Atlantic (35 page)

The British government was especially excited by the plan and offered to survey the route, to perhaps even provide ships to help lay the cable, and to pay a fee—providing its official messages could be guaranteed priority over all others. The Americans debated the same matter very much more intensely.

Not everyone in the New World wanted such intimate contact with the Old. Thoreau, ever the grumpy misanthrope, remarked caustically that tunneling beneath the Atlantic, as he put it, to place a communications cable would hardly be a worthy exercise if the first news to reach America was merely “that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” And there was still a distinct mood of postrevolutionary, post-White-House-burning Anglophobia abroad, especially in the South, where anything English was widely loathed and despised. Nonetheless, after much hard lobbying in Congress, the requisite bills passed; and on the March day in 1857 before he handed over his office to James Buchanan, President Franklin Pierce signed into law an act offering precisely the same terms as been agreed in London. Construction—the most ambitious construction project then ever envisaged in the world—could now go ahead.

Publicity was enormous: the papers on both sides of the ocean were filled with suggestions of how such a cable might be built—suspend it from balloons, wrote one correspondent; have it dangle just below the surface of the sea from a chain of buoys, where ships could tie up and, just like today’s cars at a roadside service station, fill up with messages; Queen Victoria’s husband thought it should be cased in a glass tube; still others thought—as noted in chapter 2—that there were layers of differing density in the sea that would affect how deeply various objects might sink: horses would sink lower than frogs, fat people would lie below thin, and cables would sink to only a certain depth and then hover in the ocean, like an aqueous version of today’s contrails from a jet.

Scientists squabbled endlessly over how thick the cable should be—thick copper conducts the greater voltages needed for long-distance messaging, but thick copper also meant a heavy cable that might break under its own weight as it was lowered to the seabed. In the end it was decided to manufacture a cable about as thick as a man’s index finger, its copper core insulated with gutta percha, then with hemp and tar, finally with steel wire armoring wrapped around it, and weighing about a ton a mile (though only around 1,340 pounds when suspended in water). In the early summer of 1857, two and a half thousand miles of this cable—340,000 miles in total length, if all its component wires were measured—were brought from the factories in London and Liverpool and coiled carefully into drums aboard two sailing vessels, the USS
Niagara
and the HMS
Agamemnon
, with half of the cable in each: about 1,500 tons weight.

In August the ships sailed in convoy to the island of Valentia, in southwestern Ireland, and a group of burly sailors dragged one end of the cable ashore through the surf into the magnificently named Foilhommerum Bay. Speeches of great portent and prayers of great sincerity were uttered. Fireworks were lit and exploded. And then, in the company of a flotilla of naval escorts, the two converted cable ships backed out into the sea, paying out cable as they went—whereupon there commenced a saga of accident, frustration, distemper, and dismay that was to last well into the following year, as it proved persistently impossible to lay the cable without it breaking repeatedly and plunging forever into the depths of the sea.

The crews tried all manner of ways to get around the problem—most notably by electing to begin not at any one side of the ocean, but in the middle, the two ships meeting at a point eight hundred miles from each coast, splicing the cables together and then sailing away from each other toward the opposing shores. But the problems they then encountered were without number—particularly a scourge of unprecedented midsummer storms, which very nearly capsized the cable-heavy British ship. And as before, the cables kept breaking and being lost. Technical failures endlessly dogged the attempts—including a celebrated moment when engineers on one ship noticed a flaw on the cable at the very instant it was being paid out over the stern wheels, and raced frantically to repair it as it slid along the deck and before it went into the water and short-circuited. They succeeded—but the cable went dead anyway.

The directors of the company back in London became increasingly exasperated as costs mounted. Some said the project was technically impossible and wanted it abandoned. The press became cynically dismissive. Poems were written poking fun at the operation. Confidence was shaken, almost to the breaking point.

But then, in the late summer of 1858, after three more failed attempts, the two ships met for one final time, spliced their cables together on July 29, sailed away from each other, and, both inexplicably and miraculously, met no problems whatsoever. The USS
Niagara
sailed into Trinity Bay in Newfoundland on August 4 and the
Agamemnon
stood off Valentia Island, sixteen hundred miles away, just a day later. The line they had sewn together in mid-ocean was still working; and even as sailors at each end hauled the cable to the already-built cable stations, where the landlines to New York and London were already waiting to be hooked up, it was still in apparently perfect order.

Cyrus Field, the transatlantic cable impresario, with Puck’s famous boast from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
slightly misquoted, beside him, dominates this
Harper’s Weekly
cartoon celebrating the successful laying of the first cable between Ireland and Newfoundland. Queen and president—seen in the lower part of the cartoon—were soon in busy contact with each other.

There was widespread rapture. On first hearing in London the news that a link had now been joined, made, and preserved intact, the
Times
waxed more breathless than most of its readers must have considered appropriate:

. . . since the discovery of Columbus, nothing has been done in any degree comparable to the vast enlargement which has thus been given to the sphere of human activity . . . the Atlantic is dried up, and we become in reality as well as in wish . . . one country . . . the Atlantic Telegraph has half undone the declaration of 1776, and has gone far to make us one again, in spite of ourselves, one people.

The first messages were passed across it, employing Samuel Morse’s now-famous code, on August 16—with Queen Victoria first offering to President Buchanan her sincere congratulations and “fervently hoping” that the new “electric cable” would cement the ties of amity and brotherhood across the seas, and with Buchanan replying soon afterward from Washington with similar verbal folderol. Soon came the first commercial message—a report from Cunard about a nonfatal collision between two ships, the
Europa
and the
Arabia
,
⁶⁸
both of which had put into port in Canada; and then came a slew of news items. The first messages ever to be telegraphed between the two continents were either decidedly trivial, as Thoreau had fretted (“King of Prussia too ill to visit Queen Victoria”), or quite appropriately momentous (“Settlement of Chinese question: Chinese empire opens to trade; Christian religion allowed”).

But it was too good to last. Very slowly, after less than a fortnight in the water, the cable started to show signs of a mysterious suffering. Its transmissions started to fade away into gibberish, until finally they broke down altogether, the cable sending and receiving nothing. With much sadness the company directors pronounced that the cable had succumbed to some unknown submarine malady and was quite irretrievably dead.

It had lasted fifteen days. It was a failure. The one new supercontinent had now fissioned, had become two again. The sea had won. Such was the public disappointment and official dismay that no further cable was to be laid for another eight years. Except that eventually, those who had kept the faith proved persuasive. In 1866, Brunel’s immense new ship, the
Great Eastern
, was summoned from bankruptcy and idleness and pressed into service as a cable layer. She had her difficulties, too, despite eight years’ worth of technological improvements—but eventually she sailed into the prettily named Newfoundland hamlet of Heart’s Content “having trailed behind her a chain of two thousand miles, to bind the Old World to the New.”

It was done. The cable worked almost perfectly, and Mr. Field from the Berkshires, though not able because of his Americanness to be awarded like everyone else an honor by Queen Victoria, was promptly nicknamed Lord Cable by the British press. His creation proved in short order so successful and then so irreplaceably vital that within the following decade the ocean’s floors, north and south, became festooned with filigrees of cables. A second strand was laid four weeks after the first. By 1900 there were fifteen, including cables to Argentina and Brazil. Communication between Europe and the Americas—between every European country and every American city, north and south—became almost instantaneous and then in time a matter of routine.

Yet less than half a century after the laying of the first cable, technology offered up another advance, strengthening and quickening the electronic link between worlds. Now it became possible to make exactly the same contact across the ocean—and indeed across any points around the world, and in time well beyond the planet as well—without employing cable at all.

The first experiments with wireless telegraphy—or
radio
, as it came to be called, because this kind of electronic signal was from the Latin
radiatus
, or spread—were also conducted across the Atlantic. And by being chosen as the experimental site—quite naturally so, because the cities on its sides were the richest, most inventive, and most dynamic of modern civilization—the ocean consolidated its position yet again: it was to be a great proving ground for all the new ideas—from packet ships to supersonic aircraft—that, with accelerating rapidity, were now coming to dominate the coming technological age.

A hill on the eastern edge of Newfoundland once again, and another on the western tip of England, in Cornwall—also once again, for since the seventeenth century Falmouth had been the terminus for the Post Office packets—had been chosen to serve as the endpoints for the first test of radio, in December 1901. There had to be a waypoint in Ireland for the radio signal, too, just as there had been for the Cyrus Field’s cable—but there was an added reason for this: Guglielmo Marconi, the author of all these first wireless tests, was half Irish. Though his father was Bolognese, Mrs. Marconi senior was from Ireland, of the family that made Jameson whiskey.

As many people claim to have invented radio as there are who say they created television or the incandescent lightbulb. But Marconi, who took out a crucial British patent in 1896
⁶⁹
and who a year later began his tests with transmitters and receivers and aerials of all kinds of shapes and sizes in southern England—most notably between Queen Victoria’s summer mansion at Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, and her son’s cruising yacht of the same name sailing close offshore in the English Channel—is still most closely associated with the invention. As Thomas Edison later remarked to skeptics time and again, “Marconi is the one.”

There were skeptics aplenty when Marconi announced late in 1901 that he would try to send a radio signal, already provably sent across both the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay, as well as to and from ships at sea, across the full breadth of the Atlantic Ocean. It would, they said, be as technically impossible (because of the earth’s curvature) as it was morally repugnant (this from the late Cyrus Field’s Atlantic Telegraph Company, which claimed a fifty-year monopoly on transoceanic telegraphy, with two years still to go).

But the twenty-seven-year-old Marconi cared little for their naysaying, even though his early attempts had been fraught with problems: an initial array of twenty aerials in Cornwall had blown down in a gale, and his experiment in using a balloon to hold up the Newfoundland aerial had failed when the balloon unexpectedly burst.

And now he was trying again. It was shortly after midnight, pitch dark, cold and windy, the start of Thursday, December 12, 1901, and Marconi was sitting before a table on top of what is now called Signal Hill, looking down on the winking lights of the port entrance to Newfoundland’s capital city. The glow of a torch illuminating his notepad, he was listening intently to an earphone that was hooked to a large and curiously shaped device of valves and dials, itself connected to a wire—unseen in the dark—that ascended to a large kite, which an assistant kept flying in the strong Atlantic breeze five hundred feet above.

More than 1,800 miles away in Cornwall, on a low summit by the hamlet of Poldhu, near cliffs that fell dangerously into the raging Channel surf, another group of men, Marconi’s employees, were taking turns pressing a single flat Bakelite-and-copper key on a machine similar to the one Marconi was using in St. John’s. They were endlessly tapping out the three quick dots, followed by a pause, then three quick dots again. It was Samuel Morse’s code for the letter S. It was early in the morning in Cornwall, still dark, with not even a glimmer of dawn in the east. It was late in the middle of the Newfoundland night. Everyone was tired.