‘The most gigantic electrical experiment’: The Trials of Telegraphy

Abstract

In the frantic debates of the spring and early summer of 1858, prior to a renewed attempt to establish a submarine telegraph line between Britain and North America, Scientific American told its readers that once the cable was ‘successfully laid down’ it would ‘remain the most gigantic electrical experiment ever made’.² The ambivalence of that statement — the telegraph as a robust product of electrical science, or as vast but fragile innovation — seemed to be justified by the events of the late summer. On 6 August 1858 Ireland and Newfoundland were in electrical communication; by 20 October 1858 telegraphic communication between Britain and her North American empire totally ceased.

After the harassments and disappointments of a year, when wealth and labour, care and anxiety, skill and invention might appear to have been absolutely thrown away, and to have gone to swell the vast amount of profitless labour which is done under the sun, it is no small solace to meet with such sympathy as you now manifest.… [By] your presence here this evening you show an interest in the great undertaking, animated by a conviction that the foundation of a real and lasting success is securely laid upon the ruins which alone are apparent as the results of the work hitherto accomplished. (Cheers.) … What has been done can be done again … improbable, impossible as it seemed only six months ago — chimerical and merely visionary as such a project seemed ten short years earlier — instantaneous communication between the Old and New Worlds is now a fact. It has been attained. What has been done will be done again. The loss of a position gained is an event unknown in the history of man’s struggle with the forces of inanimate nature.

— Professor William Thomson rebuilds confidence in the recently failed transatlantic telegraph cable in a speech to an audience of Glasgow’s leading citizens reported in the Glasgow Herald on 21 January 1859¹