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Atlantic Cable

"A long series of snapped cables plagued the project. The Atlantic Telegraph Company, with help from the British and U.S. governments, successfully connected Ireland and Newfoundland with a submarine telegraph line on 5 August 1858. This cable never worked well and failed completely on 25 October of the same year. The company's numerous errors
Atlantic Cable 1858
contributed to the cable's malfunctioning. Pressed by time constraints, it cut corners in the design and manufacturing processes, producing a cable that was too light and poorly insulated and had a copper core of uneven quality. The company also allowed the cable to be exposed to the sun and air, resulting in a deterioration of the gutta-percha from oxidation. The decision to send an enormous electrical charge through the cable, further damaging the defective insulation, applied the coup de grace. By 1861 the Atlantic Telegraph Company had lost £350,000 on the Atlantic cable project. The outbreak of the Civil War posed political barriers to Anglo-American cooperation and absorbed capital and energy that might otherwise have been invested in a new cable. The participants of the 1858 effort decided that they must better understand the problems of underwater telegraphy before mounting another costly expedition. A joint committee composed of members appointed by the British Board of Trade and the Atlantic Telegraph Company thoroughly investigated the 1858 failure, making many valuable suggestions and disseminating scientific knowledge from fields relevant to submarine cable construction. The new cable, weighing almost five thousand tons, carried three times as much copper and one-third more gutta-percha than did its predecessor. Its improved tensile strength allowed it to sustain eleven times its weight per mile in water (the cable at the surface of the water bore the weight of all the cable not yet resting on the ocean floor), as compared with the 1858 cable, which could sustain less than five times its weight per mile. The outlook was further improved by the fact that the Great Eastern, the largest ship of the nineteenth century, would be laying the cable. The Great Eastern used a combination of paddle wheels and a screw propeller that gave it great maneuverability, while its capacious interior enabled it to carry the entire cable submerged in large water tanks that protected the gutta-percha. The Great Eastern started from Ireland on 23 July 1865. The expedition was just six hundred miles from North America when the new cable broke during an attempt to repair a defective segment. Efforts to retrieve the cable failed. In the wake of yet another disappointment, the Atlantic Telegraph Company formed a new corporation, the Anglo-American Telegraph Company, in order to raise the necessary capital for another attempt in 1866. Finally, on 27 July 1866, the Great Eastern successfully reached Newfoundland with a functioning cable. Shortly thereafter, the Great Eastern and two other ships raised the cable lost the year before. The Great Eastern finished laying the 1865 cable, and two working telegraph lines rested on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean by 8 September 1866. In 1869, a French firm, the Societe du Cable Transatlantique Francais, used the Great Eastern to lay a third cable. This line more directly connected France and the United States, extending from Brest to Duxbury, Massachusetts, via the island of St. Pierre. Anglo-American Telegraph reacted to the ending of its monopoly by forming a cartel with the French challenger on 15 January 1870. The agreement gave the French Societe 36.66 percent of the revenue from the three cables. Improved versions of these cables would remain in use until the development of long submarine telephone cables and communications satellites during the second half of the twentieth century."

[from "Telegraph Diplomats: The United States' Relations with France in 1848 and 1870" by David Paull Nickles in Technology and Culture 40.1 (1999) 1-25]

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