Technology
Taming electricity, connecting the world

The nineteenth century was the age of electricity. In 1800, it was still a great puzzle to most people: they were baffled and literally shocked by electrical sparks. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) captured widespread beliefs that it could bring the dead back to life.

By 1900, much of this mystery had been removed with the establishment of scientific laws of electrical phenomena and the invention of numerous applications of electricity. Communication, lighting, power generation, industry and other aspects of life were being rapidly electrified.

In one hundred years electricity had transformed workplaces, homes, cities, towns and the country. It had “annihilated space” between distant countries via the telegraph and changed landscapes with networks, machines and buildings of electrical communication and power. Electricity had been truly tamed.

Cable Design: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”

The submarine (or underwater) cable design used in the first successful transatlantic cable of 1866, was more or less standard until the early twentieth century. Late nineteenth-century cable operators were generally reluctant to radically depart from this design because cables were very costly to make and lasted for decades. However, small changes were made to insulation and armouring. After 1894 many firms used cables with larger diameter copper conductors which gave greater capacity.

The most significant change did not occur until the early 1900s, when American, British and Danish manufacturers introduced sophisticated ‘inductively loaded’ submarine cable designs that could handle very high speed telegraphy and telephony across distances of tens of kilometers. By the mid-1920s, even more sophisticated ‘loaded’ cables were being laid, giving transmission rates through the longest cables of 300 words per minute – some 100 times faster than the 1866 Atlantic cable.

Cable Instruments: Meeting the need for speed

While submarine cable operators were reluctant to change cable design, they actively encouraged the invention of instruments for improving signaling speed and capacity. Until the early 1870s, the standard instrument was the mirror galvanometer designed by William Thomson between 1857 - 1858. It could handle up to seven words a minute through long submarine cables, but it could not meet the ongoing demands for faster signallng. This demand was met, until the early 1900s, by Thomson’s siphon recorder invented in 1872.

From the 1870s, electrical engineers provided cable firms with a string of other instruments that gave ten-fold increases in transmission speeds. They invented electromechanical instruments that enabled the simultaneous transmission and reception of signals, machines that automatically sent on messages without human intervention, and apparatus for sharpening, repeating and amplifying signals. It was not until the introduction of electronic valve technology in the late 1920s, that transmission speeds could be pushed significantly higher.

A New Competition: From Cables Versus Wireless to Cable and Wireless

For some, Guglielmo Marconi’s successful transmission, in 1901, of wireless signals across the Atlantic seemed to anticipate the demise of submarine cables.

Directors of cable companies reassured investors that wireless could never compete with long distance submarine cables in terms of cost, reliability, and speed of signaling. In fact, wireless was used to improve the cable service. Experimental wireless masts were built at Porthcurno in 1902, and at other cable stations to communicate with cable ships and boost cable traffic.

However, the wireless business grew rapidly, especially in marine communication. By the 1920s, wireless represented approximately half the market of global telecommunications. The crippling blow to cable firms was short wave or ‘beam’ radio. Invented in 1923-1924, it was quickly adopted around the world. Beam radio made long-distance wireless telegraphy and telephony cheaper and more efficient than ever before. The leading operator of short-wave, Marconi Wireless, took over so much of the Eastern Telegraph Company’s business that in 1928, the British government was forced to step in to save the old cable firm. Their solution was to amalgamate the companies. Cable and Wireless was born.

Research and Development: Decline of the Industrial Spirit?

We tend to think that having established itself as the world's leading industrial nation, Britain became complacent and spent very little on developing new products. This alleged underinvestment in scientific research and technical development has been blamed for the 'decline' of British industry from the 1870s. While giant American and German manufacturing firms, such as Bell and Siemens, built enormous industrial laboratories, their British equivalents apparently did nothing to stimulate innovation.

Historians have recently shown that British manufacturers encouraged research and development more than previously thought. Although the Eastern Telegraph Company was a service provider rather than a manufacturer, it still supported research. External scientific consultants were brought in to research cable and wireless technology. Moreover, in 1902, the company established a small laboratory in its London head office where the best electricians in the service produced a string of new inventions and techniques for improving cable signaling.

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Horace George Barwell (b.1865). In the early 1900s, much of the routine electrical work at Porthcurno was supervised by him. Here Barwell is seen in the "experiment room" at Porthcurno and shows how seriously the Eastern Telegraph Company was beginning to take the need for research. Taken from "A Nerve Centre of the Empire", Syren and Shipping, 4 January 1911.

Click on the thumbnails below to enlarge:

    • Horace George Barwell (b.1865). In the early 1900s, much of the routine electrical work at Porthcurno was supervised by him. Here Barwell is seen in the "experiment room" at Porthcurno and shows how seriously the Eastern Telegraph Company was beginning to take the need for research. Taken from "A Nerve Centre of the Empire", Syren and Shipping, 4 January 1911.
    • One of the most famous early telegraphic inventions, this shows the five-needle telegraph apparatus of British inventors William Fothergill Cooke (1806-1879) and Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875), invented in 1837. Cooke and Wheatstone did not "invent" the electric telegraph. They were only the latest in a long line of inventors who explored ways of using electrical charge and current to comminicate intelligence accross long distances. Their invention exploited the discoveries of Volta and Oersted.
    • Image of an electric lamp ready to be installed at a station of the EasternTelegraph Company. Artificial lighting was the most obvious application of electricity. It turned night into day and defined the modern urban space. Forms of electrical illumination were around in the early 1880s, but it was not until the late 1870s that they began to replace gas lighting.
    • The Atlantic cable of 1858 failed after only ten weeks. This was attributed to poor manufacture, and difficulties with laying and testing the cable. This costly disaster prompted official enquiries and forced widespread improvements in the cable industry, including practices at the Telegraphic Construction and Maintenance Company, pictured here in 1865.
    • The Goliath laying the Dover-Calais submarine cable in 1850. Made by English engineers, John and Jacob Brett, this cable comprised a solid copper conductor surrounded by gutta percha. Shortly after laying, the flimsy cable was accidentally broken by French fishermen. This prompted Thomas Crampton to add iron armouring to his Dover-Calais cable of 1851, a design which helped it last eight years.
    • Boxes of resistance coils on an engineer's desk in a cable station. These became essential items for testing, fault detection, and signalling in all telegraph stations and ships from the mid 1850's. From the mid 1860's, most countries had adopted the British standard of electrical resistance.
    • Thomson mirror galvanometer. From The late 1850s-1880s, this was one of the most effective ways of detecting the faint signals through long submarine telegraph cables. Signals turned a magnet attached to a mirror, which then deflected a light beam on to a horizontal scale. The left-right movement of the spot of light could be translated as the dots and dashes of telegraphic code.
    • Siphon recorders in the instrument room at the Eastern Telegraph Company's Carcavellos station. From the 1870s this was the most widely adopted method of making a permanent record of submarine telegraph signals. The electric pulses turned a magnet which in turn deflected a small siphon tube which sprayed ink from a reservoir onto a moving piece of paper. The peaks and troughs of the resulting ink trace corresponded to the dots and dashes of telegraphic code.
    • Heurtley Magnifier. Invented in 1908 by English electrical engineer Ernest Heurtley, it amplified the very faint signals emerging from long submarine cables ready for retransmission into another cable or feeding into a relay for operating equipment demanding large currents. When used with the Brown Drum Relay, it became a major tool of automating cable telegraphy.
    • Marconi's attempts to transmit wireless signals across the Salisbury Plain and the Bristol Channel in 1896-7 were triumphs. In 1897, confident of a growing market for his inventions and service, he launched the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company. This was rebranded Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company in 1900. Soon company offices appeared in Britain where wireless telegrams could be ordered.
    • Photograph from 1922, of the wireless operator Mr M.O.Obuda inside the African Direct's station at Lagos. Mr Obuda was one of many colonized people who were recruited by British cable and wireless firms and, after formal training in Britain, he returned home to work the telegraphic networks.
    • During the bleakest moments of the First World War, Eastern Telegraph Company employee Mr R. Goodliffe paused to draw this humerous cartoon for The Zodiac of the messy, frustrating and often backbreaking work of company electricians. The routine maintenance and testing duties often prevented the more ambitious electricians from persuing scientific research. Taken from The Zodiac, 1916.
    • A significant number of technological advances in cable telegraphy came from cable manufacturers such as the India Rubber and Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company in North Greenwich. It faced major competition from the larger Telegraphic Construction and Maintenance Company which, by the early 1900s, had built a chemical laboratory for research on cable materials.