Launching buoy on August 8, in lat. 51° 25´ 30´´; long. 30° 56´ (marking spot where cable had been grappled)

Forward deck cleared for the final attempt at grappling, August 11

THE

ATLANTIC TELEGRAPH.

I SHALL not detain the readers of this brief narrative with any sketch of the progress of electrical science. There are text-books, cyclopædias, and treatises full of information concerning the men who worked in early days, and recording the labours of those who still toil on, investigating the laws and developing the applications of the subtle agency which has long attracted the attention of the most acute, ingenious, and successful students of natural philosophy. For the last two centuries the greater number of those whose names are known in science have made electrical experiments a favourite pursuit, or turned to them as an agreeable recreation from severer studies. The rapidity with which electricity travels for considerable distances through insulated conductors soon suggested its use as a means of transmitting intelligence; but the high tension of the currents from friction machines, and the difficulty of insulating the conductors, were practical obstacles to the employment of the devices, some of them ingenious, recommended for that purpose from year to year. Otto Von Guericke, and his globe of sulphur; Grey, with his glass tube and silken cords; and Franklin, with his kite, were, however, the precursors of the philosophers who have done much, and whose successors may yet do much more, for the world. It is not easy to decide whether it is the man who gives a new idea to the world, or he who embodies that idea in a form and turns it into a fact, who is deserving of the credit to be assigned to any invention. A vague expression of belief that a certain end may be attained at a future period by means then unknown does not constitute a discovery, and does not entitle the person who utters it, verbally or in writing, to the honour which is due to him who indicates specifically the way of achieving the object, or who actually accomplishes it by methods he has either invented or applied. The Marquis of Worcester certainly did not invent the steam-engine; neither did Watson, Salva, Sœmmering, or Ronalds, or any other of the many early experimentalists, discover electric telegraphy. But there is a degree of credit due to those who, contending with imperfect materials and want of knowledge, persist in working out their ideas, and succeed in rescuing them from the region of chimæras. The inventions of one render capable of realisation the ideas of another, which but for them had remained dreams and visions. The introduction of a novel product into commerce, or the chance discovery of some property in a common material, may draw a project out of the limbo of impracticabilities. A suggestion at one period may be more valuable than an invention at another, and adaptations may be more useful than discoveries. Indeed, when the testimony on which men’s reputations, as finders or makers, rest, is critically examined, a suspicion is often generated that there have been many Vespuccis in the world who have given names to places they never found, and taken or received credit for what they never did.

If any person takes an interest in determining who was the inventor of electric telegraphy, he should study the works and mark the improvements of the natural philosophers of the last as well as of the present, century, and he can then arrive at some result without exciting national jealousy, or injuring individual susceptibilities. Humboldt assigns the credit of making the first electric telegraph to Salva, who constructed a line 26 miles long, from Madrid to Aranjuez, in 1798. Russia claims the honour of having invented aerial telegraphic lines, because Baron Von Schilling proposed a line for the Emperor from St. Petersburg to Peterhoff, below Cronstadt, in 1834, and was laughed at by scientific Muscovites for his pains. But the Baron certainly did transmit messages along wires supported by poles in the air. The Count du Moncel, in his recent “Traité de Télégraphie Electrique,” gives to Mr. Wheatstone the palm as the original inventor of submarine Cables, to which award, no doubt, there will be some dissent. Mr. Wheatstone, however, as early as 1840, brought before the House of Commons the project of a cable, to be laid between Dover and Calais, though he does not seem to have had at the time any decided views as to the mode in which insulation was to be obtained. In 1843, Professor Morse, detailing the results of some experiments with an electric magnetic telegraph between Washington and Baltimore, in a letter to the Secretary of the United States, wrote: “The practical inference from this law is that a telegraphic communication on the electric-magnetic plan, may with certainty be established across the Atlantic Ocean. Startling as this may seem now, I am confident the time will come when this project will be realised.” But for the experiments and discoveries of Oersted, Sturgeon, Ampére, Davy, Henry, and Faraday, and a long list of others, such suggestions would have remained as little likely to be realised as the Bishop of Llandaff’s notions of a flying-machine, or the crude theories of the alchemists. He who first produces a practical result—something which, however imperfect, gives a result to be seen and felt, and appreciated by the senses—is the true ποιἡτης—the maker and inventor, whom the world should recognise, no matter how much may be done by others to improve his work, each of those improvers being, after his kind, deserving of recognition for what he does. A year before Professor Morse wrote the letter to Mr. Spencer, he took some steps to show that which he prophesied was practicable. In the autumn of the year 1842 he stretched a submarine cable from Castle Garden to Governor’s Island in the harbour of New York, demonstrated to the American Institute the possibility of effecting electric communication through the sea, and submitted that telegraphic communication might with certainty be established across the Atlantic. Later in the same year he sent a current across the canal at Washington. But that was not the first current transmitted under water, for as early as 1839, Sir W. O’Shaughnessy, the late Superintendent of Electric Telegraphs in India, hauled an insulated wire across the Hooghly at Calcutta, and produced electrical phenomena at the other side of the river. In 1846, Col. Colt, the patentee of the revolver, and Mr. Robinson, of New York, laid a wire across the river from New York to Brooklyn, and from Long Island to Coney Island. In 1849, Mr. Walker sent messages to shore through two miles of insulated wire from a battery on board a steamer off Folkestone.

It was in 1851 that an electric cable was actually laid in the open sea, and worked successfully; and the wire which then connected Dover with Calais was beyond question the first important line of submarine telegraph ever attempted. In the year 1850, Mr. Brett obtained a concession from the French Government for effecting this object,—an object regarded at the time as one purely chimerical, and decried by the press as a gigantic swindle. The cable which was made for the purpose