The First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable

Establishing a submarine telegraph cable to connect North America and Europe took ingenuity, but more than anything else, it required tenacity. There were numerous stumbling blocks before there was finally a direct connection across the Atlantic.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Remember the Great Courses Plus dot com slash Stuff. Welcome
to stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holley,
Trying and Wilson, and today we are listening to a

(01:05):
topic that we have gotten a number of requests for.
One of them that sticks in my mind because the
request from our listener Jeff. But basically, the eighteen thirties
and the eighteen forties were a really exciting time for
communication throughout the world, scientists and inventors were experimenting with
telegraphy in some form or another, and the world sort
of stood on this threshold of information flow. And once

(01:27):
the ability to reach one another through mechanical means started
to become a reality. Of course, as we know living
in the digital age now, that information flow quickly became
a full on jet But it really was like a
pretty speedy transition even then. Uh But to get to
that initial point where things really started to be global,
it took almost two decades to get a message sent

(01:49):
across the Atlantic Ocean by telegraph. That's from the time
the idea was adopted as the next logical step for
global communication to when they actually got a line completed.
And we're king and this is sort of a story
of inspiration and daring, but above all, the real story
here is tenacity. As you will see our story of

(02:09):
the trans Atlantic cable. Unsurprisingly, we'll start with Samuel Morse,
who was credited with the invention of the telegraph, and
his original career trajectory if you're not familiar with it
might surprise you a little bit. I certainly was. Uh So.
Samuel F. B. Morrish was born on April to parents
Jedediah and Elizabeth Finley Morse. And as a student both

(02:33):
at Phillips Academy and then at Yale College, his performance
was pretty middling in all subjects except for art, which
he loved. He was not really aspiring to be an
engineer or an inventor at this point. He wanted to
become a painter when he got out of college. It
was not a particularly lucrative career plan. After an apprenticeship

(02:53):
to a Boston publisher, it was a parent that art
really was the only thing that he was interested in,
so his father sent him to England to study at
the Royal Academy, where he developed his style in the
Romantic tradition. So after studying in England, he returned to
Boston in eighteen fifteen and he set up a studio
there where he continued to paint these large, epic pieces

(03:15):
that were really well regarded, but they weren't very lucrative.
Everybody loved to look at them and talked about how
good they were, but nobody was buying them. So a
few years into his art career, he married a woman
named Lucretia Walker. This was in eighteen eighteen and at
this point he realized he had to make ends meet
and provide for his bride and they were having a family,
so he began taking commissions to paint portraits, often traveling

(03:36):
to do so. Seven years into the marriage, Lucretia died
after giving birth to the couple's third child, and Samuel
was away on a painting job when this happened. He
was so devastated that he wasn't able to make it
home in time for her burial, and this was just
the beginning of a series of heartaches for him. His

(03:57):
father died the following year, and then his mother passed
way a few years after that. So eventually Morse decided
to travel to Europe in eight nine for a three
year trip that was intended to help him move through
his grief. UH This also proved to be a pivotal
move because on the return voyage, once he had had
done this traveling, he met physician and sometimes inventor and

(04:19):
a great potential podcast subject, Charles Thomas Jackson. So, according
to the story, uh, Jackson and Morse discussed the possibilities
of the transmission of messages via electrical current, and Morse
came away from this discussion very inspired. After making some
quick initial sketches for a machine and then spending several
years studying the electric relay work of scientists, Joseph Henry

(04:43):
Morse started building a telegraph prototype. As has been the
case with many inventions we've talked about in the podcast,
Morse's telegraph did not just appear in a vacuum. Not
only was he building on the work of others, but
they're also numerous other inventors who were working on similar
concept of concepts of the time, with all of them

(05:04):
basically driven by a goal of improved communication for humankind. Yeah,
it's important to remember that if you wanted to communicate
something across the Atlantic Ocean, which was a frequent UH destination,
like people in the States were often sending things back
to Europe and vice versa, the fastest you could expect
a letter to reach someone was like a week, And

(05:25):
that was a really fast instance thinking about all the
various things we've talked about over the past years of
the show where problems would have been completely prevented if
it didn't take weeks for a letter to get anywhere. Yeah. Yes,
so this was sort of on a lot of people's minds.
They were like, man, if only I could get communication

(05:45):
to go faster. So that's why many people were working
on this. And so from eighty to eighteen forty two,
Morse and a partner named Alfred Vale worked on getting
funding to finish the development of the telegraph machine and
to develop the community Asian system that would eventually be
known as Morse Code. And a Congressman from Main named

(06:05):
Francis Ormand Jonathan Smith eventually back to the pair and
he helped them get a congressional grant of thirty thousand
dollars to run a telegraph line from the US capital
in Washington, d C. To Baltimore, Maryland that was a
span of thirty eight miles about sixty one kilometers. Their
proof of concept demonstration for Congress had been a line
strung between committee rooms and the capital that relayed several

(06:28):
messages back and forth. Even as the line from Washington's
to Baltimore was being laid, they were already using it.
They would they would sort of put out a stretch
and then attach a machine to it and use it.
And on May one, eighteen forty four, it had reached
within fifteen miles of Baltimore, and the line we was
used to transmit Wig Convention nominees to Morse in Washington,

(06:49):
d C. To announce the word via telegraph line got
to d C more than an hour faster than the
train from Baltimore that was carrying the news. Yeah, that
was kind of a big moment where people were like,
this is viable, this is really going to happen. And
on May eighteen forty four, the first telegraph on the

(07:09):
newly completed DC Baltimore line. So there had been some
going on before, but the completed line, the first UH
note was sent by Morris and it read what hath
God wrought? Once this message had actually been sent, it
led to a period of explosive growth in communications. There
were also multiple challenges to his patent on it, which

(07:29):
he was granted in eighteen forty seven, but ultimately he
was recognized as the inventor of the telegraph. Yeah, just
as with any big invention we've talked about, there were
a lot of people who wanted to say no, no,
I was part of that development. I was an important,
important part of it, including machine. Yeah, including the gentleman

(07:50):
that he had talked with while he was returning from Europe.
Charles Thomas Jackson again, that would be a whole great
episode in and of itself. But over the following decade
after they finish that that line between the capital and Baltimore,
more than twenty thousand miles that's kilometers roughly of telegraph
line was laid in the US and in Europe, a

(08:11):
similar set of criss crossing lines were being laid throughout
the continent, connecting people like never before. Seriously, I want
to make sure people grasp what a huge moment this was.
It's kind of like how we went from uh, regular
kind of clunky cell phones to smartphones and sort of
everything changed. In terms of trying to give a contemporary example,

(08:33):
it was that big of a jump. As quickly as
telegraph lines were spreading, ideas for new ways to extend
and push the technology we're also spreading. It wasn't long
before the idea of sending telegraphs across large bodies of
water took root in the minds of people who were,
you know, thinking about advancements. While a so called Siberian

(08:54):
telegraph line was also considered considered because it would require
fewer dips into the water, a Transatlantic cable was deemed
to be more viable because it would need to travel
a shorter distance. Yeah, it also wouldn't have to deal
quite so much with cold. But of course a line
across or more accurately under the water posed a number

(09:15):
of challenges. It had to be strong and resilient, and
it had to be insulated. But of course there were
also industrious types who were completely ready and willing to
rise to such challenges. Uh. But before we start talking
about them and the herculean efforts that were made to
install this cable across the Atlantic, let's pause for a
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(10:25):
the United States, Cyrus Westfield was the driving force behind
the idea to run a cable under the Atlantic, and
he started championing this idea in eighteen fifty four. The
Field was a financier from Stockbridge, Massachusetts who had made
his money in the paper business, which trick cracks me
up a little bit because you know that might affect

(10:45):
his own financial interests before putting his efforts into submarine telegraph.
And this would not be the first line that was
dropped underwater. A link between Great Britain and France was
completed at the beginning of the eighteen fifties that went
through the English Channel, but this was obviously a far
more ambitious thing than any linking line that had existed

(11:07):
up to that point, and there were other underwater lines
as well, but again much shorter under the entire ocean.
Yeah Field gathered information from a variety of sources in
this whole plan. He spoke extensively with Frederick Newton Gisborne,
who had run a line from Nova Scotia to the
tip of Newfoundland. Before his company collapsed, he talked to

(11:27):
an oceanographer named Matthew Maury to try to gain insight
into issues like currents and the shifting of the sea floor,
and he referred to Samuel Morse to make sure that
the technical requirements for this line would be adequately addressed.
Morris had also runs some underwater lines in the New
York Harbor, so he had some insights into the actual
running of submarine cables. Cyrus Field formed the New York,

(11:51):
Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company to manage this venture, but
he didn't stay independent. It didn't stay that company that
eventually rolled hold up under a parent company that he
helped form called the Atlantic Telegraph Company, and Field at
that point entered into a partnership with three British men
as they established that firm. That was Charles Bright and

(12:11):
then John and Jacob Brett, two brothers, and that happened
in eighteen fifty six. The Brett brothers had already run
that line that connected Britain and France across the English
Channel under the umbrella of the General Oceanic and Submarine
Telegraph Company, so they had some pretty good experience to
start with. The partnership began with three fifty thousand British
pounds and capital Field's own money made up about a

(12:34):
quarter of that startup capital, and then the company was
able to get a charter to run an insulated line
of cable across the Atlantic. The British government also paid
an annual subsidy to the project of a fourteen hundred
pounds per year. So first the cable that they needed
had to be manufactured, and that was a process which
basically took the entire first half of eighteen fifty seven.

(12:58):
It was made by two different companies, Glass Eliott and
Company of Greenwich and Rs. Newell and Company of Liverpool.
And this cable was made using seven twenty two gauge
copper wires which were twisted together and then they were
coated with latex, and that latex shrouded line was then
wrapped in tarred hemp, and then that was coated with
an iron wire casing that was made from eighteen strands

(13:20):
of wire, each made with seven charcoal annealed iron wires
that were twenty two gauge. So it was a lot
of wrapped in coiled wire making up one big cable.
The cable once it was all assembled, was approximately three
quarters of an inch in diameter, and a mile of
cable required a hundred and thirty three miles of wire
to make it. It weighed about a ton per mile

(13:42):
of length. Yeah, that is not not light business. And
in the meantime, the Atlantic Telegraph Company, while that cable
was being made, had been drumming up aid from both
the US and British navies for this project. So the U. S.
Navy had already compiled a survey of the Atlantic Ocean
between Newfoundland and Ireland that identified the most suitable route

(14:03):
for the cable to sit, and once the cable was
completed in the two locations by those two companies, it
was placed aboard two ships. The Niagara from the US
collected the cable that had been manufactured in Liverpool, and
the HMS Agamemnon of Great Britain took on the cable
that had been manufactured in Greenwich. The initial run set
out from the most westerly point of Ireland the first

(14:25):
week of August seven. After the European end of the
cable was brought ashore. First, the Niagara would lay down
its cargo of cable, which would take it to the
mid Atlantic and then the cable aboard the agamem Nod
would be spliced to that and would be dropped for
the rest of the distance to North America. And things
went pretty well for almost a week, but after six

(14:45):
days there was an error handling the braking mechanism that
controlled the cable speed of descent into the water, so
the line snapped less than four hundred miles about sixty
four kilometers into the trip, and they tried with like
grappling mechanisms to try to grab it again, but they
just could not, so the Niagara and the Agamemnon returned

(15:05):
to port. Additional cable had to be made up for
the lengths of line that were lost to the bottom
of the sea. The second attempt started with the same
two vessels, but this time, instead of both setting out
in the same direction, they met in the mid Atlantic
and then spliced the ends of the cables from each
ship together, and then the ships set out in separate
directions like some kind of math problem. Unsurprisingly to me,

(15:31):
the line broke almost as soon as the two ships
started moving. That just seems like the worst, worst possible plan. Well,
that's eventually how it happens. So don't get too judging.
It seems it seems like this is rife. It seems
like a big gamble. But they had done some testing

(15:53):
in smaller bodies of water while they were having that
extra cable made, and it seemed like this was probably
gonna work. So a third attempt was started right away again,
beginning with the joint of the two lines before each
of the ships set out, and with only forty miles
about sixty four kilometers of cable in place, there was
yet another snap. They tried a third time, and this

(16:13):
yielded better results. They did manage to put down a
hundred and forty six miles about two kilometers worth of
line before there was another break, And each time they
would grapple and try to get those ends. But at
some point you had to cut your losses and say
let's go back to port and reformulate our plan. At
this point, I feel like the trans Atlantic cable had
burned down, fell over, and then sank it to the swamp.

(16:36):
That's pretty much how it feels. I would have given
up at this point, but remember they're so deep in.
Four efforts gone bad was a setback. I'm sure plenty
of other people were like me judging their failures, but
it did not stop the project. Money was short, however,
and these numerous failed attempts had already cost about three

(16:58):
hundred thousand pounds, so new shares of the Atlantic Telegraph
Company had to be offered for sale at twenty pounds
each to try to build up the company coffers. And
they did. They made some money, and we're ready to go.
So the Agamemnon and the Niagara set sail for the
rendezvous point in the mid Atlantic once again on June
tenth of eighteen fifty eight, after they had been restocked

(17:19):
with cable and machinery, but this time a storm quickly
derailed their plans. The Niagara managed the weather without too
much trouble, but the Agamemnon really really suffered. According to accounts,
it almost capsized. It lost some of the coal that
it was using for fuel as it was being tossed
around at sea, and while the two vessels did manage
to meet and start their cable laying mission, things quickly failed.

(17:41):
Not only did the cable snap, but the Agamemnon had
to use sail power to try to return to the
rendezvous point. But the Niagara at that point had returned
to Ireland as had been in the plan in the
event that the two ships lost communication. So eventually the
Agamemnon also made it back to Port on July twelve,
and the next two weeks were spent repairing and we're
stocking and resetting the ships. Four vessels met in the

(18:05):
Atlantic Ocean on July to try yet again. The ships
were the Agamemnon, the Valorous, the Niagara, and the Gorgon,
with the Agamemnon and the Valorous aimed at Ireland and
the Niagara and the Gorgon headed towards Trinity Bay, Newfoundland.
The four vessels started laying cable and this time they
managed to connect the line short shore all the way

(18:28):
across the Atlantic. So apparently they just needed two more
ships additionally, well they I think those may have even
been on a prior attempt, but I wasn't clear on
that in my research. They're kind of left out of
a lot of the talk because they were kind of
just support vessels at that point. They were still doing
basically the same plan with two ships running line, and

(18:48):
then they had some support in case, I presume, but
they did manage to get it stretched across and that
cable was completed on August five, when the Agamemnon reached Ireland.
That was one day after or the Niagara had brought
the North American into the cable to Trinity Bay. And
all told, at this point the line ran more than
two thousand miles that's about kilometers across the ocean floor,

(19:12):
and once it was connected to the local telegraph stations,
it worked. On August eighteen fifty eight, the first telegraph
cable to cross the Atlantic was sent and it read
directors of Atlantic Telegraph Company, Great Britain to directors in America.
Europe and America are united by telegraph, Glory to God
in the highest on Earth, Peace and goodwill towards men.

(19:32):
And then that same message was relaid back across the
Atlantic to confirm that the line was working in both directions.
Success for right now, we're going to revel in this
success for just a moment, and while we do, we're
gonna have a quick word from one of our sponsors.
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It's just a better way to cook. So after that
initial success, Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan were then
able to trade messages on this newly laid line, and

(21:43):
the British Monarch cabled on August seventeenth the following message.
The Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful
completion of this great international work in which the Queen
has taken the greatest interest. The Queen is convinced that
the President will join her in fervently hoping that the
electric cable which now connects Great Britain with the United States,

(22:03):
will provide an additional link between the two nations, whose
friendship is founded upon their common interest and reciprocal esteem.
The Queen has much pleasure in thus directly communicating with
the President and in renewing to him her best wishes
for the prosperity of the United States. Buchanan replied, the
President cordially reciprocates the congratulations of her Majesty the Queen

(22:26):
on the success of this great international enterprise, accomplished by
the science, skill, and indomitable energy of the two countries.
It is a triumph more glorious because far more useful
to mankind than ever one by conqueror on the field
of battle. May the Atlantic Telegraph, under the blessing of Heaven,
proved to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship

(22:46):
between the candred nations, and an instrument designed by Divine
Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world.
In this view, we will not all the nations of
Christendom Spontaneous slee Unite in the declaration that it shall
be forever neutral, and that it's communications shall be held
sacred in passing to the place of their destination, even

(23:08):
in the midst of hostilities. So you may have noticed
these are wordy telegraphs WI their talkie talkie uh, and
apparently they were quite vexing to the telegraph operators and
because of the lengthy nature of these messages, they each
took more than seventeen hours to transmit. Don't talk so much,

(23:29):
you guys like a get it. You want to convey
a lot of stuff. Transmission received. Stop line works, stop.
This is awesome. This excitement was really fleeting because the
line had problems almost immediately. There are two primary reasons
that were discussed for the failure. One was that the

(23:50):
cable just was not strong enough and the initial messages
had been sent with too high voltage that taxi line,
so in addition to being so long, they were also damaging.
As for the voltage, this was largely due to the
fact that operators on either side of the Atlantic, we're
fiddling with the settings, trying to figure out how to
optimize the signal, but neither knew what the person on

(24:12):
the other end was doing. As for the weakness of
the cable, there were some claims that one of the
cable manufacturers had left a section of the cable outside
in the hot sun before it was delivered to the ships,
and that some of the latex had melted and ruined
the insulation. Yeah, so it could also have been a
combination of those things. It could also have just been

(24:35):
this is difficult. In my head, there's a little cartoon
where like a crab or a lobster just walks up
and kind of nawse on it, and I know it's
made to not let that happen, but the cartoon is
very cute. I was thinking a shark because I've seen jaws.
So the first transatlantic telegraph line was unfortunately completely dead

(24:55):
within just a few weeks. It finally went silent on
September eighteenth of eighteen fi d eight. But even with
that failure, some really impressive work had been done in
the time that the cable was functional. Over the course
of those twenty three days, two hundred and seventy one
messages had been sent from Newfoundland, and one and twenty
nine messages had been sent from Ireland. Undaunted with this

(25:17):
at this point just unending list of setbacks, Cyrus Westfield
decided to try again. I have to commend him. He
had to start the entire process from scratch, starting all
the way back at the stage of raising the money
to fund the venture for a sixth try. It took
more than seven years to have another attempt ready, but

(25:39):
in eighteen sixty five they were ready to go, and
this time it was a single ship, the Great Eastern,
out of Britain, that was chartered to lay the line
so low. The Great Eastern was larger than all of
the previous vessels that had been used to late telegraph line,
and it started in Ireland and headed west toward North America.
So they're still planning on this same exact positioning, and

(26:01):
at about the twelve hundred mile that's nineteen kilometers one
kilometer mark, it happened again the thing that keeps happening
in all of these field attempts. The cable snapped. So
at this point every effort was made to recover the
dropped end of the line, because at that point they're
already more than halfway there. But eventually they had to
abandon it. For the time being. In the Great Eastern

(26:22):
returned to port. More cable had to be made before
another attempt could be mounted, but finally the Great Eastern
was loaded with enough cable across the ocean, as well
as additional cable to splice the lost end if it
could be found and complete the second line. Okay, brace
because this eighteen sixty six voyage and laying of the

(26:43):
line was shockingly smooth. It went just fine. The end
of the cable which connected Newfoundland to Ireland reached a
fishing village named Heart's Content on the North American coast
on July eighteen sixty six. At if I had been
the person at the helm of that ship, and also

(27:06):
everyone else working on the entire thing, I would have
been like, am I awake right now? I feel like
I would have held my breath for like a month
at a time. As the crown so this time, the
first message to be sent was quote, a treaty of
peace has been signed between Austria and Prussia. It's a
whole lot shorter. Queen Victoria also sent a message to

(27:28):
President Andrew Johnson saying the Queen congratulates the President on
the successful completion of an undertaking which she hopes may
serve as an additional bond of union between the United
States and England. So a lot more concise than previously. Yeah,
which is kind of funny because this line was a
little bit better and stronger, and it probably could have
handled those longer messages much more effectively, but lesson learned.

(27:51):
So this was the first permanent line across the ocean,
and buoyed by the success of that first line, the
Great Eastern did head back to find the lost line
from its earlier mission, and they did manage to locate it,
even though it had sunk sixteen thousand feet it's about
four thousand, eight hundred and seventy sevens to the ocean floor,
and that line was grappled, pulled up, and it was spliced,

(28:13):
and a backup line was also successfully completed on September eight.
Also amazing, the telegraph cable was made available to customers
right away. But it was really uh service for the
incredibly wealthy to senday Transatlantic telegraph cost a dollar per letter,
payable in gold. That would be a lot today dollar

(28:35):
a letter. Uh So in eighteen sixty six, that was
an incredible amount of money. Yeah, that was like mind
blowing lee costly, But keep in mind that like part
of what was driving all of these attempts. One, it's
like this sort of human kind, like let's all communicate
with each other, global village ideal. But it was also
a business venture. So part of what gave them that tenacity,

(28:57):
I think was that they were all in and they
were like, if we have want to make money off
this thing, if we ever want to make our money back,
we got to finish it. Uh, and that's going to
be really expensive. But they did go into business and
did quite well. More undersea lines were laid in the
two decades following that first permanent cable, with an estimated
hundred and seven thousand miles that's a hundred seventy two

(29:19):
thousand kilometers of cable along the bottoms of the world's
oceans by the late eighteen eighties, so just twenty years later,
it was everywhere. And the lifespan of those first two
cables was not especially long. I mean, it was a
lot longer than that first successful attempt. One of them
failed in eighteen seventy two and the other in eighteen
seventy seven, so one lasted for six years and the

(29:40):
other for eleven. But by that point this failure was
no longer an issue because there was a lot of
redundancy in the system by that point thanks to other
faster cables that were running along the same lines. So
global communication network basically established. I mean, there were lots
of other places that needed to be connect did, but
there was no longer an ocean that needed to be crossed. Yeah,

(30:03):
I mean they were. They were connecting across oceans pretty
much all over the place, which is pretty amazing. Um
and those lines were used for a long time. It
really wasn't until you know, into the nine hundreds when
they were viable other options. So very cool, Tracy, I
have a lot of listener mail and some of it

(30:24):
is delightful, So um brace because we got some really
good gifts. I'm gonna be frank their gifts that I
will freak out about more than you, but they're really good.
But the first I'm going to do a postcard, which
is from our listener Valerie. She sent us a beautiful
postcard of the Pieta and she says, Dear Tracy and Holly,
my husband and I are visiting Rome for the first

(30:44):
time and we had an amazing visit to the St.
Peter's Basilica. Our tour guide told us a snippet about
the man who took a hammer to Michelangelo's Pieta, But
thanks to your podcast, I was able to share with
my husband much much more about that incident. Thank you
so much, Valeries as beautiful. It's always like the key
to my heart is to send me an art postcard.
The next uh piece of mail I have to reach

(31:07):
across the table to get it. That we have is
from our listener, Jim, and it is very dear and
it's to me, so it says, dear Holly from your podcast.
I know you're an ardent Victoria file as am I,
so you may already have this book, but I'm hoping not,
and that it's new to you. I love history and
I love family history. What better way to enjoy both
than to learn about Queen Victoria and her many descendants.

(31:29):
If you do have this book already, please just pass
it along. I'll renew my request for a podcast on
Princess Louise. Uh. That's probably gonna happen before too long.
She was the daughter of Queen Victoria, and he says,
I so enjoy the podcast. You and Tracy do. Keep
up the good work, Jim. And it's this beautiful book
about Queen Victoria's family in told through photographs, and it's

(31:49):
amazing and I did not already have it. I have
seen it before at the library, but I did not
have a personal copy. So this is going to be
very very treasured. Thank you so much, Jim. I can't
even tell you how much I love this. Uh and
your wish is probably gonna come true because that the
your topic is on my short list. Okay, our next
one is also amazing. Here's the downside. I cannot make

(32:11):
out the listener's name, but it came from France and
I am in love with it. So this reads, hello, ladies.
I've been listening to your podcast for a few months now,
first working my way through the archives and now being
a subscriber. Wanting to thank you for many hours of
enjoyment and knowing Holly is a vintage fashion lover, I
thought you might like these. It's not Victorian, I know,
but close and don't you love the drawings. I'm also

(32:33):
adding a couple of postcards from the Museum of Decorative Arts.
Thanks again and enjoy Oh my goodness. So Tracy, here's
what came in the mail. There are things you will
recognize because we saw them when we visited F I
T in New York and went to their archives. Original
copies of lamode Ilis play from n and nineteen o two.

(32:53):
That's amazing. So if anybody saw me sort of choked
up and weeping at my desk this morning, it was
me opening this parcel. All my goodness, it's amazing. I
don't I'm almost scared to touch them. I don't want
my oils from my fingers to degrade them. They're in
quite good shape, but I want to look at everything,
and they're really really beautiful. Holy Moses. So I feel

(33:14):
bad that I do not know your name to thank
you by name, but um, please feel free to shoot
us an email let me know what your name is
so I can thank you properly. And they're also, as
as mentioned, two beautiful postcards. One is a gorgeous robe
from the eighteen hundreds with the watchau pleats down the back,
and another is a gentleman's coat. Oh my goodness, so

(33:36):
generous and so kind to all of our listeners. Those
are some really amazing gifts to come into you this morning.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast at house to works dot com.
You can also find us across the spectrum of social
media as at missed in History. So we're on Twitter
at misst in history, Facebook dot com, slash mist in History,

(33:57):
pinterest dot com, slash mist in History, miss in history
dot tumbler dot com, and on Instagram at mt in history,
where I will hopefully get my act together and have
some decent pictures of these delightful gifts that have come
our way. Uh. If you would like to go to
our parents site to do some research, you can do that.
You can type in whatever your heart desires at how
stuff works dot com in the search bar, and you're
going to get a plethora of content to explore and enjoy.

(34:20):
You can also visit me and Tracy at misst in
history dot com, where we have a back catalog of
every episode of the podcast ever of all time, as
well as show notes from the era that Tracy and
I have been working on it and occasional other delights.
So please come and visit us at misston history dot
com and how stuff works dot com for more on

(34:45):
this and thousands of other topics because it how stuff
works dot Com