessed by the Atlantic Telegraph Company. Mr. Gisborne was superintendent and engineer of the Company, and he set to work with energy to construct a road from St John’s to Cape Ray, over a barren and resourceless tract of 400 miles, and made a survey of the coast line, during which he was exposed to great hardships. He succeeded at last in laying an insulated cable, made by Newall & Co., from New Brunswick to Prince Edward’s Island across the Straits of Northumberland, 11 miles long, in 22 fathoms of water; but was not successful in a similar attempt to connect Newfoundland with Cape Breton. Meantime the Company became involved in pecuniary difficulties, and Mr. Gisborne, early in 1854, on the suspension of the works, proceeded to New York, where he hoped to find money to enable him to carry out the telegraphic scheme among the keen speculators and large-pursed merchants. Through an accidental conversation at the hotel in which he was staying, he obtained an interview with Mr. Cyrus Field. He laid his plans before that gentleman, who had no desire to resume an active career, having just returned from travelling in South America, with the intention of enjoying the fortune his industry and sagacity had secured ere he had arrived at the middle term of life. But Mr. Field listened to Mr. Gisborne with attention, and then began to think over the project—“To lay these submarine cables so as to connect Newfoundland with Maine?—Good. To run a line of steamers from St. John’s to Galway?—Certainly. It would shorten the time of receiving news in New York from Europe four or five days.” And so the brain worked and thought. Then suddenly, “But if a cable can be laid in the bed of these seas—if the Great Atlantic itself could be spanned?” Here was an idea indeed. Deep and broad seas had been traversed in Europe, but here was one of the great oceans of the world, of depth but faintly guessed at, and of nigh 2000 miles span from shore to shore! Would it be within the limits of human resources to let down a line into the watery void, and to connect the Old World with the New? What a glorious thought! Was it a vision, or was it one of those inspirations from which originate grand enterprises and results which change the destinies of the world? Mr. Field terminated his reflections that night by an eminently practical measure. Ere he retired to rest he sat down and wrote two letters,—one to Lieut. Maury, U.S.N., to ask his opinion concerning the possibility of laying down a cable in the bottom of the Atlantic; the other to Professor Morse, to inquire whether he thought it practicable to send an electric current through a wire between Europe and America. Lieut Maury, in answering in the affirmative, wrote, “Curiously enough, when your letter came I was looking over my letter to the Secretary of the Navy on that very subject.” And, in fact, on the 22nd February, 1854, Lieut. Maury made a long communication to Mr. Dobbin, Secretary, United States Navy, from the Observatory, Washington, respecting a series of deep-sea soundings made by Lieut. Berryman, U.S.N., brig Dolphin, from Newfoundland to Ireland, in connection with researches on the winds and currents, carried on for the National Observatory. It is obvious that Lieut. Maury, as well as many others probably, had thought of the same idea as Mr. Field. He says, “The result is highly interesting, in so far as the bottom of the sea is concerned, upon the question of a submarine telegraph across the Atlantic;” and he goes on to make it the subject of a special report, in which occur the following passages;—
“This line of deep-sea soundings seems to be decisive of the question as to the practicability of a Submarine Telegraph between the two continents, in so far as the bottom of the deep sea is concerned. From Newfoundland to Ireland, the distance between the nearest points is about 1,600 miles;[1] and the bottom of the sea between the two places is a plateau, which seems to have been placed there especially for the purpose of holding the wires of a Submarine Telegraph, and of keeping them out of harm’s way. It is neither too deep nor too shallow; yet it is so deep that the wires, but once landed, will remain for ever beyond the reach of vessels’ anchors, icebergs, and drifts of any kind, and so shallow that the wires may be readily lodged upon the bottom. The depth of this plateau is quite regular, gradually increasing from the shores of Newfoundland to the depth of from 1,500 to 2000 fathoms as you approach the other side. The distance between Ireland and Cape St. Charles, or Cape St. Lewis, in Labrador, is somewhat less than the distance from any point of Ireland to the nearest point of Newfoundland. But whether it would be better to lead the wires from Newfoundland or Labrador is not now the question; nor do I pretend to consider the question as to the possibility of finding a time calm enough, the sea smooth enough, a wire long enough, a ship big enough, to lay a coil of wire 1,600 miles in length; though I have no fear but that the enterprise and ingenuity of the age, whenever called on with these problems, will be ready with a satisfactory and practical solution of them.
“I simply address myself at this time to the question in so far as the bottom of the sea is concerned, and as far as that the greatest practical difficulties will, I apprehend, be found after reaching soundings at either end of the line, and not in the deep sea. * * Therefore, so far as the bottom of the deep sea between Newfoundland, or the North Cape, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and Ireland, is concerned, the practicability of a Submarine Telegraph across the Atlantic is proved.”
Professor Morse, in 1843, indicated his conviction that a magnetic current could be conveyed across the Atlantic, and his reply to Mr. Field was now given with increased confidence to the same effect. Thus encouraged, Mr. Field took measures to form a Company to purchase the rights of the Newfoundland Company, and to connect Newfoundland with Ireland by means of a submarine telegraph across the Atlantic. He entered into an agreement with Mr. Gisborne for the purchase of the privileges of the Company for 8000l., under certain conditions. Then he put down the names of ten of the principal capitalists in New York, and proceeded to unfold his project to each in succession; and having secured the adhesion of Mr. Cooper, Mr. Taylor, Mr. Roberts, Mr. White, and the advice of his brother, Mr. D. Field, he called a meeting of these gentlemen at his house on 7th March. Similar meetings took place at his residence on 8th, 9th, and 10th, and after full discussion and consideration it was resolved to form “The New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company,” of which Peter Cooper was President; Moses Taylor, Treasurer; Cyrus Field, C. White, M. O. Roberts, Directors; and D. D. Field, Counsel. Mr. C. Field, his brother, and Mr. White were commissioned to proceed to Newfoundland, to obtain from the Legislature an act of incorporation, and set out for that purpose on March 15th. On their arrival at St. John’s, the Governor convoked the Executive Council. He also sent a special message to the Legislature, then in session, recommending them to pass an act of incorporation, with a guarantee of interest on the Company’s bonds to the amount of 50,000l., and to make them a grant of fifty square miles of land on the island of Newfoundland, conditional on the completion of the Telegraph.