Despite low morale among the crews, a third expedition set out.
The boats met in the centre of the Atlantic on 29 July, 1858, and
attached the cables together. The ships veered off-course wildly,
due to the ships' compasses being affected by the magnetic field
generated by the electrically-charged coiled cable, but that
problem was solved by a pilot boat used for navigation. Crucially,
there were no cable breaks, and the Niagara made it to Trinity Bay in Newfoundland on 4 August, and the Agamemnon
arrived at Valentia
Island off the west coast of Ireland on 5 August. Over the
following days, the shore ends were landed on both sides using a
team of horses, and tests were conducted.
Then, on 16 August, the first message was successfully sent, and
was swiftly followed by a telegram of congratulation from Queen
Victoria to US President James Buchanan, which expressed a hope
that the communications cable would create: "an additional link
between the nations whose friendship is founded on their common
interest and reciprocal esteem".
Buchanan shot back a rather more flowery response which said
that "it is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to
mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle. May
the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of heaven, prove to be a
bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations,
and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse
religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world".
His verbose message will have caused headaches for the
operators. The reception across the cable was terrible, and it took
an average of two minutes and five seconds to transmit a single
character. The first message took 17 hours and 40 minutes to transmit.
On 3 September, 1858, the cable failed. In an attempt to
increase the speed of transmission, the voltage on the line was
boosted from 600V to 2,000V, and the insulation on the cable
couldn't cope. It failed over the course of a few hours, and it
would be another six years before the capital was raised for another
"It's still down there", John Kincey, a principal engineer from
Cable & Wireless Worldwide and an expert on transatlantic
undersea cables, told Wired.co.uk. "Most of them are. They're
cleared near the beaches so that they don't interfere with fishing,
but in most cases they're still at the bottom of the sea."
There have been some moves to recover the copper from the
cables, which is valuable, but in many cases they can be a nuisance
to modern cable engineers. "We'll be trying to repair a cable,"
said Kincey, "and we'll pull up the wrong one."
However, although we're now laying fibreoptic cables rather than copper ones, Kincey says the
techniques in laying and protecting the cables are still remarkable
similar. "You've still got the same principles in effect. The cable
is still covered with helical steel wires to protect the central
core, and breaks are found by testing the resistance of the metal
inside to determine the length before there's a break."
The major difference is the capacity. "While the first few
cables could only manage a few words per minute", says Kincey,
"modern submarine cables can transmit more like 84,000,000,000
words per second." Cable & Wireless Worldwide have plans to
increase that further, with 100Gbit/s line systems expected to come
online within the next 18 months -- 50,000 times greater per fibre
than the first fibreoptic cable that went live in 1988.
So next time you're reading our US colleagues' website over a
transatlantic fibreoptic cable, remember the steadfast work of
Frederick Gisborne and Cyrus Field back in 1858, in a pair of boats
in the middle of the Atlantic.
We've got loads of archived photos from a 1906 cable-laying
expedition that used similar techniques. Hit up the gallery below
to check them out.