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developed the mirror galvanometer, which reflected light onto a scale to indicate signal strength and direction. These visual readings allowed operators to interpret messages effectively. Longer cables start behaving like how a capacitor does when any alternating signal (frequency) is passed through it. The charged conductor would become a plate, gathering electrons towards the grounded parts of the cable. So, when the transmitter starts sending a current, the cable begins to store a charge, and when the transmitter stops the current, the cable begins to discharge, making the needle move very slowly. If the signal is too fast, sometimes the needle wouldn’t move at all. Professor Michael Faraday reported to the Royal Institution on January 20th, 1854. There, he and Werner Siemens agreed that signals could only travel around 750 miles per second along buried wires, meaning they were slower underwater. This was due to the Leyden charge, which gives submarine cables the quality of a low-pass filter. I don’t think they fully grasped resonant frequencies and capacitive reactance yet. At the time of Faraday’s report in 1854, it seemed that a cable long enough to span the ocean would have such a terrible signal delay that it would not be possible to make practical or, more importantly, profitable.
most ingenious and painstaking experimenter,’ but by most other accounts, Whitehouse was arrogant, brilliant, foolish, and an incessant liar. He attended the Royal College of Surgeons, where he won multiple awards for his work developing molds for anatomical study. After graduation, he worked as a surgeon at the Sussex County Hospital, but for some reason, he was no longer a practicing surgeon within five or ten years. In a previous Retro Electro article, ‘ Ethereal Fire Considered ,’ we wrote about the intersection of medicine and electricity. In the late 18th century and early 19th century, how electricity affects the human body wasn’t fully understood. Electricity couldn’t even be put to practical use until the invention of the Leyden Jar in 1745. Before the 1840s, many people reasoned that electricity was deeply connected to God and health. These thoughts date all the way back to Aristotle and didn’t really change until the middle of the nineteenth century. It’s easy to consider that Whitehouse could’ve been a mad doctor who used electricity in his treatments. They surely would have taught him some electrical therapies when he attended college. His reckless nature could have led to grave injuries, forcing him to resign as a doctor. He took his electrical knowledge from the medical field and brought it
In 1855, William Thomson (later known as Lord Kelvin) published an influential paper called “On the Theory of the Electric Telegraph.” This paper introduced ‘the law of squares,’ which showed that signal distortion with submarine cables increases exponentially with the cable’s length, resulting in significant challenges with very long-distance submarine telegraphy.
Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse
Figure 4. Wildman Whitehouse
Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse was born in 1816. However, only a little is known about his life prior to the 1850s. By training in trade, he was a surgeon. His contemporaries describe his character in the same way someone would describe Scrooge in The Christmas Carol. According to one of his peers, ‘He was a gentleman of very high intellectual and scientific attainments and a
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