retroelectro
gaps, and coils to develop what he felt was the state of the art in long- distance telegraphy. Newspapers of the day, claim that he was able to talk himself into an annual salary of £1,000 a year ($175K in 2024), and once the telegraph was up and running, he would receive a £10,000 ($1.75M in 2024) salary a year. Certainly, this was all contingent on his patented equipment being necessary for the line to work. “The coils are used in pairs and consist of large hollow iron cores, 5 feet in length, and each wound with the following lengths of copper wire: —first, with about 11,000 yards of No. 20 gauge silk-covered copper wire, for a secondary circuit, insulated with wax paper between the layers, and hermetically enclosed in gutta-percha. And over this a primary circuit of thick wire, No. 14, consisting of 24 parallel circuits of about 100 yards.” – Whitehouse on the coils used in his design . Two different manufacturers were used to make the cable. There were no standards or proper testing procedures. According to Whitehouse, he tried to test the cable many times throughout its manufacture but was unable to. The cable took a year to make, and it was placed on two different ships. Whitehouse could never fully test the cable connected from end to end.
Over the next two years, there were three attempts to get the cable across. Writer’s note: according to a biography of Charles Bright by his brother and son, Whitehouse was not a founding member of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, but every other account the writer can find says he was. He states it was just Bright, Cyrus W. Field, and J. W. Brett, and then Whitehouse joined later. Attempt 1: August 1857 The first attempt to lay The Atlantic Cable began in August 1857. It was marked by high hopes, with both British and American ships, HMS Agamemnon and USS Niagara, carrying out the mission. They both carried half of the cable, starting in Ireland and heading to Newfoundland. This effort faced numerous weather-related and technical difficulties, including problems with the cable’s insulation and the challenging conditions of the deep ocean, leading to the cable breaking after about 380 miles. This initial setback revealed just how complex and demanding the task would be. Attempt 2: June 1858 The second attempt began in the early summer of 1858. They used the same cable left over from the 1857 attempt but left it outside in the Irish weather for several months
36
Powered by FlippingBook