The Victorian Internet (8 page)

T
HE NEWS THAT the Atlantic cable had failed caused an outcry, not to mention a great deal of embarrassment. Some even claimed
the whole thing had been a hoax—that there had never been a working cable, and it was all an elaborate trick organized by
Field to make a fortune on the stock market. "Was the Atlantic cable a humbug?" asked the
Boston Courier,
in an article that suggested that the message from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan had in fact been sent weeks in advance
by ordinary mail. In a bid to silence the skeptics, the full transcript of the messages sent over the cable before it failed
was released. It makes sorry reading and is all too convincing—most of the messages were along the lines of "CAN YOU RECEIVE
ME?" and "PLEASE SAY IF YOU CAN READ THIS," as the operators at each end struggled to get the cable to work. The following
year, another high-profile telegraphic venture, an attempt to build a submarine cable through the Red Sea to India funded
by the British government, also ended in failure. This time, since it was public money that had been lost, there were widespread
calls for a public inquiry.

A joint committee was appointed, with four representatives from the Atlantic Telegraph Company and four chosen by the British
government, including Professor Wheatstone. For several months the committee took evidence from witnesses, both expert and
not-so-expert, in an attempt to get to the bottom of the problem of long­distance submarine telegraphy. The star witness,
and the man who did more than anyone else to put submarine telegraphy on a firm scientific footing, was William Thomson, professor
of natural philosophy at Glasgow University—and, by this time, the archrival of the Atlantic cable's designer, Dr. Whitehouse.

Whitehouse had been conveniently ill and unable to go to sea to lay the failed cable, and it was Thomson who had kindly agreed
to stand in for him, even though he had grave reservations about its design. He had already done a lot of theoretical work
on the nature of submarine cables, and his measured, scientifically justified evidence to the public inquiry made mincemeat
out of Whitehouse. Not only had Whitehouse made the conducting core too small, Thomson explained, but his use of high-voltage
induction coils had gradually destroyed the cable's insulation and caused its eventual demise.

Worse still, Whitehouse had disobeyed his superiors and had acted as though the sole purpose of the cable's existence was
to satisfy his experimental curiosity. When it became clear that a highly sensitive new kind of receiving apparatus, the mirror
galvanometer, was better suited for transatlantic telegraphy than his own patented automatic receiver, Whitehouse grudgingly
agreed to use it—even though he continued to claim that messages were in fact being received on his apparatus. This did little
to endear him to Professor Thomson, who had invented the mirror galvanometer.

Exasperated by Whitehouse's behavior, the directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company eventually sacked him. He retaliated
almost immediately by publishing a book called
The Atlantic Telegraph
in a bid to protect his reputation. It was an extraordinarily one-sided account of the Atlantic cable. As he attempted to
defend himself and his flawed theories, Whitehouse blamed everyone around him. Portraying himself as a man of science struggling
against the forces of ignorance and incompetence, he blamed the manufacturers of the cable, the crew of the ship that laid
it, and, most of all, Cyrus Field and the other officials of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, who he claimed had refused to
let him carry out all the tests he recommended. He denounced Thomson's new theory of electricity as "fiction" and derided
his mirror galvanometer as impractical. Whitehouse was so convinced that he understood telegraphy better than anyone else
that he even invented his own "improved" version of Morse code. He also had what he thought was a brilliant new idea—codebooks
containing numbered words, which he evidently didn't realize had been abandoned by both Chappe and Morse years earlier.

Thomson's evidence to the committee, and the public savaging of Whitehouse that took place in the letters pages of the
Engineer
journal, ruined Whitehouse's reputation as effectively as the huge voltages generated by his induction coils had ruined the
cable. Conveniently for the Atlantic Telegraph Company, which ought to have taken some of the blame for rushing the manufacture
of the cable, the responsibility for the failure could be laid firmly at White-house's door. With him gone, the company argued,
the mistakes that had caused the cable to fail would never be repeated. Thomson, meanwhile, had shown that he understood the
theory of submarine telegraphy; a theory that was vindicated in 1864 when a cable was successfully laid linking India with
Europe via the Persian Gulf, along which messages were sent using low voltages and Thomson's sensitive mirror galvanometer
as a detector. This time, it really looked as though the problems of submarine telegraphy had been solved, and Field was soon
able to raise the money for a new Atlantic cable.

T
HE NEW CABLE was built with a lot more care than its predecessor. Following Professor Thomson's recommendations, it had a
much larger conducting core; it was also more buoyant, so it would be less likely to snap under its own weight. Still, it
was so heavy that there was only one ship in the world that would be able to carry it: the
Great Eastern,
designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunei, and easily the largest ship afloat. The
Great Eastern
had proved something of a white elephant; its large size should have resulted in huge economies of scale, but mismanagement
and bad luck meant it had never made anyone any money. The ship was, however, ideally suited for cable laying, and on June
24, 1865, with the new cable loaded onto three vast drums, it set out for Valentia.

A month later, having laid the Irish end of the cable, the Great
Eastern
headed west across the Atlantic, paying out the cable as it went. The cable was tested regularly, and whenever a fault was
found, the cable was cut, the ship turned around, and the cable was hauled back in until the faulty part revealed itself.
However, on August 2, two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic, the cable broke during one of these splicing operations and
disappeared under the waves, into water two miles deep. Several attempts to recover the cable were made with grapnels and
improvised steel wires, but every time it was lifted to the surface, the steel wires broke. Eventually the
Great Eastern
turned around and headed back toward Europe.

Despite this failure, raising the money for a third cable did not prove too difficult; the Atlantic Telegraph Company now
had so much experience in cable laying that it seemed certain to succeed. What's more, armed with the right equipment, Field
was confident of being able to recover the second cable. The following year, on the apparently inauspicious date of Friday,
July i3, the
Great Eastern
set out from Valentia again trailing a new cable from an improved paying-out mechanism. Two weeks later, after an uneventful
voyage, it reached Newfoundland, and the cable was secured. Once again, Europe and North America had been linked.

Demand for the new cable was so great that on its first day of operation it earned a staggering £1,000. And within a month
the
Great Eastern
had successfully recovered the lost cable of the previous year from two miles down on the seabed. More cable was spliced on,
and there were soon two working telegraph links across the Atlantic. The death blow was finally dealt to Whitehouse's high-voltage
theories by the noted engineer Josiah Latimer Clark, who had the two cables connected back-to-back and successfully sent a
signal around the whole circuit—from Ireland to Newfoundland and back—using a tiny battery and Thomson's mirror galvanometer
as the detector. The electric telegraph had finally conquered the Atlantic.

T
HIS TIME THERE was no question of the cable being a hoax. Thomson was knighted, and Congress gave Field a unanimous vote
of thanks and awarded him a specially minted gold medal. Honors were also bestowed on Wheatstone and Cooke, and, belatedly,
Francis Ronalds, whose original plans for an electric telegraph had been rejected by the Admiralty half a century earlier.
(Thomson went on to become Lord Kelvin, after whom the unit of temperature used by scientists is named.)

The hype soon got going again when it became clear that, this time, the transatlantic link was here to stay. At a banquet
held in Field's honor by the New York Chamber of Commerce in November 1866, he was described as "the Columbus of our time.
. . . he has, by his cable, moored the New World close alongside the Old." His life's work, the transatlantic cable, was hailed
as "the most wonderful achievement of our civilization."

The cables were so profitable that Field was able to pay off all his debts in 1867. That year, when one of the two cables
got crushed by an iceberg and stopped working, it was repaired within weeks. Before long, the recovery and repair of undersea
cables was regarded as commonplace.

Another banquet was held for Morse at Delmonico's in New York in December 1868, where he was toasted for having "annihilated
both space and time in the transmission of intelligence. The breadth of the Atlantic, with all its waves, is as nothing."

Echoing the sentiments expressed on the completion of the 1858 cable, a toast proposed by Edward Thornton, the British ambassador,
emphasized the peacemaking potential of the telegraph. "What can be more likely to effect [peace] than a constant and complete
intercourse between all nations and individuals in the world?" he asked. "Steam [power] was the first olive branch offered
to us by science. Then came a still more effective olive branch—this wonderful electric telegraph, which enables any man who
happens to be within reach of a wire to communicate instantaneously with his fellow men all over the world." And another toast
was to "the telegraph wire, the nerve of international life, transmitting knowledge of events, removing causes of misunderstanding,
and promoting peace and harmony throughout the world."

Was there no limit to the telegraph's power to amaze? Well, actually, there was. For just as the reach of the telegraph was
starting to expand across the oceans, some parts of the network were so congested that its whole raison d'etre—the rapid delivery
of messages—was being undermined. As the volume of traffic increased, the telegraph was in danger of becoming a victim of
its own success.

6.

STEAM-POWERED MESSAGES

The demands for the telegraph have been constantly increasing; they have been spread over every civilized country in the world,
and have become, by usage, absolutely necessary for the well-being of society.

—
NEW YORK TIMES,
April 3, 1872

S
PEEDY COMMUNICATION is a marvelous thing. But as anyone who uses e-mail will testify, once you've got used to being able
to send messages very quickly, it's very difficult to put up with delays. Just as today's e-mail systems are still plagued
by occasional blackouts and failures, the telegraph networks of the 1850s were subject to congestion as the volume of traffic
mushroomed, and key network links within major cities became overloaded.

The problem arose because most telegraph messages were not transmitted directly from the telegraph office nearest the sender
to the one nearest the recipient, but passed via one or more intermediate points where they were retranscribed and retransmitted
each time. At busy times, messages might be coming in to a particular telegraph office faster than that office could handle
them. Instead of being immediately retransmitted, the messages, transcribed on slips of paper, literally started to pile up.

Parts of the London network were, in fact, so congested that complaints about delayed messages were soon a common refrain
within the business community. A cartoon published in
Punch
magazine in i863 showed two gentlemen lamenting the sorry state of the telegraph system. "What an age we live in," complains
one. "It is now six o'clock, and we are in Fleet Street and this message was only sent from Oxford Circus yesterday afternoon
at three." (Fleet Street is less than half an hour's walk from Oxford Circus.) Stories like this threatened to undermine public
confidence in the telegraph's legendary speed and efficiency.

Some telegraph companies tried employing additional messenger boys to carry bundles of messages along busy routes from one
telegraph station to another—a distance of only a few hundred yards in many cases. With enough messages in a bundle, this
method was quicker than retelegraphing them, but it hardly inspired public confidence in the new technology. Instead, it gave
the impression that the telegraph system was merely a glorified and far more expensive postal service. On the other hand,
because the number of messages being transmitted over busy parts of the network varied so dramatically, simply installing
more telegraph lines and staffing them with more operators wasn't practical either? for if there were very few messages to
handle during a lull, the highly paid operators would have nothing to do. A cheap, efficient way had to be found to transfer
large numbers of messages over those branches of the network that were prone to sudden surges in traffic. Something new was
called for—and fast.

I
n LONDON, the problem of congestion first emerged in the early 1850s, when half of all telegraph messages related to the
Stock Exchange, another third were business related, and only one in seven concerned "family affairs." In other words, the
main use of the telegraph was to send time-sensitive information between the Stock Exchange and other parts of the country.
As a result, the telegraph link between the Stock Exchange branch office and the Central Telegraph Office, a distance of 220
yards, carried more messages than any other part of the network; and the value of these messages depended on their being delivered
swiftly.

Josiah Latimer Clark, who worked as an engineer for the Electric Telegraph Company (and who later carried out the experiment
that disproved Whitehouse's theories about transatlantic telegraphy), applied himself to the problem and came up with a radical
solution. He proposed a steam-powered pneumatic tube system to carry telegraph forms the short distance from the Stock Exchange
to the main telegraph office. Since outgoing messages would be carried by tube, the telegraph wire along the route could be
dedicated to incoming messages, and the level of traffic along the wire would be dramatically reduced.

Clark first tested the idea in 1853, and by 1854 an airtight tube an inch and a half in diameter had been laid underground
between the two telegraph stations. It was capable of carrying up to five messages at once, written on telegraph forms and
stuffed into a cylindrical carrier made of the ever-useful gutta-percha. Each carrier had a felt pad at the front end to act
as a buffer, and was covered with leather to prevent the gutta-percha from melting, since friction with the inside of the
tube tended to make the carriers, moving at twenty feet per second, very hot. A six-horsepower steam engine in the basement
of the Central Telegraph Office created a partial vacuum in front of the carrier, and it took about half a minute to draw
each one down the tube from the Stock Exchange. Even when the carriers were not fully loaded, this system was much faster
than sending the messages by telegraph, which could only send about one message per minute. Once a carrier arrived at the
Central Telegraph Office, the forms were unloaded and the messages telegraphed to their destinations in the usual way. The
original tube was one-way only, since the vast majority of messages originated at the Stock Exchange end. Batches of empty
carriers were taken back to the Stock Exchange by messenger.

This first pneumatic tube was far from perfect, and carriers frequently got stuck, but the company was convinced of the benefits
and introduced a second underground tube in 1858. With a larger bore (two and a quarter inches) and running nearly a mile
from another branch office, in Mincing Lane, to the central office, this improved tube was operated by a more powerful twenty-horsepower
steam engine. It proved successful enough that after a while the company decided to make this tube two-way.

So that steam engines would not be needed at both ends, a "vacuum reservoir," consisting of an airtight, lead-covered box,
ten by twelve by fourteen feet, was constructed in the basement of a house in Mincing Lane. However, one day a carrier got
stuck in the tube, causing the pressure in the vacuum reservoir to drop, until eventually it imploded with a loud bang, demolishing
the wall between it and a nearby house. According to a contemporary report, "At the time the landlord of the house happened
to be dining in the next room, and he suddenly found himself, his table, his dinner, and the door, which was wrenched off
its hinges, precipitated into the room amongst the debris of the chamber." Following this accident, carriers were sent by
pushing them along the tubes with compressed air, rather than drawing them along with a partial vacuum.

By 1865, the increase in traffic had led the Electric Telegraph Company to extend its London tube network and install tube
systems in Liverpool, Birmingham, and Manchester. Similar systems were initiated in Berlin in 1865 and Paris in 1866, and
before long there were also pneumatic tube networks in Vienna, Prague, Munich, Rio de Janeiro, Dublin, Rome, Naples, Milan,
and Marseilles. One of the most ambitious systems was installed in New York, linking many of the post offices in Manhattan
and Rrooklyn. This system was large enough to handle small parcels, and on one occasion a cat was even sent from one post
office to another along the tubes.

Ry 1870, three-inch-diameter tubes were the norm, with carriers capable of transporting as many as sixty messages, though
they were usually sent holding far fewer. According to statistics compiled in London, one three-inch tube was equivalent to
seven telegraph wires and fourteen operators working flat out. Tubes were also good for coping with sudden surges in demand,
such as when war fever struck London in July 1870 and the amount of traffic instantly doubled.

However, blockages were a constant problem for all pneumatic tube networks. They were usually cleared by blasting air down
the tubes—though really serious blockages meant having to dig up the street. In Paris, the distance to the blockage was sometimes
calculated by firing a pistol down the tube and noting the time delay before the sound of the bullet's impact with the carrier.
Leaks, on the other hand, were harder to find; the preferred method was to send a carrier on the end of a long string, and
note the point at which the rate of take-up of the string slackened.

A
LTHOUGH THEY WERE ORIGINALLY intended to move messages from one telegraph office to another, pneumatic tube systems were
soon being used to move messages around within major telegraph offices. Each of these offices was a vast information processing
center—a hive of activity surrounded by a cat's cradle of telegraph wires, filled with pneumatic tubes, and staffed by hundreds
of people whose sole purpose was to receive messages, figure out where to send them, and dispatch them accordingly.

The layout of a major telegraph office was carefully organized to make the flow of information as efficient as possible. Typically,
pneumatic tube and telegraph links to offices within the same city would be grouped on one floor of the building, and telegraph
wires carrying messages to and from distant towns and cities would be located on another floor. Grouping lines in this way
meant that additional instruments and operators could easily be assigned to particularly busy routes when necessary. International
connections, if any, were also grouped.

Incoming messages arriving by wire or by tube were taken to sorting tables on each floor and forwarded as appropriate over
the building's internal pneumatic tube system for retransmission. In 1875, the Central Telegraph Office in London, for example,
housed 450 telegraph instruments on three floors, linked by sixty-eight internal pneumatic tubes. The main office in New York,
at 195 Broadway, had pneumatic tubes linking its floors but also employed "check-girls" to deliver messages within its vast
operating rooms. Major telegraph offices also had a pressroom, a doctor's office, a maintenance workshop, separate male and
female dining rooms, a vast collection of batteries in the basement to provide electrical power for the telegraphic instruments,
and steam engines to power the pneumatic tubes. Operators working in shifts ensured that the whole system operated around
the clock.

Consider, for example, the path of a message from Clerkenwell in London to Birmingham. After being handed in at the Clerkenwell
Office, the telegraph form would be forwarded to the Central Telegraph Office by pneumatic tube, where it would arrive on
the "Metropoli­tan" floor handling messages to and from addresses within London. On the sorting table it would be identified
as a message requiring retransmission to another city and would be passed by internal pneumatic tube to the "Pro­vincial"
floor for transmission to Birmingham by intercity telegraph. Once it had been received and retranscribed in Birmingham, the
message would be sent by pneumatic tube to the telegraph office nearest the recipient and then delivered by messenger.

a
PPROPRIATELY ENOUGH for the nation that pioneered the first telegraphs, the French had their own twist on the use of pneumatic
tubes. For of all the tube networks built around the world, the most successful was in Paris, where sending and receiving
pneus
became part of everyday life in the late nineteenth century. Like the pneumatic tube networks in many other major cities,
the Paris network was extensive enough that many local messages could be sent from sender to recipient entirely by tube and
messenger, without any need for telegraphic transmission. In these cases, the telegraph form that the sender wrote the message
on actually ended up in the hands of the recipient—which meant that long messages were just as easy to deliver as short messages.

So, in 1879, a new pricing structure was announced: For messages traveling within the Paris tube network, the price was fixed,
no matter how long the message. Faster than the post and cheaper than sending a telegram, this network provided a convenient
way to send local messages within Paris, though the service was operated by the state telegraph company and the messages were
officially regarded as telegrams.

Messages were written on special forms, which could be purchased, prepaid, in advance. These could then be deposited into
small post boxes next to conventional mailboxes, handed in at telegraph counters in post offices, or put into boxes mounted
on the backs of trams, which were unloaded when the trams reached the end of the line. Once in the system, messages were sent
along the tubes to the office nearest the destination and then delivered by messenger. Each message might have to pass through
several sorting stations on the way to its destination; it was date-stamped at each one, so that its route could be determined.
(The same is true of today's e-mail messages, whose headers reveal their exact paths across the In­ternet.) No enclosures
were allowed to be included with messages, and any messages that broke this rule were transferred to the conventional postal
service and charged at standard postal rates.

The scheme was a great success, and the volume of messages being passed around the network almost doubled in the first year.
The network was further extended as a result, and for many years messages were affectionately known as
petits bleux,
after the blue color of the message forms.

B
Y THE EARLY 1870s, the Victorian Internet had taken shape: A patchwork of telegraph networks, submarine cables, pneumatic
tube systems, and messengers combined to deliver messages within hours over a vast area of the globe. New cables were being
laid all over the world. Malta had been linked to Alexandria in 1868, and a direct cable was laid from France to Newfoundland
in 1869. Cables reached India, Hong Kong, China, and Japan in 1870; Australia was connected in 1871, and South America in
1874.

In 1844, when Morse had started building the network, there were a few dozen miles of wire and sending a message from, say,
London to Bombay and back took ten weeks. But within thirty years there were over 650,000 miles of wire, 3o,ooo miles of submarine
cable, and 20,000 towns and villages were on-line—and messages could be telegraphed from London to Bombay and back in as little
as four minutes. "Time itself is telegraphed out of existence," declared the
Daily Telegraph
of London, a newspaper whose very name was chosen to give the impression of rapid, up-to-date delivery of news. The world
had shrunk further and faster than it ever had before.