to the new and exciting world of telegraphy. Whitehouse had little or no formal training in engineering, mechanics, or natural philosophy. Still, he managed to be made the chief electrician of the Atlantic Telegraph Company with a mixture of ambition and confidence. Electrotherapy at this time used a varying range of voltages. The idea was that if lower voltages didn’t offer a remedy, higher voltages would, as long as you did it in a way that didn’t kill the patient. If Whitehouse was a practitioner of electrotherapy, he would have been familiar with winding his own coils and making a generator. This is important to remember later in the story when he uses high voltages on the cable. In 1850, Whitehouse met with John Watkins Brett, a British businessman interested in entering the booming field of telegraphy. J. W. Brett and his brother, Jacob Brett, registered a company a few
years earlier for a trans-Atlantic telegraph cable named ‘General Oceanic Telegraph Company.’ Brett hired Whitehouse to research various telegraphy-related topics, focusing on long-distance wires. Whitehouse developed his own test equipment, methods, and apparatuses. During this time, Whitehouse produced a few patents. The first was in 1853 for a type of chemical telegraphy. In this method, a machine rolls carbon paper over a device called ‘the manipulator,’ which applies shocks to the paper, leaving an intelligible mark. When used effectively, this method should make communication easier and more efficient for both the operator and the receiver. Charles Bright While conducting research for Brett, Whitehouse met Charles Bright, the twenty-one-year-old chief engineer of the Magnetic Telegraph Company. Charles Bright,
Figure 7. Charles Bright
success, with lines running all over the United Kingdom and Ireland. By the time Bright entered into the story, he had already made significant contributions to submarine cable technology. The longest cable Whitehouse could test was a couple of hundred miles long, but with the help of Charles Bright, he could have
with his brother Edward, started the company in 1852 at the age of twenty and had tremendous
Figure 6. Chemical Telegraph. The electro-chemical decomposition printer from Whitehouse’s 1853 patent.
Figure 5. J.W. Brett
we get technical
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