Some of the men who started the cable industry, Photos by Henry Clifford, 1850, A Thread Across the Ocean,by John Steele Gordon
Laying of the Cable
Cyrus Field may have had the idea for the cable, but he sure did not do it alone. George Elliot, John Pender, and Richard Glass, all engineers, converted their business to producing submarine cables for Field and renamed it the Glass, Elliot and Company, sometimes reffered to as the GEC. Willoughby Smith worked for this company as the leader of the electricians crew and helped solve many issues for Field. William Thompson made many contributions to the technology of submarine telegraphy while working for Glass, Elliot and Company. Charles Tilston Bright was an inventor at GEC and was consulted by Field to work alongside him. While helping Field design new and improved cables, Bright became a wealthy man.
Little did Field know that his project would take him twelve years to complete. Field hired many of the brightest engineers and scientists in the country to help design a cable. This cable could not be a replica of what the cables were like in Europe. Europe’s longest cable was only about as big as a finger, and stretched 110 miles. Field’s cable had to be over 5,000 miles long, and withstand 2,300 more fathoms than any other cable. Those were not the only struggles, this cable had to be designed so it could withstand the oceans’ many horrors. One error could destroy the project, costing Field thousands, and it did. The first attempt was in 1857, two cable ships set off carrying 1,250 tons of cable each, their goal was to slowly drop the cable into the ocean. The plan was to splice the two cables together at a certain point. After just five miles the cable broke, and everyone returned home to start from scratch. The engineers had decided to base their decisions off of how fast they could make it and the price of it, therefore the first cable was rushed and had many errors leading to failure.
1858, 1865, and 1866 Atlantic Cables, Photographed April 2009, Science Museum, London
Sketch of the Cables, from the book Great Inventions, 1932