September 10, 2024 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, miles and miles of wire placed on ships and thrown into the ocean connected the world like never before and would help determine the outcomes of World Wars and beyond. John Steele Gordan tells the story of how the Transatlantic Cable came to be.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show.
And our favorite subject, as you know, is American history. Nowadays,
we never have to think about how long a message
might take to get somewhere or to someone. In fact,
often if there isn't a near instantaneous reply, we often
(00:32):
get frustrated or even annoyed. If the message is going
from Oxford, Mississippi, or sending to let's say, Oxford, England.
We want it now, and we want it fast. John Steele,
Gordon historian and friend of Hillsdale, is here to tell
us how the story of the telegraph and the Transatlantic
Cable changed the world.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
You know, some inventions are more important than others. I
mean Oscar Hammerstein, the first a great opera in Presario,
was the grandfather of the lyricist, who was a great
inventor too, by the way, but he once invented a
reversible necktie so you could spill gravy on two sides,
and he sold it. He made money on this thing,
but this did not change the world. It had been
(01:19):
known for one hundred years that you could send electricity
down a wire. Many very important scientists of the eighteenth
century had investigated this, including Benjamin Franklin, whose famous experiment
with the kite and the key proved that lightning is
an electrical phenomenon. If you're at tempted to reproduce Franklin's experiment,
I would strongly suggest that you don't. It was a
(01:42):
parlor game until the nineteenth century when wire became cheap
because wire factories powered by steam could draw out copper
very quickly and efficiently. Before then you had to beat
it out, And so the telegraph became practical in the
early nineteenth century, and people all over the world were
trying to do it. Two men in England, Wheatstone and Cook,
(02:03):
developed and patented a system in eighteen thirty seven that
actually worked. It was kind of clunky, but it worked.
Samuel Morris in this country sent his famous message what
hath God Wrought in eighteen forty four, and his system
eventually became adopted worldwide because it was simpler than the
other systems, and also because of his marvelously efficient code,
(02:25):
which is the only part of the whole system that
he invented entirely himself. Everything else was mainly bits and
pieces He had borrowed, and the code was It was
so efficient that people discovered very soon that they could.
At first they would write down the dots and the dashes,
and then they would translate them. They found that once
telegraphers got used to it, that they could actually do
(02:46):
it by ear and just write down the message. One
of the very first people to learn how to do that,
by the way, was a young telegrapher in Pittsburgh whose
name was Andrew Carnegie. And telegraph wires sprung up like crazy.
They often used the the rights of the railroads as
a convenient place to string their poles and their wires,
and it wasn't long before the railroads learned that they
(03:08):
could use a telegraph as a signaling system. Because most
of the railroads those days were single track, and so
if there was an oncoming train expected and it didn't come, well,
this train had to sit on the sighting until it came.
With a telegraph, they could telegraph had saying you know
we're stuck, You guys can come on. Suddenly. The railroads
are much more efficient. Prices went down, use went up.
(03:32):
But underwater telegraphy was another manner nobody knew of. It
was possible, but there was a very strong reason to try,
and that was in the eighteen forties and fifties, the
strongest country in the world was located on archipelago off
of northwest Europe. They wanted to be able to connect
to Europe, and so it was trying mean the English
I've always loved to be They loved that twenty two
(03:54):
miles of water between them and the French, but they
also mean the famous mid nineteenth century times of London
headline fog and channel continent cut off. And so a
pair of brothers named Brett ordered thirty miles of telegraph
wire and put on the back of a boat and
(04:16):
reeled it out and crossed a channel and tried to
send a message back to Dover. And the message got
there was gibberish, undecipherable, but at least it proved that
you could get an electric signal through twenty two miles
of a submarine cable. And what made the cable possible
was this stuff called gutta percher. The sole use of
(04:41):
gut a perche today is it's used to fill root canals.
After you've had the nerve removed, the datis puts in
gut a perture, and shortly after it came into use,
a golf playing clergyman in Scotland wondered if they might
possibly be able to make golf balls out of gut
a perchure because they had been making it. They were
called They were made of leather and stuffed with boiled
(05:02):
goose feathers and this was a very highly skilled job
stuffing the feathers into the golf ball, and they were
very expensive and they only lasted maybe two or three games.
So this clergyman, who loved to play golf but didn't
like paying for the featheries, made golf balls out of
gutta percha and hey, it worked great, and they were
(05:23):
very much cheaper. And he discovered after he'd played with
them two or three times that the ball started going further,
and he didn't understand why. We do not understand why. Now.
It was the dents and the knicks and parted by
the golf clubs gave it better aerodynamics. And so they
put dimples on golf balls, and that's why the dimples
(05:45):
are there to this day, because the ball goes further.
And then golf players love that characteristic. And then would
come to a guy who was responsible for the cable
wouldn't have happened without him. It would have happened eventually,
but it wouldn't have happened nearly as soon as it did.
And his name was Cyrus Field, and he came from
(06:07):
an old New England family from Connecticut. His father was
David Dudley Field, a great New England clergyman. He's distinguished
enough as a clergyman and as an author to be
listed today in the Dictionary of American Biography, which is
the standard twenty four volume work on distinguished Americans of
(06:28):
the past. The Reverend David Dudley Field and his wife
had eight sons. They had three daughters and eight sons.
Two of the sons died, one died in childhood, one
died in very early manhood. He was lost at sea.
Of the six sons who lived to a full lifetime,
four of them made it into the Dictionary of American
(06:50):
Biography on their own. The two who didn't. One was
a very distinguished engineer, and the other was President of
the Massachusetts Senate for three terms. So he may have
been a great clergyman, but clearly the Revan David Dudley
Field was a pretty good father too.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
And you're listening to John Steele Gordon. And by the way,
his book A Thread Across the Ocean The Story of
the Transatlantic Cable is terrific. Go to Amazon dot com
pick it up, or the usual suspects. When we come back,
more of the story of how the telegraph went from
Samuel Morse to winning World War One. Here on our
(07:29):
American story. Folks, if you love the stories we tell
about this great country, and especially the stories of America's
rich past, know that all of our stories about American history,
from war to innovation, culture and faith, are brought to
us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place
where students study all the things that are beautiful in
life and all the things that are good in life.
(07:51):
And if you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come
to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go
to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we're back
with our American stories and the story of the Transatlantic Cable.
(08:14):
Historian John Steele Gordon was just introducing cyrus Field, a
bright young man from a very impressive New England family
who was the person responsible for connecting both sides of
the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Cyrus Field was not as intellectual as some of his brothers,
just as smart, just not as interested in book learning.
And when he was sixteen, he asked his father's permission
to code to New York and go into business, and
his father granted it. New York is unique among American colonies.
The Puritans came to New England, the Quakers came to Philadelphia,
(08:50):
Catholics came to Maryland in order to worship as they
wished to do so. The Dutch came to New York
to make money, and for no other reason whatsoever. In fact,
they didn't even get around to building a church for
seventeen years, they're so busy trading first. When they did,
they named it the Church of Saint Nicholas, and Santa
Claus has been the patron saint of New York ever since.
(09:15):
So cyrus Field came to this town that was famous
for hustle and bustle, and let's make a deal. And
he was very very good at doing exactly that. He
owned a paper company, a wholesale paper company, and became
very rich. By the time he was in his thirties,
he was worth several hundred thousand dollars, which in the
eighteen fifties made you enormously rich. He lived in a great,
(09:38):
big house on Gramercy Park, his brother right next door.
They had doors to communicate between the two houses, and
he was sort of he was bored with running the
paper company because he was an entrepreneur at heart, and
once the thing was up and running and just cranking
out dividends, he bored him. You'd be willing to take
the dividends, of course. And then one day his brother,
(09:58):
Matthew Field brought a guy named Frederick Gisborne over to
see him because Gisborne had been running a telegraph line
across the southern shore of Newfoundland and with the hopes
of putting a cable across the Cabot straight the entrance
to the Saint Lawrens River and connected to the telegraph
grid in North America, because they said that would make
communication with England two days shorter, because Newfoundland is one
(10:22):
third of the way along the Great Circle route to England.
And Cyrus Hill wasn't very interested in that because they
didn't think two days made that all difference, because it
was only one day difference to Halifax, which was connected
to the telegraph grid already. But then he just he
looked at the globe in his library and saw that,
you know, the Newfoundland was indeed one third of the
(10:44):
way up on the shortest route to England. And he said, well, hey,
if we could lay a cable all the way to Ireland,
then we could. Communication wouldn't be ten days, it would
be ten minutes. And you know, we can make money
doing that, and so he decided to do it. He
wrote a couple of people, Matthew Fontaine Murray, the great oceanographer,
(11:05):
asking if it was possible, and Murray wrote back saying,
funny you should ask. We just did a series of
soundings and we found this thing, which we actually have
named the Telegraph Plateau because it's the ideal place to
lay a telegraph cable. Then he asked Samuel Morse if
it was possible, and Moore said sure. Morse was a tinkerer.
He was actually a great portrait artist, but he wasn't
(11:28):
very well technically grounded either. He'd borrowed most of his
ideas from people who knew much more about telegraphy than
he did. Feel decides to go ahead with this, and
of course he had no idea what he was getting
into almost like if somebody in the nineteen fifties reading
about the success of the Russian spotneck, saying, hey, I've
got an idea, how about a manned expedition to Mars.
(11:52):
Because the longest undersea cable in eighteen fifty four was
less than three hundred miles laid across the North Sea,
which never gets deeper into about three hundred feet, and
this would have to be two thousand miles long and
be at a depth of sometimes fifteen thousand feet. So
(12:14):
he embarks upon it. He got his neighbor Peter Cooper,
the founder of the Cooper Union, to this day the
only American university that does not charge tuition. And he
also got Moses Taylor, who was an enormously rich man
who ended up controlling the gas light industry in New York.
And they all put in very considerable sums of money,
and off they go, starting on this. The first thing
(12:36):
they did was to delay the telegraph line across the
southern shore of Newfoundland, which turned out to take about
four times as long as they had Canada on and
cost five or six times as much. The southern shore
of Newfoundland is not an easy place to work. If
you like rain and fog, you will love Newfoundland. And
then they were going to lay the cable across the
(12:57):
cabot straight about eighty miles, and they simply they had
no idea what they were doing. They ordered the cable
in England, the only place in the world that could
make the submarine cable. It was brought over in a
sailing ship. They hired a steamship in New York to
go up there. It was going to tow the sailing
ship across as a sailing ship unreeled the cable, and
(13:17):
they invited everybody on board to come on board the steamboat.
So all the investors. Peter Cooper was there, The Reverend
David Dudley Field, aged about seventy, was there. Their wives
and daughters were there in big hats and long skirts
and parasols. And they got to Saint John's in the
(13:38):
capital of Newfoundland. The whole city was full of great, large, black,
amiable Newfoundland dogs, and they fell in love with them,
and they bought ten or twelve brought them on board.
And so here was a combination between a commercial enterprise
on the cutting edge of technology and a yachting party
(14:01):
and The captain proved to be very uncooperative. He refused
to follow orders. For one thing, he said, I'll know
how to sail my ship. Well, he may know how
to sail a ship, he didn't know where they wanted
it to sail. And finally they had to cut the
cable and it was a five hundred thousand dollars disaster.
So they needed lots more money and the only place
(14:23):
to get it was England, and England was much more
enthusiastic about the cable than the United States was because
England had this worldwide empire which was very difficult to
communicate with. And so the British government said, okay, once
the cable works, we guarantee to pay you sixteen thousand
(14:46):
pounds a year, which means you can borrow at four percent,
you know, virtually the entire cost of estimated cost of
laying the cable once it works. The United States government
made the same promise, although to great deal of screaming
and yelling in Congress because a lot of Americans think,
you know, what do we need this for? But they
(15:08):
finally did come on board. Each of the navies donated
two ships. The US lent the USS Niagara, one of
the largest warships in the world, made of iron, state
of the art ship design. The British gave them the Agamemnon, which,
although it was steam powered, it looked for all the
world like a boat that had fought at Trafalgar fifty
(15:30):
years earlier. I mean, it was a three decker, three
masted ship of the line that had been retrofitted for steam,
and it was a lousy sailor, as most of those great,
big tubby ships of the Line were. They had to
use two ships because they wan't. No ship in the
world could carry enough cable to do the whole job.
The first time they started in Ireland, got out about
(15:51):
four hundred miles and the cable snapped and that was
the end of that. There wasn't enough time. Next year
they tried it again sailed out to the Middle. This
time before they got to the middle they were caught
in one of the worst Atlantic storms in memory. The
Agamemnon survived only because of superb seamanship on the part
(16:16):
of the captain and the crew. It had two hundred
and fifty tons of cables sitting on its forward deck,
which made it even more top heavy than it had
been before, and he managed to save that cable. They
could have just cut it and tossed it, but they
did not. They survived. They tried it again, the cable snapped.
They went back to England. At this point they were
(16:39):
derided by everybody. This was a wild goose chase. Why
are we putting money into this silly thing? And Field said, look,
you know the money's been spent, we have the cable,
we have enough to do it. Let's try it again.
You know, we've got nothing to lose. Otherwise we just
sell the cable for scrap and then it's a certain disaster.
So they tried it and it worked. They unreeled it
(17:00):
firstly without any problem whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
And you're hearing the true nature of an entrepreneur, and
that is they see things that no one else sees,
and they're not even sure they know how to do.
They call a few guys, a few gals, and the
next thing you know, they're giving it a shot. And
when they fail, they just want to try it one
more time because they want to fix what didn't work
and make that dream a reality, and not some pie
(17:26):
in the sky crazy dream, but something doable. And when
you think of a guy like Elon Musk saying I
want to build a spaceship to somewhere. Well he's doing it.
This spirit, well, it's always been in humankind, and something
about our country unleashes it in people and allows it
to thrive. When we come back more of John Steele
(17:47):
Gordon's story, the story of the Transatlantic Cable. Here on
our American stories, and we're back with the conclusion of
(18:09):
the cyrus Field and Transatlantic Cable story and the telegraph
cable that connected America to England and from there to
the rest of the world. We pick up at the
point where the United States and England have finally, after
many failures, connected the cable from one side of the
Atlantic to the other. Here again is John Steele Gordon.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Got to Newfoundland, hooked it up, and it worked. They
had huge celebrations. It was like the Second Coming. George
Hamilton Strong wrote in his diary that you know, some
people are really going wild, but moderate people say it's
only the greatest thing that has ever happened. They had
(18:54):
huge parties in New York. They sent fireworks off of
City Hall so enthusiastically they set City Hall on fire.
The cupola is a replacement because it was burned in
that fire. Fortunately they saved the building because it's a
magnificent building. Don't approve often of what goes on inside it,
but architecturally it is wonderful. And Queen Victoria sent a message,
(19:19):
a ninety nine word message to President Buchanan. What the
cable company did not tell people was that the ninety
nine word message took sixteen and a half hours to transmit.
The cable was working, but just barely, and then it
just wasn't working at all. It just stopped and they
never did figure out exactly why. So they tried again,
(19:47):
and they had to wait at that point until the
Civil War which broke out after the second attempt, they
had run out of money for one thing, and before
they could begin to raise enough money, they had to
wait for the Civil War. And also there was a
board of inquiry, the very first time there was an
official board of inquiry to find out what caused the disaster,
(20:09):
because they'd also the British it also had a terrible
an eight hundred thousand pound disaster laying a cable to
India through the Red Sea that had also failed to work.
What went wrong? How we can do it better learn
our lessons here, and they for all kinds of lessons.
One was they didn't have a vocabulary of electricity, and
so it was very hard to discuss technical issues because
(20:30):
people were using different words and had, you know, our
different meanings to the same words. And so they started
coining words, and they started using the names of great
scientists of the past, so words like Watt for James Watt,
and Ohm for Gay ORed Ohm, and mPire one of
a great French early investor in Volta, the great Italian
(20:51):
investigator of electricity. And this was the first time scientists
were honored in this way. It goes on to this day.
We now have Newton's and all kinds of names. And
that's you know you have arrived as a scientist when
you get some incomprehensible concept named after you. They then
designed a new cable. One of the problems with the
(21:13):
old cable was that had been very quickly designed because Field,
his greatest virtue as an entrepreneur was his drive let's
get it done. It was also as great as defect
because he didn't give enough time for experiments. They designed
a much better cable. The first cable had been about
as big around as a man's little finger. The second
cable was about as big around as a man's thumb,
which is a considerable improvement. Still a very long, thin
(21:36):
thread across the ocean. And also they had an extraordinary
stroke of luck in the greatest engineer of the nineteenth century.
His name was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, which I think is
a really great name. I mean Dickens could have thought
up that name. He designed a steamship called the Great Eastern,
which was launched in the Thames River in eighteen fifty eight.
(21:59):
It was not only was it the largest ship in
the world, it was five times the size of any
ship afloat, and throughout its thirty years of existence, wherever
it was, whether it was Bombay or Boston or Baltimore,
it looked like a rowboat and a pond full of ducks.
It was just gigantic. The Panamaa Canal existed when the
(22:20):
Great Eastern did. The Great Eastern could not have utilized
it. It was too wide to get through the Panama Canal.
Brunel realized that you could go the whole you made
a ship big enough, because the energy required increased more
or less as the square but the capacity increased as
the cube, so you could do more and more. And
he said, build a big enough ship. And he designed
(22:41):
this colossal ship and somehow talk people into pay to
have it built. It was an economic disaster. There were
six owners of the Great Eastern. All of them lost
major money, including the scrap dealer who owned it last,
because it turned out to be extremely expensive to break
it up for scrap. It was also absolutely perfect for
(23:03):
laying the Atlantic cable. They could lay the whole thing
because it was so enormous. It was much less subject
to wave action, so it was much less likely to
snap the cable. You could have all the work as
you needed on board. And since it was out of
work anyway, because it was an economic white elephant, they
were more than happy to lease it to be used
for the cable. So in the eighteen sixty five off
(23:25):
they go again, and they get four fifths of the
way across and then it snaps. They went back to
England tail between their legs. Sure they were going to
be objects of utter derision. And in fact everybody said, hey,
you had bad luck. Now we know we can do it.
All we got to do is just have good luck.
(23:46):
And the next year they laid the fifth attempt, when
like clockwork, they then went back out, grabbed the fourth attempt,
spliced it on, and within three weeks had two cables
across the Atlantic Ocean, and North America has not been
out of communication with Europe from more than a couple
of hours ever since. It revolutionized the world. The London
(24:11):
and Wall Street markets began to act in concert because
they could now wear an instant communication on newspapers. They
formed the UPI, the United President of Nationals, so they
cut cable costs so we'd get European news today, which
was just you know, jugeree. What was going on in
Europe today today was just an extraordinary thing. To them.
(24:32):
We just take it totally for granted. We just want
to know what the weather is in London. We find out. However,
it was very expensive to use the cable. The first
price was a dollar a word fifteen word minimum, and
that was fifteen dollars and when a skilled worker was
lucky to earn five dollars a week, this led to
considerable brevity, and also they didn't use the capacity of
(24:56):
the two cables. And then when the French cable came
in landed here in Duxbury in eighteen sixty nine, and
it was a separate organization. Competition. Competition is wonderful for capitalism.
Capitalists don't like it so much, but for capitalism it's
great prices that both went way down. Usage sword and
became very profitable. Cyrus Field became enormously rich. And the
(25:18):
world just changed. The world just changed. And to give
you an idea of how much it changed, the British
declared war on Germany on August first, nineteen fourteen. On
August second, nineteen fourteen, a British cable ship, in the
dark of night, sailed over to the German coast, grappled
up the German cables and cut them, forcing the Germans
(25:42):
to communicate with the outside world by radio. And the Germans,
as they always did, thought their codes were unbreakable, and
the British, as they always did, broke them. The British
were geniuses at cryptography, and one of the things they
decoded was the thing a Zimmerman telegram where they Germans
(26:03):
offered Mexico in an exchange for an alliance and an
attack upon the United States, offered Mexico the return of
their lost provinces roughly the south west quarter of the
United States. When the British quietly gave this to the
American government, the American government was convinced that maybe it
(26:24):
was time to go over there and defeat Germany and
save the British and the French's behinds, because they were
about to lose.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
And you've been listening to John Steele Gordon Thread a
story that most of us didn't know, and even if
you did, you didn't mind hearing again. His book is
A Thread Across the Ocean, The Story of the Transatlantic Cable.
In our history stories, all of our American history stories
are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College.
(26:52):
Go and sign up for their free and terrific online courses.
Go to Hillsdale dot edu. That's Hillsdale dot e ad.
John Steele Gordon, A Thread Across the Ocean, the Story
of the Transatlantic Cable. Get the book now, the story
here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show.
And our favorite subject, as you know, is American history. Nowadays,
we never have to think about how long a message
might take to get somewhere or to someone. In fact,
often if there isn't a near instantaneous reply, we often
(00:32):
get frustrated or even annoyed. If the message is going
from Oxford, Mississippi, or sending to let's say, Oxford, England.
We want it now, and we want it fast. John Steele,
Gordon historian and friend of Hillsdale, is here to tell
us how the story of the telegraph and the Transatlantic
Cable changed the world.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
You know, some inventions are more important than others. I
mean Oscar Hammerstein, the first a great opera in Presario,
was the grandfather of the lyricist, who was a great
inventor too, by the way, but he once invented a
reversible necktie so you could spill gravy on two sides,
and he sold it. He made money on this thing,
but this did not change the world. It had been
(01:19):
known for one hundred years that you could send electricity
down a wire. Many very important scientists of the eighteenth
century had investigated this, including Benjamin Franklin, whose famous experiment
with the kite and the key proved that lightning is
an electrical phenomenon. If you're at tempted to reproduce Franklin's experiment,
I would strongly suggest that you don't. It was a
(01:42):
parlor game until the nineteenth century when wire became cheap
because wire factories powered by steam could draw out copper
very quickly and efficiently. Before then you had to beat
it out, And so the telegraph became practical in the
early nineteenth century, and people all over the world were
trying to do it. Two men in England, Wheatstone and Cook,
(02:03):
developed and patented a system in eighteen thirty seven that
actually worked. It was kind of clunky, but it worked.
Samuel Morris in this country sent his famous message what
hath God Wrought in eighteen forty four, and his system
eventually became adopted worldwide because it was simpler than the
other systems, and also because of his marvelously efficient code,
(02:25):
which is the only part of the whole system that
he invented entirely himself. Everything else was mainly bits and
pieces He had borrowed, and the code was It was
so efficient that people discovered very soon that they could.
At first they would write down the dots and the dashes,
and then they would translate them. They found that once
telegraphers got used to it, that they could actually do
(02:46):
it by ear and just write down the message. One
of the very first people to learn how to do that,
by the way, was a young telegrapher in Pittsburgh whose
name was Andrew Carnegie. And telegraph wires sprung up like crazy.
They often used the the rights of the railroads as
a convenient place to string their poles and their wires,
and it wasn't long before the railroads learned that they
(03:08):
could use a telegraph as a signaling system. Because most
of the railroads those days were single track, and so
if there was an oncoming train expected and it didn't come, well,
this train had to sit on the sighting until it came.
With a telegraph, they could telegraph had saying you know
we're stuck, You guys can come on. Suddenly. The railroads
are much more efficient. Prices went down, use went up.
(03:32):
But underwater telegraphy was another manner nobody knew of. It
was possible, but there was a very strong reason to try,
and that was in the eighteen forties and fifties, the
strongest country in the world was located on archipelago off
of northwest Europe. They wanted to be able to connect
to Europe, and so it was trying mean the English
I've always loved to be They loved that twenty two
(03:54):
miles of water between them and the French, but they
also mean the famous mid nineteenth century times of London
headline fog and channel continent cut off. And so a
pair of brothers named Brett ordered thirty miles of telegraph
wire and put on the back of a boat and
(04:16):
reeled it out and crossed a channel and tried to
send a message back to Dover. And the message got
there was gibberish, undecipherable, but at least it proved that
you could get an electric signal through twenty two miles
of a submarine cable. And what made the cable possible
was this stuff called gutta percher. The sole use of
(04:41):
gut a perche today is it's used to fill root canals.
After you've had the nerve removed, the datis puts in
gut a perture, and shortly after it came into use,
a golf playing clergyman in Scotland wondered if they might
possibly be able to make golf balls out of gut
a perchure because they had been making it. They were
called They were made of leather and stuffed with boiled
(05:02):
goose feathers and this was a very highly skilled job
stuffing the feathers into the golf ball, and they were
very expensive and they only lasted maybe two or three games.
So this clergyman, who loved to play golf but didn't
like paying for the featheries, made golf balls out of
gutta percha and hey, it worked great, and they were
(05:23):
very much cheaper. And he discovered after he'd played with
them two or three times that the ball started going further,
and he didn't understand why. We do not understand why. Now.
It was the dents and the knicks and parted by
the golf clubs gave it better aerodynamics. And so they
put dimples on golf balls, and that's why the dimples
(05:45):
are there to this day, because the ball goes further.
And then golf players love that characteristic. And then would
come to a guy who was responsible for the cable
wouldn't have happened without him. It would have happened eventually,
but it wouldn't have happened nearly as soon as it did.
And his name was Cyrus Field, and he came from
(06:07):
an old New England family from Connecticut. His father was
David Dudley Field, a great New England clergyman. He's distinguished
enough as a clergyman and as an author to be
listed today in the Dictionary of American Biography, which is
the standard twenty four volume work on distinguished Americans of
(06:28):
the past. The Reverend David Dudley Field and his wife
had eight sons. They had three daughters and eight sons.
Two of the sons died, one died in childhood, one
died in very early manhood. He was lost at sea.
Of the six sons who lived to a full lifetime,
four of them made it into the Dictionary of American
(06:50):
Biography on their own. The two who didn't. One was
a very distinguished engineer, and the other was President of
the Massachusetts Senate for three terms. So he may have
been a great clergyman, but clearly the Revan David Dudley
Field was a pretty good father too.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
And you're listening to John Steele Gordon. And by the way,
his book A Thread Across the Ocean The Story of
the Transatlantic Cable is terrific. Go to Amazon dot com
pick it up, or the usual suspects. When we come back,
more of the story of how the telegraph went from
Samuel Morse to winning World War One. Here on our
(07:29):
American story. Folks, if you love the stories we tell
about this great country, and especially the stories of America's
rich past, know that all of our stories about American history,
from war to innovation, culture and faith, are brought to
us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place
where students study all the things that are beautiful in
life and all the things that are good in life.
(07:51):
And if you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come
to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go
to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we're back
with our American stories and the story of the Transatlantic Cable.
(08:14):
Historian John Steele Gordon was just introducing cyrus Field, a
bright young man from a very impressive New England family
who was the person responsible for connecting both sides of
the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Cyrus Field was not as intellectual as some of his brothers,
just as smart, just not as interested in book learning.
And when he was sixteen, he asked his father's permission
to code to New York and go into business, and
his father granted it. New York is unique among American colonies.
The Puritans came to New England, the Quakers came to Philadelphia,
(08:50):
Catholics came to Maryland in order to worship as they
wished to do so. The Dutch came to New York
to make money, and for no other reason whatsoever. In fact,
they didn't even get around to building a church for
seventeen years, they're so busy trading first. When they did,
they named it the Church of Saint Nicholas, and Santa
Claus has been the patron saint of New York ever since.
(09:15):
So cyrus Field came to this town that was famous
for hustle and bustle, and let's make a deal. And
he was very very good at doing exactly that. He
owned a paper company, a wholesale paper company, and became
very rich. By the time he was in his thirties,
he was worth several hundred thousand dollars, which in the
eighteen fifties made you enormously rich. He lived in a great,
(09:38):
big house on Gramercy Park, his brother right next door.
They had doors to communicate between the two houses, and
he was sort of he was bored with running the
paper company because he was an entrepreneur at heart, and
once the thing was up and running and just cranking
out dividends, he bored him. You'd be willing to take
the dividends, of course. And then one day his brother,
(09:58):
Matthew Field brought a guy named Frederick Gisborne over to
see him because Gisborne had been running a telegraph line
across the southern shore of Newfoundland and with the hopes
of putting a cable across the Cabot straight the entrance
to the Saint Lawrens River and connected to the telegraph
grid in North America, because they said that would make
communication with England two days shorter, because Newfoundland is one
(10:22):
third of the way along the Great Circle route to England.
And Cyrus Hill wasn't very interested in that because they
didn't think two days made that all difference, because it
was only one day difference to Halifax, which was connected
to the telegraph grid already. But then he just he
looked at the globe in his library and saw that,
you know, the Newfoundland was indeed one third of the
(10:44):
way up on the shortest route to England. And he said, well, hey,
if we could lay a cable all the way to Ireland,
then we could. Communication wouldn't be ten days, it would
be ten minutes. And you know, we can make money
doing that, and so he decided to do it. He
wrote a couple of people, Matthew Fontaine Murray, the great oceanographer,
(11:05):
asking if it was possible, and Murray wrote back saying,
funny you should ask. We just did a series of
soundings and we found this thing, which we actually have
named the Telegraph Plateau because it's the ideal place to
lay a telegraph cable. Then he asked Samuel Morse if
it was possible, and Moore said sure. Morse was a tinkerer.
He was actually a great portrait artist, but he wasn't
(11:28):
very well technically grounded either. He'd borrowed most of his
ideas from people who knew much more about telegraphy than
he did. Feel decides to go ahead with this, and
of course he had no idea what he was getting
into almost like if somebody in the nineteen fifties reading
about the success of the Russian spotneck, saying, hey, I've
got an idea, how about a manned expedition to Mars.
(11:52):
Because the longest undersea cable in eighteen fifty four was
less than three hundred miles laid across the North Sea,
which never gets deeper into about three hundred feet, and
this would have to be two thousand miles long and
be at a depth of sometimes fifteen thousand feet. So
(12:14):
he embarks upon it. He got his neighbor Peter Cooper,
the founder of the Cooper Union, to this day the
only American university that does not charge tuition. And he
also got Moses Taylor, who was an enormously rich man
who ended up controlling the gas light industry in New York.
And they all put in very considerable sums of money,
and off they go, starting on this. The first thing
(12:36):
they did was to delay the telegraph line across the
southern shore of Newfoundland, which turned out to take about
four times as long as they had Canada on and
cost five or six times as much. The southern shore
of Newfoundland is not an easy place to work. If
you like rain and fog, you will love Newfoundland. And
then they were going to lay the cable across the
(12:57):
cabot straight about eighty miles, and they simply they had
no idea what they were doing. They ordered the cable
in England, the only place in the world that could
make the submarine cable. It was brought over in a
sailing ship. They hired a steamship in New York to
go up there. It was going to tow the sailing
ship across as a sailing ship unreeled the cable, and
(13:17):
they invited everybody on board to come on board the steamboat.
So all the investors. Peter Cooper was there, The Reverend
David Dudley Field, aged about seventy, was there. Their wives
and daughters were there in big hats and long skirts
and parasols. And they got to Saint John's in the
(13:38):
capital of Newfoundland. The whole city was full of great, large, black,
amiable Newfoundland dogs, and they fell in love with them,
and they bought ten or twelve brought them on board.
And so here was a combination between a commercial enterprise
on the cutting edge of technology and a yachting party
(14:01):
and The captain proved to be very uncooperative. He refused
to follow orders. For one thing, he said, I'll know
how to sail my ship. Well, he may know how
to sail a ship, he didn't know where they wanted
it to sail. And finally they had to cut the
cable and it was a five hundred thousand dollars disaster.
So they needed lots more money and the only place
(14:23):
to get it was England, and England was much more
enthusiastic about the cable than the United States was because
England had this worldwide empire which was very difficult to
communicate with. And so the British government said, okay, once
the cable works, we guarantee to pay you sixteen thousand
(14:46):
pounds a year, which means you can borrow at four percent,
you know, virtually the entire cost of estimated cost of
laying the cable once it works. The United States government
made the same promise, although to great deal of screaming
and yelling in Congress because a lot of Americans think,
you know, what do we need this for? But they
(15:08):
finally did come on board. Each of the navies donated
two ships. The US lent the USS Niagara, one of
the largest warships in the world, made of iron, state
of the art ship design. The British gave them the Agamemnon, which,
although it was steam powered, it looked for all the
world like a boat that had fought at Trafalgar fifty
(15:30):
years earlier. I mean, it was a three decker, three
masted ship of the line that had been retrofitted for steam,
and it was a lousy sailor, as most of those great,
big tubby ships of the Line were. They had to
use two ships because they wan't. No ship in the
world could carry enough cable to do the whole job.
The first time they started in Ireland, got out about
(15:51):
four hundred miles and the cable snapped and that was
the end of that. There wasn't enough time. Next year
they tried it again sailed out to the Middle. This
time before they got to the middle they were caught
in one of the worst Atlantic storms in memory. The
Agamemnon survived only because of superb seamanship on the part
(16:16):
of the captain and the crew. It had two hundred
and fifty tons of cables sitting on its forward deck,
which made it even more top heavy than it had
been before, and he managed to save that cable. They
could have just cut it and tossed it, but they
did not. They survived. They tried it again, the cable snapped.
They went back to England. At this point they were
(16:39):
derided by everybody. This was a wild goose chase. Why
are we putting money into this silly thing? And Field said, look,
you know the money's been spent, we have the cable,
we have enough to do it. Let's try it again.
You know, we've got nothing to lose. Otherwise we just
sell the cable for scrap and then it's a certain disaster.
So they tried it and it worked. They unreeled it
(17:00):
firstly without any problem whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
And you're hearing the true nature of an entrepreneur, and
that is they see things that no one else sees,
and they're not even sure they know how to do.
They call a few guys, a few gals, and the
next thing you know, they're giving it a shot. And
when they fail, they just want to try it one
more time because they want to fix what didn't work
and make that dream a reality, and not some pie
(17:26):
in the sky crazy dream, but something doable. And when
you think of a guy like Elon Musk saying I
want to build a spaceship to somewhere. Well he's doing it.
This spirit, well, it's always been in humankind, and something
about our country unleashes it in people and allows it
to thrive. When we come back more of John Steele
(17:47):
Gordon's story, the story of the Transatlantic Cable. Here on
our American stories, and we're back with the conclusion of
(18:09):
the cyrus Field and Transatlantic Cable story and the telegraph
cable that connected America to England and from there to
the rest of the world. We pick up at the
point where the United States and England have finally, after
many failures, connected the cable from one side of the
Atlantic to the other. Here again is John Steele Gordon.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Got to Newfoundland, hooked it up, and it worked. They
had huge celebrations. It was like the Second Coming. George
Hamilton Strong wrote in his diary that you know, some
people are really going wild, but moderate people say it's
only the greatest thing that has ever happened. They had
(18:54):
huge parties in New York. They sent fireworks off of
City Hall so enthusiastically they set City Hall on fire.
The cupola is a replacement because it was burned in
that fire. Fortunately they saved the building because it's a
magnificent building. Don't approve often of what goes on inside it,
but architecturally it is wonderful. And Queen Victoria sent a message,
(19:19):
a ninety nine word message to President Buchanan. What the
cable company did not tell people was that the ninety
nine word message took sixteen and a half hours to transmit.
The cable was working, but just barely, and then it
just wasn't working at all. It just stopped and they
never did figure out exactly why. So they tried again,
(19:47):
and they had to wait at that point until the
Civil War which broke out after the second attempt, they
had run out of money for one thing, and before
they could begin to raise enough money, they had to
wait for the Civil War. And also there was a
board of inquiry, the very first time there was an
official board of inquiry to find out what caused the disaster,
(20:09):
because they'd also the British it also had a terrible
an eight hundred thousand pound disaster laying a cable to
India through the Red Sea that had also failed to work.
What went wrong? How we can do it better learn
our lessons here, and they for all kinds of lessons.
One was they didn't have a vocabulary of electricity, and
so it was very hard to discuss technical issues because
(20:30):
people were using different words and had, you know, our
different meanings to the same words. And so they started
coining words, and they started using the names of great
scientists of the past, so words like Watt for James Watt,
and Ohm for Gay ORed Ohm, and mPire one of
a great French early investor in Volta, the great Italian
(20:51):
investigator of electricity. And this was the first time scientists
were honored in this way. It goes on to this day.
We now have Newton's and all kinds of names. And
that's you know you have arrived as a scientist when
you get some incomprehensible concept named after you. They then
designed a new cable. One of the problems with the
(21:13):
old cable was that had been very quickly designed because Field,
his greatest virtue as an entrepreneur was his drive let's
get it done. It was also as great as defect
because he didn't give enough time for experiments. They designed
a much better cable. The first cable had been about
as big around as a man's little finger. The second
cable was about as big around as a man's thumb,
which is a considerable improvement. Still a very long, thin
(21:36):
thread across the ocean. And also they had an extraordinary
stroke of luck in the greatest engineer of the nineteenth century.
His name was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, which I think is
a really great name. I mean Dickens could have thought
up that name. He designed a steamship called the Great Eastern,
which was launched in the Thames River in eighteen fifty eight.
(21:59):
It was not only was it the largest ship in
the world, it was five times the size of any
ship afloat, and throughout its thirty years of existence, wherever
it was, whether it was Bombay or Boston or Baltimore,
it looked like a rowboat and a pond full of ducks.
It was just gigantic. The Panamaa Canal existed when the
(22:20):
Great Eastern did. The Great Eastern could not have utilized
it. It was too wide to get through the Panama Canal.
Brunel realized that you could go the whole you made
a ship big enough, because the energy required increased more
or less as the square but the capacity increased as
the cube, so you could do more and more. And
he said, build a big enough ship. And he designed
(22:41):
this colossal ship and somehow talk people into pay to
have it built. It was an economic disaster. There were
six owners of the Great Eastern. All of them lost
major money, including the scrap dealer who owned it last,
because it turned out to be extremely expensive to break
it up for scrap. It was also absolutely perfect for
(23:03):
laying the Atlantic cable. They could lay the whole thing
because it was so enormous. It was much less subject
to wave action, so it was much less likely to
snap the cable. You could have all the work as
you needed on board. And since it was out of
work anyway, because it was an economic white elephant, they
were more than happy to lease it to be used
for the cable. So in the eighteen sixty five off
(23:25):
they go again, and they get four fifths of the
way across and then it snaps. They went back to
England tail between their legs. Sure they were going to
be objects of utter derision. And in fact everybody said, hey,
you had bad luck. Now we know we can do it.
All we got to do is just have good luck.
(23:46):
And the next year they laid the fifth attempt, when
like clockwork, they then went back out, grabbed the fourth attempt,
spliced it on, and within three weeks had two cables
across the Atlantic Ocean, and North America has not been
out of communication with Europe from more than a couple
of hours ever since. It revolutionized the world. The London
(24:11):
and Wall Street markets began to act in concert because
they could now wear an instant communication on newspapers. They
formed the UPI, the United President of Nationals, so they
cut cable costs so we'd get European news today, which
was just you know, jugeree. What was going on in
Europe today today was just an extraordinary thing. To them.
(24:32):
We just take it totally for granted. We just want
to know what the weather is in London. We find out. However,
it was very expensive to use the cable. The first
price was a dollar a word fifteen word minimum, and
that was fifteen dollars and when a skilled worker was
lucky to earn five dollars a week, this led to
considerable brevity, and also they didn't use the capacity of
(24:56):
the two cables. And then when the French cable came
in landed here in Duxbury in eighteen sixty nine, and
it was a separate organization. Competition. Competition is wonderful for capitalism.
Capitalists don't like it so much, but for capitalism it's
great prices that both went way down. Usage sword and
became very profitable. Cyrus Field became enormously rich. And the
(25:18):
world just changed. The world just changed. And to give
you an idea of how much it changed, the British
declared war on Germany on August first, nineteen fourteen. On
August second, nineteen fourteen, a British cable ship, in the
dark of night, sailed over to the German coast, grappled
up the German cables and cut them, forcing the Germans
(25:42):
to communicate with the outside world by radio. And the Germans,
as they always did, thought their codes were unbreakable, and
the British, as they always did, broke them. The British
were geniuses at cryptography, and one of the things they
decoded was the thing a Zimmerman telegram where they Germans
(26:03):
offered Mexico in an exchange for an alliance and an
attack upon the United States, offered Mexico the return of
their lost provinces roughly the south west quarter of the
United States. When the British quietly gave this to the
American government, the American government was convinced that maybe it
(26:24):
was time to go over there and defeat Germany and
save the British and the French's behinds, because they were
about to lose.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
And you've been listening to John Steele Gordon Thread a
story that most of us didn't know, and even if
you did, you didn't mind hearing again. His book is
A Thread Across the Ocean, The Story of the Transatlantic Cable.
In our history stories, all of our American history stories
are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College.
(26:52):
Go and sign up for their free and terrific online courses.
Go to Hillsdale dot edu. That's Hillsdale dot e ad.
John Steele Gordon, A Thread Across the Ocean, the Story
of the Transatlantic Cable. Get the book now, the story
here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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