At the same time that Cooke and Wheatstone were working in England, Morse was hard at work in America. His system was very complete and practical, and, once he was able to give it a fair trial in public, it was received with great enthusiasm in this country and all over the world. The instrument that makes the furious rattling you hear in the halls of all the hotels is Morse's instrument.
Morse's first public trial was made in 1844—fifty-three years ago. After that telegraph lines were built up very quickly in all parts of the world. Many clever men took up the work, and invented methods and devices for improving the systems, and to-day the extent of the telegraph lines of the world and the amount of work done are simply stupendous. To give just two examples: In the early years of the telegraph the lines were quite short, and only a few words could be signalled in a minute. To-day a line is building from Cairo to Cape Town, the clear length of the African continent, and there are in daily use automatic instruments which send long press messages at the rate of 450 words a minute. In sending by hand forty words a minute is quite a common speed.
As soon as land telegraphs were fairly started men said, why not lay wires under the sea? Why not? So in 1850 they laid a wire under the English Channel, from Dover to Calais. It was a very short-lived line, because the day after it was laid a French fisherman picked it up with his anchor, and knowing nothing about telegraphs, and caring less, cut it in two to clear his miserable anchor. The next year they laid a strong cable, sheathed with iron wires, proof against fishermen's knives. That worked splendidly, and they say that parts of that same cable are still working under the Channel. Of course it has been often repaired and pieced out with new, but it shows what sturdy offspring an infant can have when a submarine wire forty-five years old still does service.
After that submarine cables were laid down between various countries. Some of them were costly failures, because, although the men who had taken the infant in charge had learned a great deal about its little ways, they had not learned all the refinements necessary to success in laying and working deep-sea ocean cables. So, in 1857, when Cyrus Field formed his Atlantic Telegraph Company, the cable that he and his plucky companions laid under the Atlantic failed completely of its object. But Field and some of those with him simply would not accept defeat. So they spent more money, laid more cables, failed again, toiled and moiled and worked like beavers for years, until at last in 1866 they finished a cable from Ireland to Nova Scotia that worked like a charm. It was, without exception, the greatest piece of work ever done in electricity, and its history is one of the finest of the many tales of engineering enterprise.
To-day there are about a dozen cables between North America and Europe, and three between South America and Europe. There are cables in every sea and ocean in the world, and across every ocean except the Pacific. In all there are more than 150,000 miles of submarine cable under the waters of the globe, and there is a fleet of forty ships, large and small, fitted out solely for the purpose of laying and repairing submarine cables. Nowadays the laying of an Atlantic cable attracts no attention, and the fishing up of a slender rope less than an inch thick from the floor of the ocean, 12,000 or 15,000 feet down, is a thing done a dozen times a year. In Cyrus Field's time the Atlantic cable was the topic of the world for years, and the recovery of the broken cable was for a long time impossible, because no machinery then made could stand the strain.
In 1866 a telegram from New York to London took hours on the way. For many years past the merchants of the two cities have been in the habit of grumbling vigorously if they don't get replies to their messages within half an hour of despatching. The result of the Derby is known in New York before the winning horse has slacked his pace after passing the judge's box, and it is all over the world before the proud owner has had time to lead him back into the paddock. A cable message goes round the world in an hour or so, and the sun gets so rattled that people hear of events that happened to-morrow.
No sooner had the world got fairly settled down to submarine telegraphy than the dynamo came along. Up to that time electricity had always been procured from chemical batteries. To obtain it mechanically by moving a coil of wire in front of a magnet was a great step in advance. The infant was now striding along lustily. Batteries are expensive, inconvenient, and of very small power. Once get electricity from a machine, and there is no limit to the amount to be got. The arc-light had been produced by means of joining many hundreds of batteries together, but that was a brilliant experiment—there was nothing practical or commercial about it. But with an electric machine it was different, and once the machine was in existence the electric light was something to think about.
AN ELECTRIC LIGHTING PLANT.