with, he could have had a team of assistants and technicians at his whim, but he could not manage to keep a team together. With all this said, it is undeniable that he could not test the entire length of the cable before deployment. The cable existed on two different ships and it wasn’t going to be fully connected until the installation. In this way, he is absolutely correct. Unauthorized repair After he was left alone with The Atlantic Cable, after Thomson left, he went and pulled the cable up and cut it open, despite being explicitly told not to. This is a pride and arrogance problem. A total inability to follow another leader and do what he is told. There is not excuse for this. Environmental damage while in storage The cable was manufactured with the gutta percha as an insulating material. Gutta- percha is a natural latex obtained from the sap of certain trees in Southeast Asia. It is relatively stable and resistant to water and electrical conductivity, but it can degrade when exposed to heat and environmental factors over time. Heat softens the material, leading to the deformation of the insulation. Prolonged exposure to sunlight and ultraviolet radiation
can also cause it to become brittle, leading to cracks and reduced effectiveness. Additionally, gutta- percha is susceptible to oxidation, which can accelerate degradation when exposed to an oxygen-rich environment. After the failure of 1857, the cable was stored on the docks in Ireland, sitting for nearly a year. So, this way, he is absolutely correct. It is unreasonable to expect twenty-five hundred miles of cable to sit in the environment for a year and be perfectly fine afterward. Hasty construction and manufacture A cable of this magnitude had never been constructed before. The shareholders rushed the cable to accelerate the path to profits. Everyone argued that the cable was perfect until Whitehouse got his hands on it. Thompson does come to his defense here, suggesting that there could be damage three hundred miles in.
you’ll see the center conductor is very far from the center. Having the cable be like this anywhere along the twenty-five hundred miles would cause damage with higher voltages. If the cable was constructed the way that it was supposed to be, there is a chance that Whitehouse might not have damaged the cable, but that’s not what happened. Coiling of the wire The first two attempts had two ships start in Ireland with the plan that when one finished paying out its cable, the second would splice in and continue on the trip, bringing its cable with it. That was always the plan until the third attempt. This time, they met in the center, spliced together, and then went to their respective shores. This worked, but the shielding was twisted in a way that allowed for the cable to be spliced together in the first two attempts. When they spliced it together in the center and moved out, the twists unraveled each other because the cable wasn’t designed to go that way.
One thing is clear: Whitehouse did not create the damage seen in the picture below from the Telegraph house in Ireland. Look, and Figure 16. Damaged cable, a cross-section of the original cable showing a failure point.
we get technical
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