SYMHC Classics: Transatlantic Telegraph Cable

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday, one hundred and sixty five years ago today, Cruiz finished laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable and then the first successful communication was sent along that cable a few days later. So we are replaying our episode on the first transatlantic cable today. This originally came out on November ninth, twenty sixteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy D. Wilson, and today we are listening to a topic that we have gotten a number of requests for. One of them that sticks in my mind is a request from our listener, Jeff. But basically, the eighteen thirties and the eighteen forties were a really exciting time for communication throughout the world. Sign Tists and inventors were experimenting with telegraphy in some form or another, and the world sort of stood on this threshold of information flow. And once the ability to reach one another through mechanical means started to become a reality. Of course, as we know living in the digital age now, that information flow quickly became a full on jet. But it really was like a pretty speedy transition even then. But to get to that initial point where things really started to be global, it took almost two decades to get a message sent across the Atlantic Ocean by telegraph. That's from the time the idea was adopted as the next logical step for global communication to when they actually got a line completed and working. And this is sort of a story of inspiration and daring, but above all, the real story here is tenacity. As you will see our story of the Transatlantic Cable. Unsurprisingly, we'll start with Samuel Morse, who was credited with the invention of the telegraph and his original career trajectory. If you're not familiar with it, might surprise you a little bit. I suddenly was so. Samuel F. B. Morsh was born on April twenty seventh of seventeen ninety one to parents Jedediah and Elizabeth Finley Morse, and as a student both at Phillips Academy and then at Yale College, his performance was pretty middling in all subjects except for art, which he loved. He was not really aspiring to be an engineer or an inventor at this point. He wanted to become a painter when he got out of college. That was not a particularly lucrative career plan. After an apprenticeship to a Boston publisher, it was a parent that art really was the only thing that he was interested in, so his father sent him to England to study at the Royal Academy, where he developed his style in the Romantic tradition. So, after studying in England, he returned to Boston in eighteen fifteen and he set up a studio there where he continued to paint these large, epic pieces that were really well regarded, but they weren't very lucrative. Everybody, but he loved to look at them and talked about how good they were, but nobody was buying them. So a few years into his art career, he married a woman named Lucretia Walker. This was in eighteen eighteen, and at this point he realized he had to make ends meet and provide for his bride and they were having a family, so he began taking commissions to paint portraits, often traveling to do so. Seven years into the marriage, Lucretia died after giving birth to the couple's third child, and Samuel was away on a painting job. When this happened, he was so devastated that he wasn't able to make it home in time for her burial, and this was just the beginning of a series of heartaches for him. His father died the following year, and then his mother passed away a few years after that. So eventually Morse decided to travel to Europe in eighteen twenty nine for a three year trip that was intended to help him move through his grief. This also proved to be a pivotal move because on the return voyage. Once he had done this traveling, he met physician and some time inventor and a great potential podcast subject, Charles Thomas Jackson. So, according to the story, Jackson and Morse discussed the possibilities of the transmission of messages via electrical current, and Morse came away from this discussion very inspired. After making some quick initial sketches for a machine and then spending several years studying the electric relay work of scientist Joseph Henry, Morse started building a telegraph prototype. As has been the case with many inventions we've talked about in the podcast, Morse's telegraph did not just appear in a vacuum. Not only was he building on the work of others, but there are also numerous other inventors who were working on similar concepts of the time, with all of them basically driven by a goal of improved communication for humankind. Yeah, it's important to remember that if you wanted to communicate something across the Atlantic Ocean, which was a frequent destination, like people in the state, we're often sending things back to Europe and vice versa, the fastest you could expect a letter to reach someone was like a week, and that was a really fast instance thinking about all the various things we've talked about over the past years of the show, where problems would have been completely prevented if it didn't take weeks for a letter to get anywhere. Yeah. Yeah, So this was sort of on a lot of people's minds that they were like, man, if only I could get communication to go faster. So that's why many people were working on this, And so from eighteen thirty eight to eighteen forty two, Morse and a partner named Alfred Vale worked on getting funding to finish the development of the telegraph machine and to develop the communication system that would eventually be known as Morse Code, and a Congressman from Maine named Francis ormand Jonathan Smith eventually backed the pair, and he helped them get a congressional grant of thirty thousand dollars to run a telegraph line from the US Capitol in Washington, d C. To Baltimore, Maryland that was a span of thirty eight miles about sixty one kilometers. Their proof of concept demonstration for Congress had been a line strung between committee rooms in the Capitol that relaid several messages back and forth. Even as the line from Washington's of Baltimore was being laid, they were already using it. They would sort of put out a stretch and then attach a machine to it and use it. And on May first of eighteen forty four, it had reached within fifteen miles of Baltimore, and the line we was used to transmit Whig Convention nominees to Morse in Washington, DC to announce the word via a telegraph line got to DC more than an hour faster than the train from Baltimore that was carrying the news. Yeah, that was kind of a big moment where people were like, this is viable this is really going to happen. And on May twenty fourth of eighteen forty four, the first telegraph on the newly completed d C Baltimore line. So there had been some going on before, but the completed line, the first note was sent by Morse and it read what hath God Wrought? Once this message had actually been sent, it led to a period of explosive growth in communications. There were also multiple challenges to his patent on it, which he was granted in eighteen forty seven, but ultimately he was recognized as the inventor of the telegraph. Yeah, just as with any big invention we've talked about, there were a lot of people who wanted to say no, no, I was part of that development. I was an important, important part of it, including the general fer Art on this machine. Yeah, including the gentleman that he had talked with while he was returning from Europe, Charles Thomas Jackson. Again, that would be a whole great episode in and of itself, but over the following decade after they finished that that line between the Capitol and Baltimore more than twenty thousand miles, that's thirty two thousand kilometers roughly of telegraph line was laid in the US, and in Europe a similar set of criss crossing lines were being laid throughout the continent, connecting people like never before. Seriously, I I want to make sure people grasp what a huge moment this was. It's kind of like how we went from regular kind of clunky cell phones to smartphones and sort of everything changed. In terms of trying to give a contemporary example, it was that big of a jump. As quickly as telegraph lines were spreading, ideas for new ways to extend and push the technology were also spreading, and it wasn't long before the idea of sending telegraphs across large bodies of water took root in the minds of people who were you thinking about advancements. While a so called Siberian telegraph line was also considered considered because it would require fewer dips into the water, a transatlantic cable was deemed to be more viable because it would need to travel a shorter distance. Yeah, it also wouldn't have to deal quite so much with cold. But of course a line across or more accurately under the water posed a number of challenges. It had to be strong and resilient and it had to be in But of course there were also industrious types who were completely ready and willing to rise to such challenges. But before we start talking about them and the herculean efforts that were made to install this cable across the Atlantic, let's pause for a moment and have a word from one of our sponsors in the United States. Cyrus Westfield, was the driving force behind the idea to run a cable under the Atlantic, and he started championing this idea in eighteen fifty four. Field was a financier from Stockbridge, Massachusetts who had made his money in the paper business, which truck cracks me up a little bit because you know that might affect his own financial interests before putting his efforts into submarines telegraph. And this would not be the first line that was dropped underwater. A link between Great Britain and France was completed at the begin in the eighteen fifties that went through the English Channel, but this was obviously a far more ambitious thing than any linking line that had existed up to that point, and there were other underwater lines as well, but again much shorter under the entire ocean. Field gathered information from a variety of sources in this whole plan. He spoke extensively with Frederick Newton Gisborne, who had run a line from Nova Scotia to the tip of Newfoundland before his company collapsed. He talked to an oceanographer named Matthew Maury to try to gain insight into issues like currents and the shifting of the steafloor, and he referred to Samuel Morse to make sure that the technical requirements for this line would be adequately addressed. Morris had also run some underwater lines in the New York Harbor, so he had some insights into the actual running of submarine cables. Cyrus Field formed the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company to manage this venture, but he didn't stay independent. Didn't stay that company that eventually rolled up under a parent company that he helped form called the Atlantic Telegraph Company, and Feeled at that point entered into a partnership with three British men as they established that firm. That was Charles Bright and then John and Jacob Brett, two brothers, and that happened in eighteen fifty six. The Brett brothers had already run that line that connected Britain and France across the English Channel under the umbrella of the General Oceanic and Submarine Telegraph Company, so they had some pretty good experience to start with. The partnership began with three hundred and fifty thousand British pounds in capital. Field's own money made up about a quarter of that startup capital, and then the company was able to get a charter to run an insulated line of cable across the Atlantic. The British government also paid an annual subsidy to the project of fourteen hundred pounds per year. So first the cable that they needed had to be manufactured, and that was a process which basically took the entire first half of eighteen fifty seven. It was made by two different companies, Glass Elliot and Company of Greenwich and RS. Newele and Company of Liverpool. And this cable was made using seven twenty two gauge copper wires which were twisted together and then they were coded with latex, and that latex shrouded line was then wrapped in tarred hemp, and then that was coated with an iron wire casing that was made from eighteen strands of wire, each made with seven charcoal annealed iron wires that were twenty two gauge, So it was a lot of wrapped in coiled wire making up one big cable. The cable, once it was all assembled, was approximately three quarters of an inch in diameter, and a mile of cable required one hundred and thirty three miles of wire to make it. It weighed about a ton per mile of length. Yeah, that is not not light business. And in the meantime, the Atlantic Telegraph Company, while that cable was being made, had been drumming up aid from both the US and British navies for this project. So the US Navy had already compiled a survey of the Atlantic Ocean between Newfoundland and Ireland that identified the most suitable route for the cable to sit. And once the cable was completed in the two locations by those two companies, it was placed aboard two ships. The Niagara from the US collected the cable that had been manufactured in Liverpool, and the HMS Agamemnon of Great Britain took on the cable that had been manufactured in Greenwich. The initial run set out from the most westerly point of Ireland the first week of August eighteen fifty seven, after the European end of the cable was brought ashore. First the Niagara would lay down its cargo of cable, which would take it to the mid Atlantic, and then the cable aboard the Agamemnod would be spliced to that and would be dropped for the rest of the distance to North America. And things went pretty well for almost a week, but after six days there was an error handling the breaking mechanism that controlled the cable's speed of descent into the water, so the line snapped less than four hundred miles or about six hundred and forty four kilometers into the trip, and they tried with like grappling mechanisms to try to grab it again, but they just could not, so the Niagara and the Agamemnon returned to port. Additional cable had to be made up for the lengths of line that were lost to the bottom of the sea. The second attempt started with the same two vessels, but this time, instead of both setting out in the same direction, they met in the mid Atlantic and then spliced the ends of the cables from each ship together and then the ships set out in separate directions like some kind of math problem. Unsurprisingly to me, the line broke almost as soon as the two ships started moving. That just seems like the worst, worst possible plan. Well, that's eventually how it happens, so don't get too judging. I'm to say. It seems like this is rife. It seems like a big gambol. Yeah, but they had done some testing in smaller bodies of water while they were having that extra cable made, and it seemed like this was probably good work. So a third attempt was started right away, again, beginning with a joint of the two lines before each of the ships set out, and with only forty miles about sixty four kilometers of cable in place, there was yet another snap. They tried a third time, and this yielded better results. They did manage to put down one hundred and forty six miles about two hundred and thirty five kilometers worth of line before there was another break, And each time they would grapple and try to get those ends. But at some point you had to cut your losses and say let's go back to port and reformulate our plan. At this point. I feel like the Transatlantic cable had burned down, fell over, and then sank it to the swap. That's pretty much how it feels. I would have given up at this point, but remember they're so deep in. Four efforts gone bad was a setback. I'm sure plenty of other people were like me judging their failures, but it did not stop the project. Money was short, however, and these numerous failed attempts had already cost about three hundred thousand pounds, so new shares of the Atlantic Telegraph Company had to be offered for sale at twenty pounds each to try to build up the company coffers. And they did. They made some money and were ready to go. So the Agamemnon and the Niagara set sale for the rendezvous point in the mid Atlantic once again on June tenth of eighteen fifty eight, after they had been restocked with cable and machinery, but this time a storm quickly derailed their plans. The Niagara managed the weather without too much trouble, but the Agamemnon really really suffered. According to accounts, it almost capsized. It lost some of the coal that it was using for fuel as it was being tossed around at sea, and while the two vessels did manage to meet and start their cable laying mission, things quickly failed. Not only did the cable snap, but the Agamemnon had to use sail power to try to return to the rendezvous point. But the Niagara at that point had returned to Ireland as had been in the plan in the event that the two ships lost communication, so eventually the Agamemnon also made it back to port on July twe wealth and the next two weeks were spent repairing and were stocking and resetting the ships. Four vessels met in the Atlantic Ocean on July twenty ninth, eighteen fifty eight, to try yet again. The ships were the Agamemnon, the Valorous, the Niagara, and the Gorgon, with the Agamemnon and the Valarus aimed at Ireland and the Niagara and the Gorgon headed toward Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. The four vessels started laying cable, and this time they managed to connect the line short shore all the way across the Atlantic, so apparently they just needed two more ships additionally, well, they I think those may have even been on a prior attempt but I wasn't clear on that. In my research, they're kind of left out of a lot of the talk because they were kind of just support vessels at that point. They were still doing basically the same plan with two ships running line, and then they had some support in case, I presume, but they did manage to get it stretched across, and that cable was completed on August fifth, when the Agamemnon reached Ireland. That was one day after the Niagara had brought the North American end of the cable to Trinity Bay. And all told, at this point the line ran more than two thousand miles that's about thirty two hundred kilometers across the ocean floor, and once it was connected to the local telegraph stations, it worked. On August sixteenth, eighteen fifty eight, the first telegraph cable to cross the Atlantic was sent and it read directors of Atlantic Telegraph Company, Great Britain to directors in America. Europe and America are united by telegraph, Glory to God in the highest on Earth, Peace and goodwill towards men. And then that same message was relayed back across the Atlantic to confirm that the line was working in both directions success for right now, We're going to revel in this success for just a moment, and what we do, we're going to have a quick word from one of our sponsors. So after that initial success, Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan were then able to trade messages on this newly laid line, and the British monarch cabled on August seventeenth the following message. The Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of this great international work in which the Queen has taken the greatest interest. The Queen is convinced that the President will join her in fervently hoping that the electric cable which now connects Great Britain with the United States, will provide an additional link between the two nations, whose friendship is founded upon their common interest and reciprocal esteem. The Queen has much pleasure in thus directly communicating with the President and in renewing to him her best wishes for the prosperity of the United States. Buchanan replied, the President cordially reciprocates the congratulations of her Majesty the Queen on the success of this great international enterprise. Accomplished by the science, skill, and indomitable energy of the two countries. It is a triumph more glorious because far more useful to mankind than ever one by conqueror on the field of battle. May the Atlantic Telegraph, under the blessing of Heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument designed by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world. In this view, we will not all the nations of Christendom spontaneously unite in the declaration that it shall be forever neutral, and that its communications shall be held sacred in passing to the place of their destination, even in the midst of hostilities. So you may have noticed these are wordy telegraphs. They're real wordies. They're talkie talkie, and apparently they were quite vexing to the telegraph operators. And because of the lengthy nature of these messages, they each took more than seventeen hours to transmit. Don't talk so much, you God. It's like I get it. You want to convey a lot of stuff. Transmission received, Stop works stop. This is awesome. This excitement was really fleeting because the line had problems almost immediately. There are two primary reasons that were discussed for the failure. One was that the cable just was not strong enough, and the initial messages had been sent with too high a voltage that taxi line, so in addition to being so long, they were also damaging. As for the voltage, this was largely due to the fact that operators on either side of the Atlantic were fiddling with the settings, trying to figure out how to optimize the signal, but neither knew what the person on the other end was doing. As for the weakness of the cable, there were some claims that one of the cable manufacturers had left a section of the cable outside in the hot sun before it was delivered to the ships, and that some of the latex had melted and ruined the insulation. Yeah, so it could also have been a combination of those things. It could also have just been this. This is difficult. In my head, there's a little cartoon where like a crab or a lobster just walks up and kind of gnaws on it, and I know it's made to not let that happen. But the cartoon is very cute. I was thinking a shark because I've seen jaws. So the first transatlantic telegraph line was unfortunately completely dead within just a few weeks. It finally went silent on September eighteenth of eighteen fifty eight. But even with that failure, some really impressive work had been done in the time that the cable was functional. Over the course of those twenty three days, two hundred and seventy one messages had been sent from Newfoundland and one hundred and twenty nine messages had been sent from Ireland. Undaunted with this at this point just unending list of setbacks, Cyrus Westfield decided to try again. I have to commend him. He had to start the entire process from scratch, starting all the way back at the stage of raising the money to fund the venture for a sixth try. It took more than seven years to have another attempt ready, but in eighteen sixty five they were ready to go, and this time it was a single ship, the Great Eastern, out of Britain, that was chartered to lay the line so low. The Great Eastern was larger than all of the previous vessels that had been used to lay telegraph line, and it started in Ireland and headed west toward North America. So they're still planning on this same exact positioning. And at about the twelve hundred mile that's nineteen thirty one kilometers nineteen hundred and thirty one kilometer mark, it happened again the thing that keeps happening in all of these field attempts. The cable snapped. So at this point every effort was made to recover the dropped end of the line, because at that point they're already more than halfway there. But eventually they had to abandon it for the time being, and the Great Eastern returned to Port. More cable had to be made before another attempt could be mounted, but finally the Great Eastern was loaded with enough cable to cross the ocean, as well as additional cable to splice the lost end if it could be bound and complete a second line. Okay, brace, because this eighteen sixty six voyage and laying of the line was shockingly smooth. It went just fine. The end of the cable which connected Newfoundland to Ireland reached a fishing village named Heart's Content on the North American coast on July twenty seventh of eighteen sixty six. If I had been the person at the helm of that ship, and also everyone else working on the entire thing, I would have been like, am I awake right now? I feel like I would have held my breath for like a month at a time as they crossed the coach. So this time, the first message to be sent was quote, a treaty of peace has been signed between Austria and Prussia. It's a whole lot shorter. Queen Victoria also sent a message to President Andrew Johnson saying, the Queen congratulates the President on the successful completion of an undertaking which she hopes may serve as an additional bond of union between the United States and England. So a lot more concise than previously. Yeah, which is kind of funny because this line was a little bit better and stronger, and it probably could have handled those longer messages much more effectively, but lesson learned. So this was the first permanent line across the ocean, and buoyed by the success of that first line, the Grade Eastern did head back to find the lost line from its earlier mission, and they did manage to locate it, even though it had sunk sixteen thousand feet that's about four eight hundred and seventy seven meters to the ocean floor, and that line was grappled, pulled up, and it was spliced, and a backup line was also successfully completed on September eighth. Also amazing, the telegraph cable was made available to customers right away, but it was really a service for the incredibly wealthy. To send a transatlantic telegraph cost a dollar per letter, payable in gold. That would be a lot today dollar a letter. So in eighteen sixty six, that was an incredible amount of money. Yeah, that was like mind blowingly costly. But keep in mind that like part of what was driving all of these attempts. One, it's like this sort of human kind, like let's all communicate with each other, global village ideal. But it was also a business venture. So part of what gave them that tenacity, I think was that they were all in and they were like, if we ever want to make money off this thing, if we ever want to make our money back, we got to finish it. Uh, and that's going to be really expensive. But they did go into business and did quite well more under sea lines were laid in the two decades following that first permanent cable, with an estimated one hundred and seven thousand miles that's one hundred and seventy two thousand kilometers of cable along the bottoms of the world's oceans by the late eighteen eighties, so just twenty years later, it was everywhere. And the lifespan of those first two cables was not especially long. I mean it was a lot longer than that first successful attempt. One of them failed in eighteen teen seventy two and the other in eighteen seventy seven, so one lasted for six years and the other for eleven. But by that point this failure was no longer an issue because there was a lot of redundancy in the system by that point thanks to other faster cables that were running along the same lines. So global communication network basically established. I mean, there were lots of other places that needed to be connected, but there was no longer an ocean that needed to be crossed. Yeah, I mean, they were connecting across oceans pretty much all over the place. Just pretty amazing, and those lines weren't used for a long time. It really wasn't until you know, into the nineteen hundreds when there were viable other options, So very cool. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed Inhistory, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. 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