Today, Queen Victoria sends a telegram to President
Buchanan. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
After Samuel F.B. Morse
showed that long-distance telegraphy was workable,
we quickly wove a spider web of lines over America.
One of the first was Morse's cable under New York
Harbor. Taking telegraphy into the inky ocean
depths opened a mare's nest of problems. Still, a
cable was run under the English Channel by 1851 --
14 years after Morse's first demonstration.
Three years later, in 1854, an English engineer
named Gisborne went to the young American financier
Cyrus Field with plans
to lay a cable from America to Newfoundland. Field
went home to think it over and decided to go for
broke. He set up a company to lay telegraph cable
all the way to England. The line to Newfoundland
was finished in two years. The waters were fairly
shallow with a silt bottom that protected the
cable.
But the 2200-mile stretch under the Atlantic posed
terrible difficulties. The first cables were
stranded copper, insulated with gutta percha and
tarred hemp. They were wound with 300,000 miles of
iron wire to protect them. They were about half an
inch in diameter. No ship was big enough to carry
2200 miles of cable, so it had to be spliced in
mid-ocean. The cables broke twice and were lost,
but a third try succeeded in 1858.
And all the while, scientists and engineers argued
about how much voltage it would take to carry a
signal over the terrible distance. The high-voltage
people won out with a 2000-volt system. After a
month of operation, it burned through the
insulation off the coast of Ireland.
While it lasted, the cable was met with euphoria. A
98-word message from Queen Victoria to President
Buchanan took 17 hours to send on the failing
cable. But New Yorkers celebrated the linkup with
fireworks in the street.
Then the cable failure, followed by the Civil War,
ended the project until 1865. But in 1865, another
failure came to the rescue. The Great Eastern -- the largest
ship ever built -- had failed as a passenger ship
because it burned too much fuel. But it was big
enough to carry a single strand of one-inch
reinforced cable 2700 miles long -- a single strand
that weighed 5000 tons.
The cable broke in 1865, but the Great Eastern
succeeded a year later. A once-bitten public wasn't
so excited this time. But now a stronger cable --
operating under low voltage -- survived to change
the very character of commerce between America and
Europe.
It's hard to digest, but success in technology is
almost always the offspring of failure. Things just
don't work the first time, and success is usually
hard-earned.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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