We try and maintain a laserlike focus on the future at Wired, but sometimes it's worth taking a look back at the innovations of the past. On August 16, 1858, the first message was sent across the Atlantic by telegraph cable, reading "Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and good will toward men". The transmission marked the culmination of 19 years of dreams, plans and hard work, bridging the economic and political systems of both the UK and the USA.
The idea of a transatlantic communications cable was first floated in 1839, following the introduction of the working telegraph by Wiliam Cooke and Charles Wheatstone. Samuel Morse, the inventor of Morse code, threw his weight behind it in 1840, and by 1850, a link had been laid between Britain and France. The same year, construction began on a telegraph line up the far north-east coast of North America -- from Nova Scotia to the very tip of Newfoundland.
The team behind the east-coast cable was led by Frederick Newton Gisborne, a telegraph engineer from Lancashire, who lived in Nova Scotia. However, the line didn't prove too lucrative, and in 1853 the company collapsed. His fortunes changed, however, when he was introduced to Cyrus West Field, a businessman and financier from New York City.
Field took Gisborne's idea -- that the east-coast cable could be extended across the Atlantic to Britain -- and set about making it happen. He consulted Morse on the technical requirements, as well as a noted oceanographer named Matthew Maury, and after being satisfied that the project was feasible, formed the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company.
Field began to raise funds for the transatlantic expedition by selling shares in London and in New York in a parent company called the Atlantic Telegraph Company. The British government helped Field out with a subsidy of £1,400 per year, which works out as about £150,000 today, and the financier managed to get the US congress to help out, too, despite fierce opposition from Anglophobe senators. Field also supplied a quarter of the funds for the cable himself.
In 1857, the first attempt was made. A cable consisting of seven copper wires was manufactured by a pair of English companies --
Glass Elliot & Co from Greenwich, and R.S.Newall & Co from Liverpool. The cable's protective qualities were important -- it was covered with a latex made from gutta-percha, which was thought to be resilient to attack from marine plants and animals, wound with tarred hemp and surrounded by a spiralling sheath of iron wire. The idea was to allow for a pull of several tons, but still be relatively flexible.
Two ships -- the HMS Agamemnon and the USS Niagara -- set sail from near Ballycarbery Castle in County Kerry, on the southwest coast of Ireland on August 5, 1857. On the first day of the expedition, however, the cable broke and had to be grappled from the sea floor and repaired.
Soon after, the cable broke again at a depth of 3.2km, and the operation was called off for the year.
Undaunted, Field attempted the connection again the following year. After experiments in the Bay of Biscay had been conducted, the plan was changed -- the Niagara and Agamemnos met in the centre of the Atlantic on 26 June and attached their respective cables to each other, then headed for opposite sides of the ocean. Again, the cable broke -- once after less than 6km had been laid, again after about 100km and then a third time when 370km had been laid. The boats returned to port.
Despite low morale among the crews, a third expedition set out.
The boats met in the centre of the Atlantic on 29 July, 1858, and attached the cables together. The ships veered off-course wildly, due to the ships' compasses being affected by the magnetic field generated by the electrically-charged coiled cable, but that problem was solved by a pilot boat used for navigation. Crucially, there were no cable breaks, and the Niagara made it to Trinity Bay in Newfoundland on 4 August, and the Agamemnon arrived at Valentia Island off the west coast of Ireland on 5 August. Over the following days, the shore ends were landed on both sides using a team of horses, and tests were conducted.
Then, on 16 August, the first message was successfully sent, and was swiftly followed by a telegram of congratulation from Queen Victoria to US President James Buchanan, which expressed a hope that the communications cable would create: "an additional link between the nations whose friendship is founded on their common interest and reciprocal esteem".
Buchanan shot back a rather more flowery response which said that "it is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won 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 destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world".
His verbose message will have caused headaches for the operators. The reception across the cable was terrible, and it took an average of two minutes and five seconds to transmit a single character. The first message took 17 hours and 40 minutes to transmit.
On 3 September, 1858, the cable failed. In an attempt to increase the speed of transmission, the voltage on the line was boosted from 600V to 2,000V, and the insulation on the cable couldn't cope. It failed over the course of a few hours, and it would be another six years before the capital was raised for another attempt. "It's still down there", John Kincey, a principal engineer from Cable & Wireless Worldwide and an expert on transatlantic undersea cables, told Wired.co.uk. "Most of them are. They're cleared near the beaches so that they don't interfere with fishing, but in most cases they're still at the bottom of the sea."
There have been some moves to recover the copper from the cables, which is valuable, but in many cases they can be a nuisance to modern cable engineers. "We'll be trying to repair a cable," said Kincey, "and we'll pull up the wrong one."
However, although we're now laying fibreoptic cables rather than copper ones, Kincey says the techniques in laying and protecting the cables are still remarkable similar. "You've still got the same principles in effect. The cable is still covered with helical steel wires to protect the central core, and breaks are found by testing the resistance of the metal inside to determine the length before there's a break."
The major difference is the capacity. "While the first few cables could only manage a few words per minute", says Kincey, "modern submarine cables can transmit more like 84,000,000,000 words per second." Cable & Wireless Worldwide have plans to increase that further, with 100Gbit/s line systems expected to come online within the next 18 months -- 50,000 times greater per fibre than the first fibreoptic cable that went live in 1988.
So next time you're reading our US colleagues' website over a transatlantic fibreoptic cable, remember the steadfast work of Frederick Gisborne and Cyrus Field back in 1858, in a pair of boats in the middle of the Atlantic.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
