Cables, Atlantic and Pacific

CABLES, ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC

CABLES, ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC. Telegraphy had barely been established on land in the mid-1840s when thoughts turned to bridging the Atlantic Ocean. The development of large ocean-going steamships and the plastic material gutta-percha, for insulating copper wires, made the idea feasible. When cables were successfully laid across the English Channel and the Mediterranean in the 1850s, investors grew optimistic about the chances for more ambitious ventures.

British interests dominated the early cable projects. The American paper wholesaler Cyrus Field financed a line up to and across Newfoundland, but the money and expertise for the ocean route were to be found among London, Liverpool, and Manchester merchants. The British and American governments supplied guaranteed subsidies for a working cable as well as ships for the laying operations. After an unsuccessful attempt the year before, in 1858 British and American steamships met at midocean to try again. The line broke three times—each time requiring a new start—before, on August 5, a single-wire connection was made between Valencia, Ireland, and Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. The event was greeted with great excitement; during the celebration, fireworks lit atop New York city hall sparked a blaze that destroyed most of the building's roof. Unfortunately, attempts to use high-voltage pulses aggravated flaws in the cable, and it failed entirely by October 20.

The Civil War emphasized the need for rapid transoceanic communications. In 1865 the entire length of a transatlantic cable was loaded on board the Great Eastern. It broke two-thirds of the way across. On 27 August 1866, a renewed attempt was successful; the 1865 cable was then picked up and completed. Another cable was laid in 1869.

In 1884 the mining mogul John W. Mackay and James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald laid the first two American-sponsored cables. Many others followed. New techniques were developed to clarify the blurred signal that came through these 2,000-mile spans. Two systems emerged, one developed by the Eastern Company (British) with its long chains of cables to the Far East, the other by Western Union (American) with its dominance—in the twentieth century—of the high-density North Atlantic routes. The first (British) Pacific cable was not laid until 1902; it ran from Vancouver to Australia and New Zealand. In 1903 the first link of an American Pacific cable (promoted by Mackay) was completed between San Francisco and Hawaii; it was extended to Guam and the Philippines. In 1956 procedures were finally perfected for submerging repeaters, or amplifiers, with the cable; this greatly increased the information capabilities, making telephone transmission possible. American companies, especially the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, led cable advances in the twentieth century.

Submarine cables proved immeasurably important politically and commercially. Their effect was often psychological, reducing U.S. separation from the rest of the world from weeks to seconds. They also were valuable in wartime; during World War I, German U-boats attempted (unsuccessfully) to knock out the cable link between Washington and London by sinking explosive charges on the western terminus of the cable just off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Despite the rise of radio, satellite, and wireless telephones, transoceanic cables, using fiber-optic technology, remained crucial links into the twenty-first century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Coates, Vary T., and Bernard Finn. A Retrospective Technology Assessment: Submarine Telegraphy: The Transatlantic Cable of 1866. San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1979.

Dibner, Bern. The Atlantic Cable. New York: Blaisdell, 1964.

Finn, Bernard S. Submarine Telegraphy: The Grand Victorian Technology. London: Science Museum, 1973.

Bernard S. Finn / a. r.

See also AT&T ; Electronics ; Intelligence, Military and Strategic ; Radio ; Telegraph ; Western Union Telegraph Company .

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