WEBVTT - The Transatlantic Telegraph Cable 0:00:04.400 --> 0:00:07.800 Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. 0:00:12.119 --> 0:00:14.960 Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, 0:00:15.160 --> 0:00:17.920 Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio 0:00:17.960 --> 0:00:21.120 and I love all things tech. And in our last episode, 0:00:21.320 --> 0:00:24.880 we started to talk about the history of subsea cables 0:00:25.040 --> 0:00:29.800 requests from Entris and subsea cables trace their history back 0:00:29.800 --> 0:00:36.080 to the olden days of telegraphic communication mid nineteen century, 0:00:36.200 --> 0:00:40.640 before the telephone, and way before stuff like fiber optics. Now, 0:00:40.680 --> 0:00:44.760 some early tests of undersea cables showed that while there 0:00:44.760 --> 0:00:49.200 were significant challenges to overcome, it could totally work. However, 0:00:50.479 --> 0:00:54.440 there were some peculiar issues that cropped up, especially as 0:00:54.440 --> 0:00:57.920 you worked with longer and longer subsea cables, and we 0:00:58.000 --> 0:00:59.720 talked a little bit about that, but I wanted to 0:00:59.760 --> 0:01:03.760 follow up on that specific part. So one person who 0:01:03.880 --> 0:01:09.760 quantified this issue was William Thompson, later known as Lord Kelvin. 0:01:09.800 --> 0:01:13.000 He would be knighted and then made a member of 0:01:13.040 --> 0:01:18.240 the Peerage, largely for his contributions to telegraphy, and we 0:01:18.319 --> 0:01:20.600 talked about him a little bit in the last episode. 0:01:20.600 --> 0:01:22.160 We'll talk about him a lot more in this one. 0:01:22.480 --> 0:01:26.240 He had described the relationship of a signal speed passing 0:01:26.280 --> 0:01:31.000 through an undersea cable as being inversely proportional by the 0:01:31.120 --> 0:01:34.360 to the cable's length the square of the cable's length. Actually, 0:01:34.959 --> 0:01:36.360 he said that as the square of the length of 0:01:36.360 --> 0:01:40.080 the cable increases, for any given diameter of a core conductor, 0:01:40.600 --> 0:01:44.320 the speed of the signal passing through that conductor would decrease. 0:01:44.959 --> 0:01:48.080 Uh He had discovered that a conductive cable insulated by 0:01:48.120 --> 0:01:52.000 some sort of material like Gutta percha or later synthetic rubber. 0:01:52.440 --> 0:01:56.760 UH the surrounded by a conducting medium like saltwater acts 0:01:56.840 --> 0:02:01.240 as a type of condenser. Now we are not talking 0:02:01.840 --> 0:02:04.640 about the kind of condenser you find in an air 0:02:04.720 --> 0:02:10.360 conditioner or a refrigerator. Condenser in this sense means capacitor. 0:02:10.360 --> 0:02:13.280 It's kind of an old word for what we would 0:02:13.280 --> 0:02:17.799 call a capacitor today. And a capacitor stores electricity. It 0:02:17.960 --> 0:02:22.080 stores an electrostatic charge in an electric field, and it 0:02:22.120 --> 0:02:26.760 builds up this electrostatic charge and it can rapidly discharge 0:02:27.160 --> 0:02:30.840 under the right conditions. So a typical capacitor consists of 0:02:30.880 --> 0:02:34.560 a pair of conductive plates. They are separated by a 0:02:34.639 --> 0:02:39.120 non conducting substance we call dielectric. So if you want 0:02:39.160 --> 0:02:41.359 to think of it like a sandwich. The bread of 0:02:41.400 --> 0:02:44.560 our sandwich are a pair of metal plates, one of 0:02:44.560 --> 0:02:47.639 which has a positive charge, one which has a negative charge, 0:02:47.919 --> 0:02:51.720 and the filling in our sandwich is tasty, tasty, non 0:02:51.720 --> 0:02:55.600 conductive dielectric. So an electric terminal connext to each of 0:02:55.639 --> 0:02:57.960 those plates. So, like I said, you have a positive 0:02:58.000 --> 0:03:01.640 side and a negative side pause of a negative electric charge. 0:03:01.680 --> 0:03:04.000 In other words, so when you connect this to a battery, 0:03:04.280 --> 0:03:07.440 the negative plate builds up electrons, it has a stronger 0:03:07.480 --> 0:03:13.160 negative charge. The other plate loses electrons. It becomes positively charged. 0:03:13.760 --> 0:03:17.520 But the electrons from the negative plate cannot immediately pass 0:03:17.600 --> 0:03:20.160 to the positive plate. You know, they want to do 0:03:20.240 --> 0:03:24.440 that because opposite charges attract, so positive attracts negative. But 0:03:24.639 --> 0:03:28.640 because we have that crumby dielectric sandwich filling coming up 0:03:28.680 --> 0:03:32.880 the two plates, the electrons cannot make that journey, so 0:03:32.919 --> 0:03:36.400 they just keep accumulating and the negative charge on that 0:03:36.440 --> 0:03:41.480 plate continues to grow. Effectively, we're storing that electric charge 0:03:41.640 --> 0:03:44.680 in this capacitor. In fact, if we disconnect it from 0:03:44.680 --> 0:03:47.960 the battery, that electric charge will still be in that 0:03:48.000 --> 0:03:50.920 capacitor for a good long while, as long as you 0:03:50.960 --> 0:03:53.560 haven't created a way for it to discharge. So, in 0:03:53.640 --> 0:03:56.080 other words, it's not connected to any other kind of circuit. 0:03:56.720 --> 0:03:58.680 And this is why if you've ever seen a video 0:03:58.720 --> 0:04:01.960 of someone smashing up old you know, cafod ray tube, 0:04:01.960 --> 0:04:05.600 television or monitor, you might have seen some some sparks 0:04:05.600 --> 0:04:08.440 fly like almost like a little explosion. Well that's because 0:04:08.480 --> 0:04:11.680 there are powerful capacitors in these old monitors and they 0:04:11.760 --> 0:04:15.000 can still have a significant and harmful charge of electricity 0:04:15.040 --> 0:04:19.440 inside them because, like I said, capacitors store electricity. This 0:04:19.520 --> 0:04:21.880 is why it's a good idea to you know, not 0:04:22.080 --> 0:04:26.000 smash them. Anyway, let's get back to capacitors. So you 0:04:26.080 --> 0:04:28.920 got this capacitor and it's stored up an electric charge 0:04:28.960 --> 0:04:31.640 from a power source. But if you connect that capascitor 0:04:31.720 --> 0:04:33.640 to a circuit with a load on it, such as 0:04:33.680 --> 0:04:36.960 a flash bulb for a you know, a film camera, 0:04:37.480 --> 0:04:40.640 it allows the capacitor to release or you know, dump 0:04:41.040 --> 0:04:45.000 that entire electric charge all at once, you know, just 0:04:45.080 --> 0:04:48.880 in an instant. So you get this sudden electric discharge, 0:04:48.920 --> 0:04:51.880 which is useful for your applications, like having a flashbulb 0:04:51.920 --> 0:04:55.040 go off. You see, energy from a battery has this 0:04:55.120 --> 0:04:58.320 sort of ramping up situation. So if you had the 0:04:58.360 --> 0:05:01.840 flashbulb just attached to a switch with a battery attached, 0:05:02.200 --> 0:05:04.159 then the bulb would not go off as quickly. It 0:05:04.160 --> 0:05:06.960 wouldn't just go off in an instant It will come 0:05:07.000 --> 0:05:10.600 on slightly more gradually and turn off more gradually, and 0:05:10.800 --> 0:05:13.800 thus not be suitable for you to take a picture 0:05:13.839 --> 0:05:16.520 with like a film camera, where you want the aperture 0:05:17.080 --> 0:05:20.000 to have just the right amount of light exposure when 0:05:20.040 --> 0:05:23.120 it opens. And it might seem to us when you're 0:05:23.360 --> 0:05:25.640 using a battery that things are coming on instantly, are 0:05:25.680 --> 0:05:29.000 going off instantly, but when you're talking about super high 0:05:29.000 --> 0:05:31.640 speed applications, that really makes a difference. A capacitor makes 0:05:31.640 --> 0:05:36.080 it seem truly instantaneous to us. Anyway, the future Lord 0:05:36.160 --> 0:05:39.560 Kelvin was kind of sussing all this out, that these 0:05:39.839 --> 0:05:43.200 cables under the ocean can start to act like a 0:05:43.240 --> 0:05:46.680 capacitor and store up an electric charge which interferes with 0:05:46.720 --> 0:05:50.440 signals passing through. And he saw that subseat cables wouldn't 0:05:50.480 --> 0:05:53.560 behave the same way as terrestrial ones, would you know, 0:05:53.600 --> 0:05:57.400 the ones above the waves. With terrestrial cables, you didn't 0:05:57.480 --> 0:06:00.640 encounter the same issues of signal RETARDA is what they 0:06:00.680 --> 0:06:04.839 called it the signal being slowed down like they overland 0:06:04.839 --> 0:06:07.560 they weren't seeing this, but under the oceans they were. 0:06:07.880 --> 0:06:12.080 So he was advising engineers to consider this challenge and 0:06:12.120 --> 0:06:15.200 to find new ways to approach subsea cables to account 0:06:15.200 --> 0:06:18.080 for those differences. And one thing he advised was that 0:06:18.160 --> 0:06:22.120 the cable should be a large diameter core cable, in 0:06:22.160 --> 0:06:26.680 other words, thicker copper wires. He felt that a pure 0:06:27.040 --> 0:06:29.400 copper cable, like something as pure as you can make it, 0:06:30.040 --> 0:06:34.280 with a pretty thick diameter would reduce the electrical resistance 0:06:34.440 --> 0:06:37.200 of the cable, and he was right. But there were 0:06:37.200 --> 0:06:42.360 other people like Michael Faraday, another brilliant engineer, and Samuel 0:06:42.360 --> 0:06:46.760 Morse who was he was pretty sharp himself. They felt 0:06:46.800 --> 0:06:49.920 that the copper wire really needed to be very narrow, 0:06:50.040 --> 0:06:53.640 very thin, in order to reduce the effects of signal retardation. 0:06:53.680 --> 0:06:57.400 They felt that that by being isolated from the water, 0:06:58.000 --> 0:07:01.040 in other words, having it thinner and surrounded by more installation, 0:07:01.400 --> 0:07:05.240 that that would solve the problem. Now, Thompson had his 0:07:05.279 --> 0:07:10.920 own supporters, including another very important person on the team 0:07:11.040 --> 0:07:14.600 who were you know, figuring this stuff out. But the 0:07:14.720 --> 0:07:19.200 narrow cable also had lots of supporters, and perhaps more importantly, 0:07:19.760 --> 0:07:23.960 a narrow cable would represent a cheaper option because you 0:07:23.960 --> 0:07:26.920 needed less copper. Right, you weren't making as thick a 0:07:26.920 --> 0:07:30.160 copper wire. So I bet you can guess which one 0:07:30.200 --> 0:07:33.800 the Atlantic Telegraph Company went with. And now just a 0:07:33.840 --> 0:07:37.160 quick digression. One thing that the pandemic has really taught 0:07:37.240 --> 0:07:41.560 us today is that not everyone accepts scientific explanations as 0:07:41.600 --> 0:07:44.720 being realistic. And I do grant that the process of 0:07:44.760 --> 0:07:47.680 science means that you have to do lots of testing 0:07:47.680 --> 0:07:50.200 of hypotheses in order to see if they actually hold up. 0:07:50.560 --> 0:07:54.120 You can't just accept a hypothesis on the face of it, 0:07:54.600 --> 0:07:58.720 because sometimes we make hypotheses that are wrong. Sometimes we 0:07:58.800 --> 0:08:02.040 make some that are really wrong. But when we actually 0:08:02.080 --> 0:08:05.640 have tested them and they have stood those tests, we 0:08:05.680 --> 0:08:10.360 should be ready to accept those scientific results. C. Thompson 0:08:10.480 --> 0:08:13.080 was pretty thorough in his analysis, and others could have 0:08:13.080 --> 0:08:17.640 followed his lead and tested his findings themselves to their satisfaction, 0:08:17.720 --> 0:08:20.880 but they didn't really do that anyway. The reason I 0:08:20.920 --> 0:08:24.080 even say all this is Lord Kelvin's work wasn't immediately 0:08:24.120 --> 0:08:27.840 embraced by telegraphy companies because, for one thing, if he 0:08:27.920 --> 0:08:29.920 was right, it would mean that these companies would all 0:08:29.960 --> 0:08:32.760 have to spend way more money to make cables. Those 0:08:32.760 --> 0:08:37.840 cables would be far more expensive. Um. And there were 0:08:37.880 --> 0:08:40.000 some who just figured that all you really need to 0:08:40.000 --> 0:08:43.280 do was increase the voltage to sufficient levels to push 0:08:43.280 --> 0:08:46.280 a signal through a very long cable, and that would 0:08:46.559 --> 0:08:51.319 end up causing issues. Um. Just as a reminder, voltage 0:08:51.559 --> 0:08:54.760 in an electrical system is kind of like water pressure 0:08:55.280 --> 0:08:59.400 in a plumbing system. It's not how much electricity there is, 0:09:00.160 --> 0:09:05.240 rather the difference in positive to negative electric charge, or 0:09:05.360 --> 0:09:07.040 you know, you can think of it as how much 0:09:07.040 --> 0:09:09.480 ooth the electricity has behind it. So you can have 0:09:10.280 --> 0:09:13.920 high voltage with a low current, which means you're pushing 0:09:13.960 --> 0:09:17.840 out a tiny stream of electricity at incredible pressure. Or 0:09:17.880 --> 0:09:21.680 you can have low voltage but high current. In that 0:09:21.760 --> 0:09:23.960 case you're moving a lot of electricity but not with 0:09:24.000 --> 0:09:26.240 a whole lot of ooth behind it. Or you can 0:09:26.320 --> 0:09:29.920 have both voltage and current be high or low. But 0:09:30.080 --> 0:09:32.400 that's enough, because I talked about that in the previous episode. 0:09:33.160 --> 0:09:38.439 So while the Future Lord Kelvin was exploring the limitations 0:09:38.440 --> 0:09:42.800 of contemporary technology with regard to subsea cables, companies began 0:09:42.960 --> 0:09:48.400 to lay more of those subsea cables over relatively short distances, 0:09:48.440 --> 0:09:52.120 and because you know, Lord Kelvin's discoveries showed that we'd 0:09:52.120 --> 0:09:57.319 really only encounter significant limitations over great distances. Subsea cables 0:09:57.360 --> 0:10:01.320 worked good enough in most cases, though companies would have 0:10:01.360 --> 0:10:04.200 to replace them every couple of decades due to wear 0:10:04.200 --> 0:10:08.080 and tear. But well before all those replacements, in the 0:10:08.120 --> 0:10:11.720 mid eighteen fifties, there was a growing interest in creating 0:10:11.720 --> 0:10:15.640 a cable long enough to connect Europe to North America. Now, 0:10:15.679 --> 0:10:19.760 this would be significantly longer than any subseed cable produced 0:10:19.880 --> 0:10:23.160 up to that point. One person in America who was 0:10:23.240 --> 0:10:27.199 really pushing for this was a businessman named Cyrus west Field. 0:10:27.640 --> 0:10:31.319 I've talked a lot about engineers and scientists in these episodes, 0:10:31.840 --> 0:10:35.680 but we also have to remember that financiers and business 0:10:35.720 --> 0:10:39.360 folk are really important too, because you know, that's where 0:10:39.360 --> 0:10:42.400 the money comes from. So Field had made his fortune 0:10:42.480 --> 0:10:46.480 in the paper industry, uh, though not always smoothly. It 0:10:46.520 --> 0:10:48.240 took him a while to get there, but by his 0:10:48.320 --> 0:10:52.000 early thirties he was so wealthy that he decided to 0:10:52.040 --> 0:10:57.200 retire the rotten wats it anyway, he became interested in 0:10:57.280 --> 0:11:00.680 telegraphy and he joined a venture proposed by and English 0:11:00.720 --> 0:11:05.480 electrician Frederick in Gisborne, who was living in Canada and 0:11:05.520 --> 0:11:10.840 Gisborne wanted a cable that connected Newfoundland with Nova Scotia 0:11:11.120 --> 0:11:14.719 and to go across a body of water along the way. 0:11:14.760 --> 0:11:18.360 So Field helped secure investors and the cable had been 0:11:18.400 --> 0:11:22.360 designed and built and laid, though the project ended up 0:11:22.440 --> 0:11:25.800 taking much longer than Field had estimated due to the 0:11:25.840 --> 0:11:29.319 rugged terrain of Canada and the fact that Canada has 0:11:29.360 --> 0:11:33.079 a lot of natural dangers in it, such as bears, wolves, 0:11:33.080 --> 0:11:37.360 and tim Horton's but the cable's success convinced Field that 0:11:37.440 --> 0:11:41.800 a subsea cable connecting North America to Europe would be invaluable, 0:11:41.880 --> 0:11:46.719 particularly for business purposes, like if you have a partnership 0:11:47.040 --> 0:11:49.719 and you've got, you know, a partner in London and 0:11:49.760 --> 0:11:51.960 you were in New York, it would be really useful 0:11:51.960 --> 0:11:54.400 to be able to communicate with that person in near 0:11:54.520 --> 0:11:59.360 real time. So the route that seemed the most promising 0:11:59.600 --> 0:12:03.160 would be Newfoundland to Ireland. That was a distance that 0:12:03.160 --> 0:12:07.280 would equal somewhere between six hundred to two thousand miles. 0:12:08.320 --> 0:12:12.240 So Field attracted supporters and investors both in America and 0:12:12.320 --> 0:12:16.920 in England. Our Buddy Billy the Future, Lord Kelvin Thompson 0:12:17.240 --> 0:12:21.680 joined that project. Uh. Samuel Morris did as well. John 0:12:21.720 --> 0:12:25.560 Watkins Brett, who had overseen the first commercial subsea connection 0:12:25.600 --> 0:12:28.720 between Dover, England and Calais, France, which we talked about 0:12:28.720 --> 0:12:31.120 in the last episode. Uh, he also was part of 0:12:31.120 --> 0:12:34.680 this endeavor. And Field brought on a British surgeon with 0:12:34.760 --> 0:12:41.000 the amazing name Edward Orange Wildman white House to serve 0:12:41.040 --> 0:12:46.160 as chief electrician. And you might think, huh, that's weird 0:12:46.640 --> 0:12:51.000 bringing a surgeon in to act in that capacity. Pun intended. 0:12:51.520 --> 0:12:54.400 But this was a time when the fields of medicine 0:12:54.440 --> 0:12:59.320 and science we're pretty darn mixed. Like you had engineers 0:12:59.320 --> 0:13:02.679 whould become the positions and physicians who become an engineers, etcetera. 0:13:03.040 --> 0:13:06.560 And we were just starting to see people begin to 0:13:06.640 --> 0:13:10.360 specialize in specific fields. Also, how do you say no 0:13:10.559 --> 0:13:13.640 to a guy named wild Man? So the project got 0:13:13.720 --> 0:13:17.920 started around eight fifty four, but it would take years 0:13:17.960 --> 0:13:21.200 of work before the cable would be built, let alone deployed. 0:13:21.679 --> 0:13:25.760 For one thing, the Atlantic Telegraph Company really needed to 0:13:25.800 --> 0:13:29.199 find a good route to avoid issues with the c floor. 0:13:29.240 --> 0:13:31.559 They knew they wanted to go from Newfoundland to Ireland. 0:13:31.600 --> 0:13:35.040 But they need to plot the exact course. Now, there 0:13:35.120 --> 0:13:37.880 was no way to send signals down through the water, 0:13:38.200 --> 0:13:40.360 to bounce off the cea floor and come back up 0:13:40.400 --> 0:13:42.679 and give us kind of a map of what the 0:13:42.720 --> 0:13:45.080 bottom of the ocean looked like, which meant that you 0:13:45.080 --> 0:13:47.840 had to do things in a much more low tech way. 0:13:47.880 --> 0:13:51.720 That way involved a heavy weight on a rope. You know, 0:13:51.760 --> 0:13:54.280 you might use something like a cannon ball, and you 0:13:54.320 --> 0:13:56.920 would need a really long rope, you know, a couple 0:13:56.960 --> 0:14:00.480 of miles long at least, and you would typically mark 0:14:00.480 --> 0:14:02.679 off links of the rope so that way you can 0:14:02.720 --> 0:14:05.559 see how deep the ocean is at any given point 0:14:06.000 --> 0:14:08.199 by plopping the weight over the side of the boat, 0:14:08.520 --> 0:14:10.800 letting it sink all the way to the bottom, and 0:14:10.840 --> 0:14:14.800 then reading off where on the water line the rope. 0:14:14.800 --> 0:14:17.160 It's like like, where on the rope is the waterline? 0:14:17.200 --> 0:14:20.280 Is what I really meant to say. And you would 0:14:20.400 --> 0:14:22.840 need to do that many times as you went down 0:14:23.240 --> 0:14:28.000 your proposed path, because what if the depth increases or decreases. 0:14:28.960 --> 0:14:31.720 So using this method, ship Cruise found a route that 0:14:31.840 --> 0:14:35.200 was at a depth of around two miles from the surface, 0:14:35.480 --> 0:14:38.480 with a relatively flat seabed, and that was chosen to 0:14:38.520 --> 0:14:41.360 be the site for the cable between Newfoundland and Ireland. 0:14:41.680 --> 0:14:44.160 The cable would rest against the seabed without risk of 0:14:44.200 --> 0:14:47.640 rubbing against like craggy rocks and breaking apart, and the 0:14:47.640 --> 0:14:51.040 cable's design meant that it would be heavy enough to 0:14:51.120 --> 0:14:54.240 sink down on its own without the need for additional weights. 0:14:55.080 --> 0:14:59.800 Wildman designed the cable, which had seven copper wires in 0:14:59.840 --> 0:15:03.760 it to carry signals that were kind of UH coiled together. 0:15:04.200 --> 0:15:08.240 The wires were insulated by a triple layer of gutta percha. Now, 0:15:08.280 --> 0:15:10.200 in case you don't remember what that is, I talked 0:15:10.240 --> 0:15:13.400 about in the previous episode. That was an extract from 0:15:13.440 --> 0:15:16.160 a plant that had the same name, and the extract 0:15:16.160 --> 0:15:18.520 could be heated to be made pliable and then would 0:15:18.520 --> 0:15:22.360 behave pretty much like rubber does UH. And that meant 0:15:22.360 --> 0:15:25.240 that it was also an electrical insulator. So the wires 0:15:25.320 --> 0:15:29.320 and gutta percha were nearly half an inch in diameter. UH. 0:15:29.440 --> 0:15:31.800 This core of the cable would then't have a layer 0:15:32.080 --> 0:15:35.520 of yarn soaked in tar, beeswax and other materials wrapped 0:15:35.560 --> 0:15:38.560 around it, which added thickness and stability to the cable, 0:15:39.040 --> 0:15:42.760 protecting the copper from damage, and then would come the armor, 0:15:43.160 --> 0:15:45.640 which was made up of a weave of seven iron 0:15:45.680 --> 0:15:49.920 wires uh the core of the cable weighed one seven 0:15:49.960 --> 0:15:53.280 pounds per nautical mile. This was about a quarter of 0:15:53.320 --> 0:15:58.760 the weight that William Thompson had recommended. But the fully 0:15:59.040 --> 0:16:01.400 armored cable is weight, you know, once it had the 0:16:01.440 --> 0:16:04.960 iron sheath on it. That was a ton for every 0:16:05.000 --> 0:16:07.640 mile of cable, and the route chosen was about six 0:16:08.280 --> 0:16:11.960 miles long. At the cable was about half an inch 0:16:12.000 --> 0:16:15.000 in diameter total at five eighths of an inch. By 0:16:15.240 --> 0:16:18.400 eighteen fifty seven, the cable was ready. The United States 0:16:18.440 --> 0:16:21.800 and UK governments each supplied a steam powered ship for 0:16:21.840 --> 0:16:24.360 the purpose of laying the cable, and the American ship 0:16:24.440 --> 0:16:27.960 was called the Niagara. The British ship was called the Agamemnon. 0:16:28.520 --> 0:16:31.480 Each ship would carry half the length of the cable. 0:16:31.680 --> 0:16:34.040 Is too much cable for one ship to carry At 0:16:34.080 --> 0:16:38.280 that point, there was some disagreement over how this should 0:16:38.320 --> 0:16:40.920 be done and how to join the two lengths of 0:16:41.000 --> 0:16:44.840 cable together. One of the project's leaders, an engineer named 0:16:44.960 --> 0:16:48.080 Charles Tilston Bright, who was one of you know, William 0:16:48.120 --> 0:16:51.240 Thompson's allies. One of the people who sided with Lord 0:16:51.320 --> 0:16:54.120 Kelvin about what the cable should be like. He said 0:16:54.800 --> 0:16:57.080 that what they should do is send the two ships 0:16:57.160 --> 0:17:00.960 to sail to the middle of the Atlantic, join the 0:17:01.120 --> 0:17:05.320 ends of the length of cable together to make one 0:17:05.359 --> 0:17:08.639 single cable, and then have one ship sailed to the east, 0:17:09.280 --> 0:17:11.960 which would be toward Ireland, and one ship sailed to 0:17:12.000 --> 0:17:15.520 the west towards Newfoundland, and that they just bring the 0:17:15.520 --> 0:17:19.320 whole length of the cable out to the end destinations. 0:17:19.880 --> 0:17:22.000 The two ships could remain in contact with each other 0:17:22.040 --> 0:17:24.400 because they could send signals over that cable. They could 0:17:24.400 --> 0:17:28.800 connect those to their instrumentation and actually send electric signals 0:17:28.800 --> 0:17:30.639 from one ship to the other to make sure that 0:17:30.640 --> 0:17:36.080 everything was working correctly. But the rest of the project 0:17:36.160 --> 0:17:40.000 did not really like this um They felt that this 0:17:40.160 --> 0:17:42.520 was not the best way to do it. You know. 0:17:42.640 --> 0:17:44.360 Bright was saying, Hey, if we do it this way, 0:17:44.400 --> 0:17:46.960 then each ship is spending half the amount of time 0:17:47.640 --> 0:17:50.399 out in the ocean once we start. That reduces the 0:17:50.480 --> 0:17:52.959 chance that we run into bad weather. They said, no, 0:17:53.080 --> 0:17:56.320 that sounds too risky. We would rather start in Ireland, 0:17:56.720 --> 0:18:01.520 have both ships go across the ocean, and when the 0:18:01.640 --> 0:18:04.359 length of cable runs out for ship number one. Ship 0:18:04.480 --> 0:18:07.240 number two will splice the end of its cable to 0:18:07.359 --> 0:18:11.080 that one and continue the rest of the way to Newfoundland. 0:18:11.640 --> 0:18:15.560 So in the summer of eighteen fifty seven, numerous barges 0:18:15.920 --> 0:18:19.879 transported the lengths of cable to these two ships, and 0:18:19.960 --> 0:18:23.520 once loaded, each coil of cable measured twelve feet high 0:18:23.560 --> 0:18:26.920 and forty ft in diameter. And the plan was for 0:18:27.080 --> 0:18:29.639 Niagara to go ahead and lay the first half of 0:18:29.640 --> 0:18:33.600 the cable, with Agamemnon following with the second half, and 0:18:33.640 --> 0:18:36.040 once Niagara would reach the end of its cable supply, 0:18:36.520 --> 0:18:40.159 that's where they would splice it all together. Unfortunately, it 0:18:40.160 --> 0:18:42.879 wouldn't work out that way in eighteen fifty seven. And 0:18:42.880 --> 0:18:54.280 I'll explain more if we come back from this break. Okay, 0:18:54.840 --> 0:18:57.480 we had the Niagara and the Agamemnon, but those would 0:18:57.520 --> 0:19:00.720 not be the only ships involved in this little project. 0:19:01.400 --> 0:19:04.560 There were also support ships. There was the HMS Advice, 0:19:04.920 --> 0:19:09.560 the HMS Willing Mind, and the HMS Cyclops. There were 0:19:09.600 --> 0:19:13.280 also two escort ships, the u s S Susquehanna and 0:19:13.359 --> 0:19:17.040 the HMS Leopard. They all set sail to lay the 0:19:17.080 --> 0:19:21.960 cable on August eightifty seven and right away, there were problems. 0:19:22.000 --> 0:19:25.320 So the first segment of the cable was the shore cable. 0:19:25.400 --> 0:19:29.439 This was a shorter length that wasn't the full subsea cable. 0:19:29.840 --> 0:19:32.440 This was the version of the cable that was to 0:19:32.520 --> 0:19:36.440 lay close to the shore, thus called the shore cable. 0:19:36.520 --> 0:19:39.840 It was more heavily armored because it was going to 0:19:39.880 --> 0:19:43.280 be subjected to more wave action and potentially rub up 0:19:43.280 --> 0:19:46.080 against stuff like rocks. Plus there was always the danger 0:19:46.119 --> 0:19:49.240 of a ship anchor snagging the cable, so they wanted 0:19:49.240 --> 0:19:52.520 it to be very heavily armored. But before Niagara could 0:19:52.560 --> 0:19:55.879 even go five miles, the thicker part of the cable, 0:19:55.920 --> 0:19:59.240 this shore cable, caught up in the machinery that was 0:19:59.359 --> 0:20:02.919 used to feed the cable out into the ocean, and 0:20:02.960 --> 0:20:06.000 the cable broke. Now, the crew of the Willing Mind, 0:20:06.880 --> 0:20:09.720 which sounds like kind of an HP Lovecraft story, they 0:20:09.720 --> 0:20:12.720 were able to retrieve the end of the snapped cable 0:20:12.800 --> 0:20:15.040 under the sea, and the crew of the Niagara was 0:20:15.160 --> 0:20:19.000 able to splice it back into place um and so 0:20:19.119 --> 0:20:22.400 they were able to repair the cable and try again. 0:20:23.280 --> 0:20:25.240 Uh they were able to lay the rest of the 0:20:25.280 --> 0:20:28.840 shore cable segment without further incident, and then they spliced 0:20:28.880 --> 0:20:32.919 the end of the shore cable to the length of 0:20:32.960 --> 0:20:36.680 the sub sea cable, the the main cable they were carrying. 0:20:37.240 --> 0:20:41.639 So now, over the next several days, everything worked pretty 0:20:41.720 --> 0:20:44.680 much as planned. Uh, I mean there were some drawbacks. 0:20:44.720 --> 0:20:49.080 Samuel Morris, who was on board the Niagara, got terribly 0:20:49.200 --> 0:20:52.960 sea sick and so he was pretty much incapacitated. But 0:20:53.080 --> 0:20:56.479 the other members, including William Thompson, they were fine, and 0:20:56.520 --> 0:21:00.720 they remained in contact with wild Man white House, who 0:21:00.760 --> 0:21:04.080 remained back in Ireland, using the cable to send signals 0:21:04.119 --> 0:21:08.200 even as they were you know, spooling it into the ocean. Now, 0:21:08.240 --> 0:21:11.440 I said that things worked more or less his planned, 0:21:11.440 --> 0:21:14.479 But but that's smoothing over some stuff that was pretty tricky. 0:21:14.560 --> 0:21:17.280 For one thing, the machine that was spooling out the 0:21:17.320 --> 0:21:20.080 cable had a grooved wheel kind of like a pulley, 0:21:20.119 --> 0:21:22.320 and the cable fit into this groove to be fed 0:21:22.320 --> 0:21:24.760 out into the ocean. But sometimes the cable would slip 0:21:24.800 --> 0:21:27.240 off the wheel. That meant that they had to stop 0:21:27.320 --> 0:21:30.440 in order to you know, get the cable back on 0:21:30.480 --> 0:21:33.680 the wheel to get it back in place. Also, the cable, 0:21:33.800 --> 0:21:37.000 if you remember, had a layer of yarn soaked in tar. 0:21:37.520 --> 0:21:41.440 Some of that tar would occasionally seep outside of the 0:21:41.480 --> 0:21:43.439 cable and get on the wheel, so they would have 0:21:43.480 --> 0:21:45.800 to stop occasionally in order to clean the wheel off, 0:21:45.840 --> 0:21:49.240 because otherwise the cable was sticking to it, so that 0:21:49.400 --> 0:21:54.240 also made things a little slow. On August eleven, eighty seven, 0:21:55.119 --> 0:21:58.280 the Niagara's crew ran into a serious problem. Now, the 0:21:58.320 --> 0:22:00.960 intent was to lay the cable down at the same 0:22:01.080 --> 0:22:04.440 rate of speed as the ship's movement, but several days 0:22:04.520 --> 0:22:08.639 after Niagara had, you know, started this run, they noticed 0:22:08.680 --> 0:22:10.879 that the cable was starting to feed out faster than 0:22:10.920 --> 0:22:13.359 the ship was moving. So, in other words, they were 0:22:13.400 --> 0:22:15.720 they were putting too much cable into the ocean as 0:22:15.720 --> 0:22:18.879 they were going along, which could potentially mean that the 0:22:18.880 --> 0:22:21.359 ship would run out of its length of cable too early, 0:22:21.760 --> 0:22:24.679 and that there was a chance that the cable wouldn't 0:22:24.680 --> 0:22:26.919 reach all the way across the Atlantic, kind of like 0:22:26.960 --> 0:22:29.800 an extension cord that's just a foot too short for 0:22:29.960 --> 0:22:32.520 doing whatever it is you planned on doing. Now, the 0:22:32.600 --> 0:22:35.760 Niagara's crew hit the brakes on the machine that was 0:22:35.840 --> 0:22:39.320 feeding the cable out into the ocean on this spinning wheel, 0:22:39.760 --> 0:22:41.919 if you you know, if you want to imagine it, 0:22:42.960 --> 0:22:45.760 and the weight of the cable was such that the 0:22:45.920 --> 0:22:51.440 cable's tensile strength couldn't match the weight of the cable itself, 0:22:52.040 --> 0:22:54.720 and uh Niagara was in the low point of a 0:22:54.760 --> 0:22:59.680 wave when the brakes had engaged. But then, obviously waves 0:23:00.080 --> 0:23:02.359 have troughs and they also have crests. So as the 0:23:02.400 --> 0:23:05.800 wave was crusting and Niagara went up the wheel had 0:23:05.800 --> 0:23:07.840 its brakes on, it wasn't going to move at all, 0:23:08.560 --> 0:23:12.399 and that amazing amount of tension on the cable was 0:23:12.520 --> 0:23:16.560 enough to make it snap. The machines brakes should have 0:23:16.720 --> 0:23:21.240 released automatically once a certain amount of tension was achieved, 0:23:21.560 --> 0:23:24.439 but it failed to do so, so there is no 0:23:24.560 --> 0:23:27.639 salvaging the lost cable. It was a couple of miles 0:23:27.720 --> 0:23:31.480 down on the ocean floor. The first attempt of laying 0:23:31.520 --> 0:23:35.040 the Transatlantic telegraph cable was just a failure, but from 0:23:35.119 --> 0:23:38.679 failure comes lessons learned, and the team was determined to 0:23:38.680 --> 0:23:42.199 try again the following year. So joining the project at 0:23:42.240 --> 0:23:45.560 this point was William Everett, now the chief engineer for 0:23:45.640 --> 0:23:49.360 the expedition. Everett went to work designing a new machine 0:23:49.520 --> 0:23:52.840 to feed out the cable to the ocean. He created 0:23:52.920 --> 0:23:56.520 a new breaking system to avoid making the same mistakes 0:23:56.560 --> 0:24:01.800 as the eighteen fifty seven voyage, and in that year, 0:24:02.320 --> 0:24:07.520