Atlantic Cable, The (How Cyrus Laid the Cable)

DESCRIPTION: "Come, listen all unto my song, It is no silly fable, 'Tis all about the mighty cord They call the Atlantic Cable." Cyrus Field, despite ridicule and doubt about his ability to do it, after two failures manages to run a telegraph cable across the Atlantic
AUTHOR: John Godfry Saxe (1816-1887)
EARLIEST DATE: 1931 (Shoemaker-MountainMinstrelsyOfPennsylvania)
KEYWORDS: technology ship
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Nov 30, 1818 - Birth of Cyrus West Field
1854 - Field meets with Frederic Gisborne, who had tried and failed to lay a cable connecting Newfoundland with Canada. Field and his partners take over Gisborne's business but decide to try a cable all the way across the Atlantic via Newfoundland
1855 - First attempt to lay a Newfoundland Cable fails
1856 - Cable successfully laid across Cabot Strait; the Newfoundland part of the cable i s complete
Aug 1857 - First attempt at an Atlantic Cable fails
Jun 1858 - Second attempt to lay the cable fails due to storms
Jul-Aug 1858 - Cable successfully laid
Sep 1858 - Cable fails
Jul 1865 - Third attempt, this time using the _Great Eastern_. Cable breaks in mid-ocean
Jun 30, 1866 - beginning of fourth attempt
Jul 27 - Cable completed, with messages starting the next day. The _Great Eastern_ then manages to grapple the 1865 cable, so two lines are complete
Jul 12, 1892 - Death of Cyrus Field
FOUND IN: US(MA)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Shoemaker-MountainMinstrelsyOfPennsylvania, pp. 66-68, "The Atlantic Cable" (1 text) (pp. 54-56 in the 1919 edition)
Roud #14077
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Atlantic Cable Parody" under "Pop Goes the Weasel" (subject)
NOTES [6510 words]: According to Wikipedia, John Godfrey Saxe, who wrote this poem, was most famous for his retelling of the story of "The Blind Men and the Elephant," and also was responsible for the quip that making laws was like making sausages -- you didn't want to see it done. Granger's Index to Poetry lists twenty of his poems which were popular enough to be printed in major twentieth century anthologies; this is one of them, but the only citation of it is in an anthology of poems about history. Still, it can be found online. Shoemaker's version -- which he says was used as a chantey! -- differs somewhat from the original but retains most of the text.
Contrary to what is usually taught in America, most of the key ideas for the telegraph were originate by British scientist Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875), who in his spare time invented the concertina (Porter, pp. 717-718). Samuel Morse did little more than tweak it -- but he did invent Morse Code, which was important as the means used to transmit information efficiently (Gordon, p. 9). And that made Morse famous and (eventually) financially comfortable; the telegraph was all the rage, and he became popular as an ideas person.
At first, of course, the telegraph was used only on land, and for short-distance runs -- a signal had to be strong enough to make it through the resistance in the conducting wire, and the longer the wire, the greater the resistance. But as batteries and wires got better, it became possible to extend the telegraph's range. By 1845, the first wire was run across a river (Gordon, p. 10); in i850, a cable went across the English Channel -- and failed, but the state of the art soon improved (Gordon, pp. 10-11. Note that a cable is a much more elaborate item than a wire, because it has to deal with the water environment).
But cables in European waters were short (a few dozen miles to get across the English Channel, e.g.), and the seas generally shallow. To cross the Atlantic was a much bigger job.
Enter Cyrus W. Field, a member of one of the most accomplished families in America (Cyrus, his father, and three of his brothers would earn entries in the Dictionary of American Biography; Gordon, p.16. I think the DAB editors overdid it; glancing over the entries, I think I would have included only Cyrus and two others, one a Supreme Court justice and one a legal theorist). The family included famous clergymen and lawyers, but it's easy to understand why Cyrus wanted to escape: His mother came from a family so conservative that they inflicted the first name "Submit" on her (Cowan, p. 16, has a portrait of her), and his father's theology was basically puritan; Cyrus was the squirmy kid who had trouble dealing with all the family rigidity (Cowan, pp. 15-17). Cyrus went into business. He had a lot of help from his family connections (Gordon, pp. 22-25), but he definitely made the most of those connections; he made a fortune as a paper merchant, then -- having seriously damaged his health through overwork -- turned the business over to his partner and retired from the company at age 34 (Cowan, p. 9, 40-41).
But he absolutely could not slow down; whatever he did, he did with all the energy he had, meaning that he kept making himself sick all over again (e.g. Cowan, pp. 48-49)..
He was also extremely honest. Early on in his career, he had been part of a company which went bankrupt, resolving its debts for thirty cents on the dollar. Field had no obligation to do anything more -- he had been left holding the bag, but he hadn't incurred the debts, and in any case, the books were closed. But once he had enough money, he went and paid the old creditors all the amount they had lost in the bankruptcy, with interest! (Gordon, p. 25).
It is ironic that he suffered from chronic seasickness (Gordon, p. 25), because few men who were not professional sailors can have crossed the Atlantic more than he did.
It was in the period when he wanted a non-paperwork job that he met a certain Mr. Gisborne, who had tried to build a cable connecting the island of Newfoundland with Canada -- but Newfoundland's rough topography had proved too much; he had run out of money trying to run a wire across the island. He wanted Cyrus's help to finish the project. Not only would it connect Newfoundland with Canada, it would allow news to cross the Atlantic faster, since ships could stop in St. John's and then the news would travel with telegraphic speed (Cowan, pp. 9-11).
Field wasn't inspired by the idea of the Newfoundland Cable; Newfoundland itself wasn't important (in his view), and the time saved carrying messages wasn't enough to be worth the high expense (Gordon, p. 33). I suspect he was right; although for a brief time ships did drop news reports in vessels off Cape Race (see "Loss of the Anglo Saxon"), news from Europe would still be too slow to really be helpful. But Field went on to look at a globe, and noticed that the distance from Newfoundland to Great Britain was a lot less than the distance from, say, New York to Britain. If a cable across the Atlantic was possible at all, Newfoundland was the place. A cable from Newfoundland to New York wasn't a big deal. A cable from London to New York would be a big deal -- if it was possible.
Field sought for advice in the best possible places: Samuel Morse for information about telegraphs and the famous oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury for information about problems he might have to deal with when running a cable across the ocean bottom. Morse was sure telegraph cables could be run for long distances underwater (Gordon, p. 35). In fact, he signed on to Field's project.
Maury -- who had had his own thoughts about a cable -- reported that the ocean floor on the path from Newfoundland to Great Britain had been recently sounded and was relatively flat, and on a relatively shallow plateau, which was what Field needed to run a long cable (Gordon, pp. 38-39; Clarke, p.21). So Field started signing up investors (Cowan, p. 57); on May 8, 1854, he and a few others formed the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, with capital of $1.5 million (Cowan, p. 59).
The first step was to take over Gisborne's charter complete the cable across Newfoundland. Renegotiating the charter to allow a European connection was no problem (Cowan, p. 59); Newfoundland governments in this era were prone to make Big Deals to their own detriment (the British government strongly recommended against the contract, according to Gordon, p. 45, but Newfoundland was internally independent, and it agreed to the deal. It was not the last time they made an incredibly stupid deal in the name of progress; the notes to "The Wreck of the Steamship Ethie" detail how they made a horrid agreement to get a railroad built). But getting a steal of deal from Newfoundland didn't actually string any wires. The absurdly optimistic goal was to finish the Newfoundland line in 1855 and run the Atlantic Cable in 1856.
The consortium had never studied Newfoundland. Cyrus's brother Matthew was given charge of the party responsible for building a telegraph path across the island. He had a crew of 600 men, and a steamer to drop off supplies along the coast. In March 1855, Cyrus asked his brother how many more months it would take to finish. Matthew blew up: "How many months? Let's say how many years!" (Cowan, pp. 63-64). This part of the job, which had been thought to be minor, ended up costing $500,000, or a third of the company's capital (Gordon, p. 48). The connection was finally made in October 1856, after two and a half years of work (Cowan, p. 72).
The first attempt to lay the cable across the Cabot Strait between Newfoundland and the Canadian mainland was frankly a farce. Field & Co had hired a sailing ships, the Sarah Bryant which had carried the cable from England, and the steamer Adger to tow her. But the captain of the Adger would not steer her where he was ordered, and sailed faster than the cable could be unreeled, and then the weather went bad; the attempt failed and much cable was ruined (Gordon, pp. 56-57). Another $350,000 down the drain (Cowan, p. 71). The cable really needed a steamship to lay it. It was finally laid by the Propontis in 1856 (Gordon, p. 59) after the company got rid of all the partygoers and nut cases they had allowed aboard for the first cable-laying attempt..
Both the Newfoundland cable and the land line across Newfoundland broke down soon after (Cowan, p. 79), but that was resolved relatively easily.
Also in 1856, Cyrus headed to Britain to try to make arrangements for the transatlantic cable itself. The government was willing to support the project, as long as the Americans did as well; they would supply a ship to help lay it, and survey the route, as well as paying a fee to use the cable. That gave Cyrus the permissions he needed to form a British consortium to work with his American group (Cowan, p. 76); they also agreed to conduct a detailed sounding of the proposed route (Gordon, p. 66). The new company, the Atlantic Telegraph Company, sold 350 shares at £1000 per share (Cowan, p. 76. Unfortunately, Field reserved 88 shares for Americans, and found that he couldn't sell most of them, so he ended up having to take 61 of them, using up effectively every cent he had left; Gordon, p.68). The organizers perhaps would have been better off with a few more mechanical engineers and fewer money people on the Board (the cable companies seemed to operate in just two modes: driving too hard and ignoring scientific facts, or sitting on their hands), but they did at least recruit William Thomson, the future Lord Kelvin.
Then Field headed back to the United States to reach an agreement with the American navy to get it to cooperate with the British. Many in congress disliked the idea of doing anything with the British, but the forward-looking Senator William A. Seward approved, as did Stephen A. Douglas; the bill (barely) passed both House and Senate (Cowan, pp. 79-80; Gordon, pp. 69-71).
Meanwhile, the company was negotiating the purchase of thousands of miles of undersea cable -- a specialized item, since it had to be watertight but somewhat flexible; it was made only in Great Britain. And the supply was inherently limited because it had to be made with gutta-percha -- which came from sap of the tree of the same name, so the supply was finite. (Gutta-percha in effect was the first hard plastic, used for everything from chess pieces to inkwells to golfballs; there would be no real replacement for it until the discovery of polyethylene shortly before World War II; Clarke, pp.103-105.)
The longer the cable, the better it needed to be built. (An undersea cable needed much better insulation than a land wire, because sea water has electromagnetic properties that interfere with the signals. The first cable across the English Channel had been a failure because this was not appreciated; Clarke, p. 14.) The standard underwater cable design consisted of three copper wires, each wrapped in gutta-percha, wrapped together, then covered with chemically treated hemp, another layer of gutta-percha, and a sheathing of galvanized iron wires; Gordon, p. 53. The transatlantic cable upgraded the design to seven copper wires at the core (Cowan, p. 81. In a bizarre twist, the two companies that manufactured the cables twisted them in different directions, so special work had to be done to make proper splices; Cowan, p. 82). The 2500 mile cable ended up costing £224,000 and weighing about 2500 tons -- too heavy for any single ship available (Clarke, pp. 32-33). It took three weeks just to coil it, with shifts of thirty men at a time working to get it onto the spools (Gordon, p.87).
And, unfortunately, it was not conductive enough to really perform its task. Thomson knew; the "copper" wires were not pure enough (Clarke, p.32). Even with pure copper, the resistance of the cable would be on the order of 3000 ohms, which is already a lot; I don't know if anyone calculated the resistance of the cable as actually laid, but 5000 ohms seems likely; it was a huge signaling problem. But no one knew that yet!
The British and American navies each supplied a navy ship, the Agamemnon and Niagara. It was to prove a tough task for the ships. Clarke seems to think the Agamemnon was ancient, but in fact she was still fairly new, having been laid down in 1849 and launched in 1852; she was the first ship to be designed from the start to use screw propulsion (Payne, p.8). If she had problems, it was mostly because she was the first of her kind. There don't seem to have been any complaints about the Niagara, which was roughly half again as large although several years older than the Agamemnon (Gordon, p.84).
Both ships were modified to hold the cable. Each navy also sent support ships, including one British ship to take soundings as they proceeded (Cowan, pp. 82-83). The ships assembled at Queenstown (Cobh), then set out for the proposed cable base in County Kerry on the west coast of Ireland (Gordon, p. 90). An above-water test of the cable showed that it carried signals well (Cowan, p. 84); apparently no one realized that things would be different once it was underwater.
Originally the plan was to start in mid-ocean, splice the cable there, and have each ship set out for shore, but plans changed at the last minute (Cowan, p. 85). By hooking up at the Ireland end before they started, the ships supposed to be able to stay in touch with home during the cable-laying. They hooked up to the shore on August 5, 1857, and started laying cable on August 6. After running just five miles, the cable broke (Gordon, p. 93, thinks this was because they were still unreeling the extra-heavy cable that was intended for use only near land, where the wear and tear was expected to be heavier). They went back and fixed it and started out again. Three days later, for reasons unknown, the cable stopped sending signals, then restarted (Gordon, p. 96). The day after, due to problems with the machinery, the cable broke again, this time far from land (Clarke, pp 36-37; Gordon, p. 97). There wasn't enough cable left to continue, so the whole thing had to stop for the year while the cable-laying machinery, which could not exert much control over how fast the cable went off the ship, was redesigned (Clarke, p. 38).
This nearly ended the enterprise, because the United States was in the grip of the Panic of 1857. The paper company that was Field's personal source of income was basically bankrupt (Cowan, p. 82; according to Gordon, p. 102, it survived only because people trusted Field's word that he would find a way to replay), and capital was scarce. Almost anyone else would simply have given up. Not Cyrus Field. He wouldn't even take the £1000 per year salary the British side of the consortium apparently offered him (Cowan, p. 95).
The next attempt, in 1858, followed the original plan: Start in mid-ocean, splice the cable there, and head for land in both directions (when they spliced the ends, they threw in a sixpence for luck; Cowan, p. 102. It wouldn't help). At least, this time, Thomson had come up with instrumentation to better test the cable as it was reeled out (Cowan, p. 97. Cowan notes many clashes between Thomson and the company's senior scientist Edward Whitehouse. When they disagreed, Whitehouse almost always won -- and was consistently wrong). They also used an improved braking system, and practiced laying cable first (Gordon, p.108). The planning and preparation was certainly better. This attempt almost failed because of a severe storm (Clarke, pp. 40-41; based on the description on pp. 110-117 of Gordon, it is amazing that the Agamemnon, top-heavy with cable, managed to avoid capsizing and sinking. As it was, she suffered much damage, and several men were injured). Afterward, they quickly suffered three cable breaks. They headed back to Ireland, re-supplied, and went out again (Clarke, pp. 42-43). They almost ran out of coal, and even food, because of more bad weather and other problems (Cowan, p. 103), but at last the Agamemnon reached Ireland with the cable intact. (Clarke, p. 47). The Niagara made it to Newfoundland soon after; between them, they had laid 2050 miles of cable (Clarke, p. 48). Apparently the organizers had forgotten that they had to run a wire to Trinity Bay where the Niagara came ashore (! -- Gordon, p. 131), but that was a detail. The cable was complete.
It was also almost useless. The signals were garbled. Clarke, p. 49, lists the entire set of transmissions sent from Newfoundland on day six of operations. There were 51 words, and they were all requests for slower signals or information on how the signals are being received. it wasn't until August 16, twelve days after the cable was hooked up, that a real message was sent -- a greeting from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan (Clarke, p. 50). It took more than sixteen hours to transmit. A few more messages followed.
There was vast excitement. Apparently "How Cyrus Laid the Cable" was first published in Harper's Weekly at this time (Cowan, p. 119).
Then, on September 1, 1858, the cable failed permanently (Clarke, p. 51) -- signal quality had been deteriorating, and after that date, it was no longer possible to interpret the signals. No one really understood why, because electricity still wasn't understood; although Ohm's Law had been published, few knew of it, and the basic units of measure, volts, amperes, and ohms, were still undefined; there was a sort of measure of voltage (based on the output of a certain sort of cell), but nothing else (Clarke, p. 56). Dr. Whitehouse's technique for long-distance signalling was to crank up the voltage to 2000 volts (which, if the cable really did have a resistance of 5000 ohms, means a current of about .4 amperes, which means they were cranking 800 watts of energy through the wire! Little wonder if it overheated somewhere. We don't know why it failed, but the best guess is Whitehouse's errors, which would force him to spend a long time answering to the investigating committee; Gordin, p. 145). The failure was so rapid that some people said it was all a fake -- but certain messages had news that could not otherwise have been known, so the cable had definitely worked for a while (Cowan, pp.130-131).
(It wasn't much consolation that an even more expensive cable, for which the government itself paid £800,000, was run from Britain to India the next year, via the Red Sea, and promptly failed; Clarke, p. 52. The only good news was, after all these failures, everyone agreed that they needed to figure out just how a cable should be built, and they did solid research over the next few years; Cowan, p. 132; Clarke, pp. 63-64. The British commission concluded that a proper cable was possible, which was good news in a way, although not everyone believed it; Cowan, p. 137.)
After these failures, it was even harder to find new capital -- especially since Field's telegraph company in America lost many of its stations when the American South seceded in 1861, plus Western Union kept pulling away business (Cowan, p. 140). Field spent the years 1861-1864 crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic to raise money (Clarke, pp. 62-63; according to Gordon, p. 168, Field had finally liquidated his paper business during the Civil War, so cable-laying was the only job he had left!). Ultimately, he arguably failed -- although there was another cable expedition, the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance company was largely in charge: They made the cable, planned the operation to lay it -- and put up more than half the cash (Clarke, p. 66). All Cyrus and Co. did was promise a payment if the cable worked.
It is ironic that the cable was successfully laid by using a ship that was notoriously unsuccessful -- indeed, so unsuccessful that her story sounds more like a farce than actual history. The Great Eastern, when built, was a mechanical marvel, five times larger than other ships of the era (Dugan, p. 1) and built to be extraordinarily safe (much safer than the allegedly-unsinkable Titanic, because the Great Eastern had true watertight integrity and a genuine double hull; Dugan, p. 4) She was 22,500 tons (the largest ship in the world for 49 years, according to Dugan, p. 3, although there is some disagreement about just when a bigger ship was built and just which ship it was). She had six masts (even though her sails went almost entirely unused; Dugan, p. 58) and such large engines that she needed five funnels (Dugan, p. 2). She was designed to carry 2000 passengers (some sources say 4000, but there were never plans to embark that many).
Brinnin, pp. 216-217, declares her "'a great swollen hunk of a premature leviathan,' a ship stillborn, a ship out of epoch. Five times bigger than the next biggest ship afloat (no other vessel would exceed her in tonnage displacement for nearly fifty years), she was huge, busy, and slightly grotesque -- not only because of her awesome dimensions, but also because, like a giant born with the brain of a cretin, she lacked the power, if not the will, to govern herself. She had a propeller as big as a windmill, ponderous paddle engines that worked 'with the steadiness and patience of a London drayhorse,' paddle boxes capacious enough to contain Ferris wheels, and six masts, tall as trees, spread with sheetings sufficient to bed a regiment. Yet she was weak and clumsy, given to rolling and to bumping into things, and developed an appetite for soft coal so big that she was never worth her keep."
She was so clumsy, in fact. that Dugan, p. 250, says she damaged or sank ten other ships in her career!
She also lacked any real superstructure (which made her look very strange to our eyes; Clarke, p. 65); perhaps it's no wonder that, despite having an extremely short turning radius for her size (if she turned off her screw and used just her paddlewheels, she could turn around in place), she was hard to maneuver.
Although she would prove to be fast enough to set records for the transatlantic crossing, her propulsion system was not very efficient. She had huge paddlewheels on each side and a single screw propeller -- according to Dugan, p. 132, the largest propeller ever placed on a ship (though reportedly recent submarines have now used bigger ones). This is partly because no one had yet worked out the proper hydrodynamics of a screw (Gordon, p. 157n) but mostly because the had only one screw; newer ships have two, three, or four smaller screws, letting them steer (within limits) on their propellers rather than their rudder. The Great Eastern's rudder alternative was her paddlewheels -- but paddlewheels are not efficient as a driving mechanism (a point the Royal Navy had determined empirically as early as 1845). (According to Gordon, p. 157, her odd system of single screw and dual paddlewheels was necessary because, with big, low-efficiency boilers, there was no room engines to drive more than one screw.) Apart from being inefficient, paddlewheels were prone to damage, as the ship would discover. Throw in her low-pressure boilers (25 psi) and she was inevitably a fuel hog (Dugan, p. 132) . That low efficiency also meant that she needed a lot of men to man her engines. In just the next decade, improvements in boiler design would roughly double the pressure and efficiency, but those improvements came too late for her.
"From the first, the Great Eastern promised big money and, from the first, lost money with a prodigality that confounded every man who ever had anything to do with her. As a result, she went through the hands of one group of owners after another like a hot potato" (Brinnin, p. 217). The idea was to build a ship that could steam from Britain to India nonstop, and then on to Australia, without needing to visit coaling stations (Brinnin, pp. 219-220; Clarke, p. 65). For such a task, a big ship was much more efficient (less water resistance relative to carrying capacity), so they ended up with a design so big that, had the Panama Canal been built, she wouldn't have fit through it (Gordon, pp. 154-155).
She was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, "the most celebrated civil engineer of the middle nineteenth century," known as "the Little Giant" (Dugan, p. 19), who had already built large-for-their-time ships such as the Great Western and Great Britain (Gordon, pp. 152-153).
Even Brunel's flops were on a grand scale. The Great Eastern was jinxed from the start. Half a dozen people died in the process of building her (Dugan, p. 5), and her size meant that she could only be launched horizontally rather than nose first, and only at a high spring tide -- and, as it turned out, only in optimal circumstances even then; it took three months to get her into the water (Dugan, pp. 9-17; the actual launching was on January 30, 1858, after she had gotten stuck on the launching ramp; Brinnin, p. 221). The company that built her failed under the strain of financing it all, to the tune of a three million dollars loss -- in 1850s dollars! (Dugan, p. 37). When another company took her over and fitted her out, Brunel attended -- and had a stroke on the spot (Dugan, p. 40. Even if the shock didn't cause the stroke, the project had aged him; he had lost most of his hair and started to stoop while the ship was built; Gordon, p. 161). The ship had a funnel explode on her first voyage, causing multiple casualties (Dugan, pp. 42-43). When Brunel, still paralyzed from his stroke, was told, he promptly died (Dugan, p. 44). The second group of investors went out of business, since the ship had no source of revenue except tourists looking at the giant artifact; a third group came in to finally fit out the ship and get her to sea (Dugan, pp. 48-49).
When the Great Eastern finally made its first ocean trip, constant changes of schedule and mismanagement meant that she had only 35 paying passengers on a ship with 418 crew! (Dugan, p. 55). She also had a brand-new captain; the man who had been intended to be in charge had recently drowned in a storm (Dugan, pp. 48-49, 56). She made it to New York safely, though she had to wait until high tide to get over the harbor bar (Dugan, pp. 61-62) -- but when they tried to berth her (the first time she had ever actually been berthed), one of her side wheels severely damaged the wharf (Dugan, p. 63). Several people died in the hoopla over her arrival (Dugan, pp. 66-67; he calculates that they brought the total number of people killed by the ship to 22). On her way back to Britain, she made the fastest crossing on record (nine days, four hours; Dugan, p. 86), but she also broke the shaft of her screw propeller. She ran so rarely that her crews were the dregs of the seaside towns. And she couldn't run in winter because she was too cold (Dugan, pp. 86-87). During this time, she hit and damaged H. M. S. Blenheim (Dugan, p. 91).
She finally did make a relatively successful voyage, carrying some 3000 British troops to defend Canada from American and Fenian raids. This trip was made in eight days and six hours, a new record for the westward crossing -- but she almost collided with the Arabia on the way. Although she had done a good job of carrying the troops, the British government declined to hire her again (Dugan, pp. 98-100). In a trip in September 1861 in which she ran into a storm, she was never in danger of sinking, but both her paddlewheels were destroyed and her rudder broke (Dugan, pp. 104-125; Brinnin, pp. 225-230); she might be unsinkable, but it wasn't hard to render her uncontrollable!
On August 27, 1862, arriving in New York, her captain decided she was too heavily loaded to go over the bar of the regular channel, so he took a different route and hit an uncharted rock and tore a huge hole in her outer hull. She survived -- the inner hull held -- but she had an 89-foot-long gash in her outer hull and needed another repair that would take months (Dugan, pp. 140-142) and cost another $350,000 (Dugan, p. 155).
Somewhere in there, she also ruined a ship named the Jane, with the owners of the latter ship brining a lawsuit for damages (Dugan, p.162). The Great Eastern was, simply, too clumsy to be safe and too expensive to keep running as a liner.
Eventually the situation was so bad that a German group apparently proposed to raffle off the ship. That fell through, but in January 1864, her then-owners tried to auction her off (Dugan, p.160). At the first auction, there were no takers (Dugan, p. 161). A second auction was almost as quiet; what would become the cable consortium got the ship for £25,000 (Dugan, pp. 161-162). The old management apparently was selling her without telling the shareholders, who were to lose their entire investment (Dugan, pp. 162-163; I will confess that I couldn't quite figure out just what the management did here, except that it made the former shareholders very upset.)
But all the maneuvers accomplished one thing: the men who had managed her, rather than the old shareholders, now owned the ship, and in 1864 they were able to offer it to Field for cable-laying, with the agreement that they would only charge him if the cable was successfully laid (Dugan, p. 167; on the same page he calculates that the Great Eastern had by this time lost five million, Field only two and a half million, so the ship was "twice the financial flop that Field was"). The price, if the project succeeded, was $250,000 in cable stock.
So what happened when a jinxed project met a jinxed ship? The Great Eastern did have one advantage: She was big enough to carry the whole cable, so there was no need for mid-ocean splicing. (They did have to do a splice off the coast of Ireland, because the Great Eastern was too big to approach the shore along the Irish coast where there was no deep-water port! -- Clarke, pp. 66-67). The first attempt was made in 1865 (Dugan, p. 167). The ship had to be modified, taking out not only passenger space but also two boilers and one funnel (Dugan, p. 168). It would have been a great chance to put in some better boilers, but that apparently didn't happen.
The fact that they were using such a big ship required a change of plans at the Newfoundland end. No longer could they go as far into Trinity Bay as they had in the past; they needed deeper water. So they chose the town of Heart's Content as the cable terminus (Cowan, pp. 148-149).
As they laid the cable, there was a bad moment when the signal stopped; they hauled up the cable, found what appeared to be sabotage (a piece of wire driven into the cable) -- and cut out the section and spliced around it (Dugan, pp. 172-173; Clarke, p. 67). And on they went. More signs of possible sabotage were found later, causing them to mount a guard on the cable -- though it turned out it was a mechanical problem (Dugan, pp. 176-177; Clarke, p. 72): the iron in the sheathing was too brittle and sometimes broke and moved around. Then there was a break in the cable; they managed to grapple it up and splice it (Dugan, pp.180-181), but eventually it broke again, in such a way that they couldn't grapple it; another attempt had failed (Dugan, pp. 184-185; Clarke, pp. 72-73, notes the absurd fact that the failure was not because they couldn't hook the cable; it was that they hadn't brought proper grapnels for the job; their improvised alternatives just weren't strong enough to carry the cable's weight). Happily, they had taken a very good position fix just before it happened (Gordon, pp. 184-185), so they knew with real precision where the cable had broken. They just didn't have the equipment to bring it up, and wouldn't have time to get it before the winter gales.
In early 1866 (Dugan, p. 185), having re-organized yet again (Clarke, p. 75), it was time for another attempt. (Technically, the British, who by this time were running the whole thing, created a whole new company, because Parliament had set limits on the capital they could raise, and Parliament wasn't in session to raise the limit; Cowan, pp. 169-170; Gordon, pp. 189-190.) They took unusual precautions this time -- e.g. the men who were assigned to watch the cable play out were given special costumes designed to make sure they could not carry tools for sabotage; they had no pockets and tied in the back! (Dugan, p. 186). Maybe it brought them luck. On Friday, July 27, 1866, with signals still going through the cable, they arrived at Heart's Content, Newfoundland (Dugan, p. 187). The next day, the cable was spliced in, and Britain and America were connected.
To add one last note of farce to all this, when the Great Eastern arrived in Newfoundland, the cable from Newfoundland across the Cabot Strait to Canada was out of commission, so even though the cable had reached across the ocean, it still wasn't possible to send messages all the way. So Field had to arrange to get that cable fixed, hiring the Newoundland sealing steamer Bloodhound to do it (Cowan, p. 175).
Dugan, p. 187, reports that the price to send a message across the Atlantic was at that time $1.25, and about fifty messages were sent on the first day. This time, the cable would work, and would continue to do so for years.
Having finished her main job, the Great Eastern was sent to try to find the lost cable of 1865. It had been built to something close to the 1866 standard, so if they could grapple it and extend it to Newfoundland, they would have two connections (Dugan, p. 187). A second ship, the Medway, carried the additional cable that would be used to complete the 1865 cable (Clarke, p. 76). They set out to the old cable it as soon as the cable could be transferred and the Great Eastern could load enough coal -- which took longer than expected because one of the coal ships had sunk on its way to Newfoundland (Clarke, p. 79). Finding the cable wasn't too hard, but it broke several times as they tried to bring it up; after many days of this, they hit on the expedient of bringing it partway up, attaching a buoy to hold it, and moving off to another point and lifting from there, so that no part of the cable had to bear all the mass of the run to the surface (Clarke, p. 81). That done, they finally managed to complete the second cable, four weeks after the first (Clarke, p. 82).
In the aftermath, four men were knighted, including Thomson, and two were given baronetcies. Dugan, p.188, notes that nothing was given to John Scott Russell, who had built the Great Eastern; Clarke, p.83, mentions the depressing fact that the two who became barons were both money men; the men who did the actual work were given the lesser honor of knighthood.
Although Cyrus Field was basically done as a telegraphy pioneer, Thomson wasn't; over the next several years, he produced several inventions which dramatically improved the field, including one for recording cable messages (Clarke, pp. 86-87).
Down the road, there were further effects. For example, the cable made European news instantly available to America -- but no one newspaper could afford the high rates. And so United Press International was founded to allow multiple papers access to trans-Atlantic content. The effects on the financial industry were also dramatic, since the London and New York markets could now compare prices on a fairly short time scale (Gordon, p. 211).
That left the question of what to do with the Great Eastern. Louis Napoleon was convinced that the French should buy her -- apparently tricked by a rumor that the Ottoman would make her into a floating harem (Dugan, p. 190). But her problems weren't cured: on her first voyage for the French, four men were killed when a capstan flew out of control (Dugan, pp. 193-194), and she took a loss so dramatic that the company refused to pay her sailors and the ship was, in effect, repossessed (Dugan, p. 202-204). She did, at least, succeed in laying and repairing a few more cables, including one from France to the United States, laid in 1869 (Clarke, p. 88), plus key parts of a cable from Britain to India (Dugan, p. 222, observes that the Great Eastern had been designed to make voyages to India without refueling; she never managed that, but she gave Britain its first direct connection to India of another sort).
But she remained expensive, both in terms of crew and fuel; in 1874, the first true cable-laying ship, the Faraday, was launched, and the Great Eastern was out of the only job she had ever been good at (Dugan, p. 240). She was sent to rot at Milford Haven, since no one wanted her for anything -- even the Milford people wanted her out of their way! (Dugan, pp. 240-241).
By the time they found someone to take her over, she was in pretty bad shape. Soon she was serving as a sort of floating circus and billboard (Brinnin, p. 233) at the Liverpool Exhibition, with signs painted on her sides advertising Lewis's clothing stores (Dugan, pp. 244-250). The ship was displaying such exhibits as "Bob, the Missing Link" (Dugan, p. 252). The people of Liverpool who saw her considered her an eyesore. Her engines were so bad by this time that those who were using her as a floating exhibit had to tow her rather than run under her own power (Dugan, p. 258). All she could do was pander to tourists -- and by 1887, there were so few of those that she was auctioned off again (Dugan, p. 260). When they finally unloaded her, the stockholders who had owned her at this time got just 14% of their original investment back (Dugan, p. 261).
Finally, 31 years after she was built, the Great Eastern was sent to the breakers in May, 1889 -- who found it almost as hard to take her apart as it had been to get her to float in the first place! (Brinnin, p. 218). According to Dugan, p. 266, the wrecking ball was invented because they couldn't figure out any other way to take her apart. But at least disassembling her brought in some money; the ship wasn't worth much, but they got a lot by auctioning her fittings (Dugan, p. 263, who adds that this was the first time that a ship had been sold, in effect, in pieces). It took more than a year and a half to take her apart.
Cyrus Field died in 1892 having, yet again, lost his fortune, due this time to bad behavior by his stockbrokers (Clarke, pp. 85-86 -- but if he had lived, he would probably have been bankrupted the next year anyway due to the Panic of 1893).
It's interesting that there is no Newfoundland song about this event. The telegraph office at Heart's Content -- in effect, the switchboard of the Atlantic Cable -- became a landmark, and the town itself boomed; it was one of the most prosperous places in Newfoundland (Major, p. 312). The old office is now a museum.
This poem apparently originated in the short period between the laying of the 1858 cable and its failure. But the poem is vague enough that it could apply just about as well to the events of 1866; there are no real details except the words "Cyrus Field" and "Atlantic" and "cable." - RBW
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