“Please send slower for the present.”
“How?”
“How do you receive?”
“Send slower.”
“Please send slower.”
“How do you receive?”
“Please say if you can read this.”
“Can you read this?”
“Yes.”
“How are signals?”
“Do you receive?”
“Please send something.”
“Please send V’s and B’s.”
“How are signals?”
Two and a half thousand tons of copper and iron had been strung two thousand miles across an ocean at the cost of millions of pounds and near shipwreck in order to act as conduit for the sputtering piece of failure you read above. That text represents an entire day’s conversation across the great transatlantic telegraph cable, which, in the late summer of 1858, linked Europe to North America for twenty-eight days. The first message launched fireworks and knighthoods and euphoric editorials (“The Atlantic is dried up,” announced the Times of London), but soon noise consumed the signal, and the wire went dead for hours at a time. Buried under three miles of water—sunk, in Kipling’s words, “Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are”—the cable was falling apart.
For the sake of those twenty-eight days of sporadic talk, British-American naval convoys had set out five separate times, unwinding the cable foot by foot as they steamed east across the Atlantic. On the fourth attempt, the ships were slammed by an historically ferocious storm. The British ship Agamemnon, a wooden vessel outfitted with both steam and sail, was caught in a weeklong gale, lurching from side to side by as many as 45 degrees, unbalanced by the tons of metal on her deck and in her hold—coils, wrote a nauseous newspaper correspondent on board, that resembled “nothing so much as a cargo of live eels.” Four times the cable snapped. Only on the fifth voyage did it hold.
On each attempt, the most important passenger was a scientist who has already figured in this story: William Thomson, the future Lord Kelvin. His analog computer was two decades to come; in those days he was comparatively little known, and still without his Neptunian beard. But he was one of the world’s leading experts on the wire transmission of information, though he didn’t use that word. He had staked his reputation on the transatlantic project and been voted onto its board of directors as a scientific advisor; he served on each voyage, even the nearly fatal one, unpaid. An Australian reporter on board for the fifth attempt captured his mood when, in the middle of the night, electric current in the cable ceased and it looked to have snapped again: “The very thought of disaster seemed to overpower him. His hand shook so much that he could scarcely adjust his eyeglasses. The veins on his forehead were swollen. His face was deathly pale . . . yet in mind keen and collected, testing and waiting.” But soon enough the signal came back to life, and Kelvin burst into laughter. A week later, the hills of County Kerry rose on the eastern horizon, and the cable was hauled onto the Irish shore, to be linked up with the European network.
A month later, it was inert junk on the bottom of the sea, destroyed by a disagreement.
Even before the Atlantic cable was laid, it was clear that messages sent through any underwater lines—across the English Channel, for instance—were especially prone to delay and distortion: transmitting a message through water is uniquely difficult. Because water, especially saltwater, is a natural conductor of electricity, a submerged cable is prone to find its electrical current leaching away. Compared to the signal borne by a dry cable, the signal sent along the length of a wet cable is far harder to discern.
No one understood this dilemma better than Thomson; it was, in large part, why he was aboard the Agamemnon to see the cable laid. Three years before the last sailing, his laboratory experiments in Glasgow had led him to argue that electrical transmission at a distance obeyed a “law of squares”: the arrival time of a message increased with the square of the cable’s length. Further, the signal’s strength would grow increasingly attenuated the farther it had to travel. And if all of this were the case, then the only hope of reliable undersea communication was the thickest, best insulated—and most expensive—cable that had ever been constructed, paired with sensitive equipment to pick up faint signals at the far end.
But in 1858, in the absence of an ocean-spanning cable to put them to the test, those conclusions were very much in doubt. Strong financial incentives pushed the transatlantic project’s backers to disregard Thomson: fortunes had begun to hang on the prospect of instantaneous communication across the ocean (imagine what a stockjobber in London could do with instant knowledge of commodity prices in Chicago), and Thomson’s results came with the dispiriting warning that a truly reliable cable might cost more than it was worth. As misfortune would have it, Thomson’s chief doubter was also his coworker: the head electrician of the transatlantic project.
Dr. O. E. Wildman Whitehouse was a retired surgeon and amateur electrical experimenter. That should not necessarily be counted as a slur on his expertise—the nineteenth century was a great age of gentleman amateurs. Against Thomson’s university prestige, however, Whitehouse staked a frankly populist claim: he announced that the study of electricity and communication “is no longer the exclusive privilege of the philosopher.” On the strength of his own flurry of experiments, he denounced the law of squares as “a fiction of the schools”: a formula built for elegance in the pages of journals (it even looked like Newton’s famous inverse-square law of gravity!), but one that fell apart in practice. Thomson struck the correct poses of Victorian decorum in response, but on his own copy of Whitehouse’s work, he scribbled that it was “fallacious in almost every point.” Where Thomson’s results demanded a sturdier cable and finer signal detection, Whitehouse’s called for brute force. As a later writer summed up his solution: “The further the electricity has to travel, the larger the kick it needs to send it on its way.” To overcome distortion and delay, simply apply more power: it had the virtue of simplicity, and it underbid Thomson’s plan, an inestimable advantage for a project that would live or die on the strength of the investments it could command.
In the end, it was a draw, and a farce. Thomson’s “mirror galvanometer,” his device for picking up faint electric signals, was installed at both ends, and disconnected by Whitehouse at every opportunity. The cable itself was built well below his standard of robustness. At the eastern end, on Valentia Island off the Irish coast, was Whitehouse—hooking up his massive, five-foot-long spark coils to push the signal through, and pumping electricity into the wire in 2,000-volt bursts.
Hauled in and out of ship holds, on and off decks, unwound and rewound, dropped to the seabed, snapped four times, spliced and respliced, the cable was already well punished by the time the first signal was sent. Now, subjected to Whitehouse’s electrical barrage, its insulation fried and gave out in a matter of days. The last sorry message received at Valentia read: “Forty-eight words. Right. Right.” Most of the messages sent and received on the celebrated wire were just like that: communications about communication, telegraphy as an especially bleak Samuel Beckett play.
Disobeying company orders, Whitehouse had a section of cable hauled up two miles offshore, searching for a wiring fault on which he could blame the breakdown; in the signal’s last days, he was fired for insubordination. A postmortem parliamentary report made him the face of the failure (though scholars have argued more recently that the cable, in bad condition from the start, was bound to fail eventually). Some newspapers treated the entire existence of the transatlantic telegraph as a hoax or an investment scam. For the next six years, communications across the ocean would be carried much as they had been for the previous four hundred, on boats. Not until 1866 was a cable laid that held.
And were all of these lessons on the minds of Claude Shannon and his colleagues, ninety years later? Very much so: when Arthur C. Clarke paused from science fiction to write a history of communication beginning with the transatlantic cable, he dedicated it to Shannon’s boss at Bell Labs, John Pierce, who “bullied” him into the project. In particular, the fiasco of the telegraph helped to crystallize three enduring lessons that would remain at the heart of communications science long after its details were forgotten, and long after the specific problem of transatlantic telegraphy had been tolerably solved.
First, communication is a war against noise. Noise is interference between telephone wires, or static that interrupts a radio transmission, or a telegraph signal corrupted by failing insulation and decaying on its way across an ocean. It is the randomness that creeps into our conversations, accidentally or deliberately, and blocks our understanding. Across short distances, or over relatively uncomplicated media—Bell calling Watson from the next room, or a landline telegraph from London to Manchester—noise could be coped with. But as distances increased and the means of sending and storing messages proliferated, the problems of noise grew with them. And the provisional solutions—whether closer to Thomson’s solution of listening more closely or Whitehouse’s solution of shouting louder—were ad hoc and distinct from source to source, put into practice as engineers stumbled upon them. At certain distances, or in certain channels of communication, perfect accuracy looked impossible: communication would be permanently linked to doubt. Until Claude Shannon, few people, if any, suspected that there could be a unified answer to noise.
Second, there are limits to brute force. Applying more power, amplifying messages, strengthening signals—Whitehouse’s solution to the telegraph problem—remained the most intuitive answer to noise. Its failure in 1858 discredited Whitehouse but not the outlines of his methods; few others were available. Yet there were high costs to shouting. In the best case, it was still expensive and energy-hungry. In the worst case, as with the undersea cable, it could destroy the medium of communication itself.
Third, what hope there was of doing better lay in investigating the boundaries between the hard world of physics and the invisible world of messages. The object of study was the relationship between the qualities of messages—their susceptibility to noise, the density of their content, their speed, their accuracy—and the physical media that carried them. Thomson’s proposed law of squares was one of the earliest links in that chain of thought. But such a law addressed only the movement of electricity, not the nature of the messages it carried. How could science speak of such a thing? It could track the speed of electrons in a wire, but the idea that the message they represented could be measured and manipulated with comparable precision would have to wait until the next century. Information was old. A science of information was just beginning to stir.