which a sheath of eighteen strands, each of seven iron wires, was laid in a close spiral. It weighed nearly a ton to the mile, was flexible as a rope, and able to withstand a pull of several tons. It was made conjointly by Messrs. Glass, Elliot & Co., of Greenwich, and Messrs. R. S. Newall & Co., of Liverpool.
The British Government promised Mr. Field a subsidy of L1,400 a year, and the loan of ships to lay the cable. He solicited an equal help from Congress, but a large number of the senators, actuated by a national jealousy of England, and looking to the fact that both ends of the line were to lie in British territory, opposed the grant. It appeared to these far-sighted politicians that England, the hereditary foe, was ‘literally crawling under the sea to get some advantage over the United States.’ The Bill was only passed by a majority of a single vote. In the House of Representatives it encountered a similar hostility, but was ultimately signed by President Pierce.
The Agamemnon, a British man-of-war fitted out for the purpose, took in the section made at Greenwich, and the Niagara, an American warship, that made at Liverpool. The vessels and their consorts met in the bay of Valentia Island, on the south-west coast of Ireland, where on August 5, 1857, the shore end of the cable was landed from the Niagara. It was a memorable scene. The ships in the bay were dressed in bunting, and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland stood on the beach, attended by his following, to receive the end from the American sailors. Visitors in holiday attire collected in groups to watch the operations, and eagerly joined with his excellency in helping to pull the wire ashore. When it was landed, the Reverend Mr. Day, of Kenmore, offered up a prayer, asking the Almighty to prosper the undertaking, Next day the expedition sailed; but ere the Niagara had proceeded five miles on her way the shore-end parted, and the repairing of it delayed the start for another day.
At first the Niagara went slowly ahead to avoid a mishap, but as the cable ran out easily she increased her speed. The night fell, but hardly a soul slept. The utmost vigilance was maintained throughout the vessel. Apart from the noise of the paying-out machinery, there was an awful stillness on board. Men walked about with a muffled step, or spoke in whispers, as if they were afraid the sound of their voices would break the slender line. It seemed as though a great and valued friend lay at the point of death.
The submarine hill, with its dangerous slope, was passed in safety, and the ‘telegraph plateau,’ nearly two miles deep, was reached, when suddenly the signals from Ireland, which told that the conductor was intact, stopped altogether. Professor Morse and De Sauty, the electricians, failed to restore the communication, and the engineers were preparing to cut the cable, when quite as suddenly the signals returned, and every face grew bright. A weather-beaten old sailor said, ‘I have watched nearly every mile of it as it came over the side, and I would have given fifty dollars, poor man as I am, to have saved it, although I don’t expect to make anything by it when it is laid down.’
But the joy was short-lived. The line was running out at the rate of six miles an hour, while the vessel was only making four. To check this waste of cable the engineer tightened the brakes; but as the stern of the ship rose on the swell, the cable parted under the heavy strain, and the end was lost in the sea.
The bad news ran like a flash of lightning through all the ships, and produced a feeling of sorrow and dismay.
No attempt was made to grapple the line in such deep water, and the expedition returned to England. It was too late to try again that year, but the following summer the Agamemnon and Niagara, after an experimental trip to the Bay of Biscay, sailed from Plymouth on June 10 with a full supply of cable, better gear than before, and a riper experience of the work. They were to meet in the middle of the Atlantic, where the two halves of the cable on board of each were to be spliced together, and while the Agamemnon payed out eastwards to Valentia Island the Niagara was to pay out westward to Newfoundland. On her way to the rendezvous the Agamemnon encountered a terrific gale, which lasted for a week, and nearly proved her destruction.
On Saturday, the 26th, the middle splice was effected and the bight dropped into the deep. The two ships got under weigh, but had not proceeded three miles when the cable broke in the paying-out machinery of the Niagara. Another splice, followed by a fresh start, was made during the same afternoon; but when some fifty miles were payed out of each vessel, the current which kept up communication between them suddenly failed owing to the cable having snapped in the sea. Once more the middle splice was made and lowered, and the ships parted company a third time. For a day or two all went well; over two hundred miles of cable ran smoothly out of each vessel, and the anxious chiefs began to indulge in hopes of ultimate success, when the cable broke about twenty feet behind the stern of the Agamemnon.
The expedition returned to Queenstown, and a consultation took place. Mr. Field, and Professor Thomson, who was on board the Agamemnon, were in favour of another trial, and it was decided to make one without delay. The vessels left the Cove of Cork on July 17; but on this occasion there was no public enthusiasm, and even those on board felt as if they were going on another wild goose chase. The Agamemnon was now almost becalmed on her way to the rendezvous; but the middle splice was finished by 12.30 p.m. on July 29, 1858, and immediately dropped into the sea. The ships thereupon started, and increased their distance, while the cable ran easily out of them. Some alarm was caused by the stoppage of the continuity signals, but after a time they reappeared. The Niagara deviated from the great arc of a circle on which the cable was to be laid, and the error was traced to the iron of the cable influencing her compass. Hence the Gorgon, one of her consorts, was ordered to go ahead and lead the way. The Niagara passed several icebergs, but none injured the cable, and on August 4 she arrived in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. At 6. a.m. next morning the shore end was landed into the telegraph-house which had been built for its reception. Captain Hudson, of the Niagara, then read prayers, and at one p.m. H.M.S. Gorgon fired a salute of twenty-one guns.
The Agamemnon made an equally successful run. About six o’clock on the first evening a huge whale was seen approaching on the starboard bow, and as he sported in the waves, rolling and lashing them into foam, the onlookers began to fear that he might endanger the line. Their excitement became intense as the monster heaved astern, nearer and nearer to the cable, until his body grazed it where it sank into the water; but happily no harm was done. Damaged portions of the cable had to be removed in paying-out, and the stoppage of the continuity signals raised other alarms on board. Strong head winds kept the Agamemnon back, and two American ships which got into her course had to be warned off by firing guns. The signals from the Niagara became very weak, but on Professor Thomson asking the electricians on board of her to increase their battery power, they improved at once. At length, on Thursday, August, 5, the Agamemnon, with her consort, the Valorous, arrived at Valentia Island, and the shore end was landed into the cable-house at Knightstown by 3 p.m., and a royal salute announced the completion of the work.
The news was received at first with some incredulity, but on being confirmed it caused a universal joy. On August 16 Queen Victoria sent a telegram of congratulation to President Buchanan through the line, and expressed a hope that it would prove ‘an additional link between the nations whose friendship is founded on their common interest and reciprocal esteem.’ The President responded that, ‘it is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle. May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilisation, liberty, and law throughout the world.’
These messages were the signal for a fresh outburst of enthusiasm. Next morning a grand salute of 100 guns resounded in New York, the streets were decorated with flags, the bells of the churches rung, and at night the city was illuminated.
The Atlantic cable was a theme of inspiration for innumerable sermons and a prodigious quantity of doggerel. Among the happier lines were these :-
”Tis done! the angry sea consents, The nations stand no more apart;
With clasped hands the continents Feel throbbings of each other’s heart.
Speed! speed the cable! let it run A loving girdle round the earth,
Till all the nations ‘neath the sun Shall be as brothers of one hearth.
As brothers pledging, hand in hand, One freedom for the world abroad,
One commerce over every land,
One language, and one God.’
The rejoicing reached a climax in September, when a public service was held in Trinity Church, and Mr. Field, the hero of the hour, as head and mainspring of the expedition, received an ovation in the Crystal Palace at New York. The mayor presented him with a golden casket as a souvenir of ‘the grandest enterprise of our day and generation.’ The band played ‘God save the Queen,’ and the whole audience rose to their feet. In the evening there was a magnificent torchlight procession of the city firemen.
That very day the cable breathed its last. Its insulation had been failing for some days, and the only signals which could be read were those given by the mirror galvanometer.[It is said to have broken down while Newfoundland was vainly attempting to inform Valentia that it was sending with THREE HUNDRED AND TWELVE CELLS!] The reaction at this news was tremendous. Some writers even hinted that the line was a mere hoax, and others pronounced it a stock exchange speculation. Sensible men doubted whether the cable had ever ‘spoken;’ but in addition to the royal despatch, items of daily news had passed through the wire; for instance, the announcement of a collision between two ships, the Arabia and the Europa, off Cape Race, Newfoundland, and an order from London, countermanding the departure of a regiment in Canada for the seat of the Indian Mutiny, which had come to an end.
Mr. Field was by no means daunted at the failure. He was even more eager to renew the work, since he had come so near to success. But the public had lost confidence in the scheme, and all his efforts to revive the company were futile. It was not until 1864 that with the assistance of Mr. Thomas (afterwards Lord) Brassey, and Mr. (now Sir) John Fender, that he succeeded in raising the necessary capital. The Glass, Elliot, and Gutta-Percha Companies were united to form the well-known Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, which undertook to manufacture and lay the new cable.
Much experience had been gained in the meanwhile. Long cables had been submerged in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. The Board of Trade in 1859 had appointed a committee of experts, including Professor Wheatstone, to investigate the whole subject, and the results were published in a Blue-book. Profiting by these aids, an improved type of cable was designed. The core consisted of a strand of seven very pure copper wires weighing 300 lbs. a knot, coated with Chatterton’s compound, which is impervious to water, then covered with four layers of gutta-percha alternating with four thin layers of the compound cementing the whole, and bringing the weight of the insulator to 400 lbs. per knot. This core was served with hemp saturated in a preservative solution, and on the hemp as a padding were spirally wound eighteen single wires of soft steel, each covered with fine strands of Manilla yam steeped in the preservative. The weight of the new cable was 35.75 cwt. per knot, or nearly twice the weight of the old, and it was stronger in proportion.
Ten years before, Mr. Marc Isambard Brunel, the architect of the Great Eastern, had taken Mr. Field to Blackwall, where the leviathan was lying, and said to him, ‘There is the ship to lay the Atlantic cable.’ She was now purchased to fulfil the mission. Her immense hull was fitted with three iron tanks for the reception of 2,300 miles of cable, and her decks furnished with the paying-out gear. Captain (now Sir) James Anderson, of the Cunard steamer China, a thorough seaman, was appointed to the command, with Captain Moriarty, R.N., as chief navigating officer. Mr. (afterwards Sir) Samuel Canning was engineer for the contractors, the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, and Mr. de Sauty their electrician; Professor Thomson and Mr. Cromwell Fleetwood Varley were the electricians for the Atlantic Telegraph Company. The Press was ably represented by Dr. W. H. Russell, correspondent of the TIMES. The Great Eastern took on board seven or eight thousand tons of coal to feed her fires, a prodigious quantity of stores, and a multitude of live stock which turned her decks into a farmyard. Her crew all told numbered 500 men.
At noon on Saturday, July 15, 1865, the Great Eastern left the Nore for Foilhommerum Bay, Valentia Island, where the shore end was laid by the Caroline.
At 5.30 p.m. on Sunday, July 23, amidst the firing of cannon and the cheers of the telegraph fleet, she started on her voyage at a speed of about four knots an hour. The weather was fine, and all went well until next morning early, when the boom of a gun signalled that a fault had broken out in the cable. It turned out that a splinter of iron wire had penetrated the core. More faults of the kind were discovered, and as they always happened in the same watch, there was a suspicion of foul play. In repairing one of these on July 31, after 1,062 miles had been payed out, the cable snapped near the stern of the ship, and the end was lost. ‘All is over,’ quietly observed Mr. Canning; and though spirited attempts were made to grapple the sunken line in two miles of water, they failed to recover it.
The Great Eastern steamed back to England, where the indomitable Mr. Field issued another prospectus, and formed the Anglo-American Telegraph Company, with a capital of L600,000, to lay a new cable and complete the broken one. On July 7, 1866, the William Cory laid the shore end at Valentia, and on Friday, July 13,.about 3 p.m., the Great Eastern started paying-out once more. [Friday is regarded as an unlucky, and Sunday as a lucky day by sailors. The Great Eastern started on Sunday before and failed; she succeeded now. Columbus sailed on a Friday, and discovered America on a Friday.] A private service of prayer was held at Valentia by invitation of two directors of the company, but otherwise there was no celebration of the event. Professor Thomson was on board; but Dr. W. H. Russell had gone to the seat of the Austro-Prussian war, from which telegrams were received through the cable.
The ‘big ship’ was attended by three consorts, the Terrible, to act as a spy on the starboard how, and warn other vessels off the course, the Medway on the port, and the Albany on the starboard quarter, to drop or pick up buoys, and make themselves generally useful. Despite the fickleness of the weather, and a ‘foul flake,’ or clogging of the line as it ran out of the tank, there was no interruption of the work. The ‘old coffee mill,’ as the sailors dubbed the paying-out gear, kept grinding away. ‘I believe we shall do it this time, Jack,’ said one of the crew to his mate.
On the evening of Friday, July 27, the expedition made the entrance of Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, in a thick fog, and next morning the Great Eastern cast her anchor at Heart’s Content. Flags were flying from the little church and the telegraph station on shore. The Great Eastern was dressed, three cheers were given, and a salute was fired. At 9 a.m. a message from England cited these words from a leading article in the current TIMES: ‘It is a great work, a glory to our age and nation, and the men who have achieved it deserve to be honoured among the benefactors of their race.’ ‘Treaty of peace signed between Prussia and Austria.’ The shore end was landed during the day by the Medway; and Captain Anderson, with the officers of the telegraph fleet, went in a body to the church to return thanks for the success of the expedition. Congratulations poured in, and friendly telegrams were again exchanged between Her Majesty and the United States. The great work had been finally accomplished, and the two worlds were lastingly united.
On August 9 the Great Eastern put to sea again in order to grapple the lost cable of 1865, and complete it to Newfoundland. Arriving in mid- ocean she proceeded to fish for the submerged line in two thousand fathoms of water, and after repeated failures, involving thirty casts of the grapnel, she hooked and raised it to surface, then spliced it to the fresh cable in her hold, and payed out to Heart’s Content, where she arrived on Saturday, September 7. There were now two fibres of intelligence between the two hemispheres.
On his return home, Professor Thomson was among those who received the honour of knighthood for their services in connection with the enterprise. He deserved it. By his theory and apparatus he probably did more than any other man, with the exception of Mr. Field, to further the Atlantic telegraph. We owe it to his admirable inventions, the mirror instrument of 1857 and the siphon recorder of 1869, that messages through long cables are so cheap and fast, and, as a consequence, that ocean telegraphy is now so common. Hence some account of these two instruments will not be out of place.
Sir William Thomson’s siphon recorder, in all its present completeness, must take rank as a masterpiece of invention. As used in the recording or writing in permanent characters of the messages sent through long submarine cables, it is the acknowledged chief of ‘receiving instruments,’ as those apparatus are called which interpret the electrical condition of the telegraph wire into intelligible signals. Like other mechanical creations, no doubt its growth in idea and translation into material fact was a step-by-step process of evolution, culminating at last in its great fitness and beauty.
The marvellous development of telegraphy within the last generation has called into existence a great variety of receiving instruments, each admirable in its way. The Hughes, or the Stock Exchange instruments, for instance, print the message in Roman characters; the sounders strike it out on stops or bells of different tone; the needle instruments indicate it by oscillations of their needles; the Morse daubs it in ink on paper, or embosses it by a hard style; while Bain’s electro-chemical receiver stains it on chemically prepared paper. The Meyer-Baudot and the Quadruple receive four messages at once and record them separately; while the harmonic telegraph of Elisha Gray can receive as many as eight simultaneously, by means of notes excited by the current in eight separate tuning forks.
But all these instruments have one great drawback for delicate work, and, however suitable they may be for land lines, they are next to useless for long cables. They require a certain definite strength of current to work them, whatever it may be, and in general it is very considerable. Most of the moving parts of the mechanism are comparatively heavy, and unless the current is of the proper strength to move them, the instrument is dumb, while in Bain’s the solution requires a certain power of current to decompose it and leave the stain.
In overland lines the current traverses the wire suddenly, like a bullet, and at its full strength, so that if the current be sufficiently strong these instruments will be worked at once, and no time will be lost. But it is quite different on submarine cables. There the current is slow and varying. It travels along the copper wire in the form of a wave or undulation, and is received feebly at first, then gradually rising to its maximum strength, and finally dying away again as slowly as it rose. In the French Atlantic cable no current can be detected by the most delicate galvanoscope at America for the first tenth of a second after it has been put on at Brest; and it takes about half a second for the received current to reach its maximum value. This is owing to the phenomenon of induction, very important in submarine cables, but almost entirely absent in land lines. In submarine cables, as is well known, the copper wire which conveys the current is insulated from the sea-water by an envelope, usually of gutta-percha. Now the electricity sent into this wire INDUCES electricity of an opposite kind to itself in the sea-water outside, and the attraction set up between these two kinds ‘holds back’ the current in the wire, and retards its passage to the receiving station.
It follows, that with a receiving instrument set to indicate a particular strength of current, the rate of signalling would be very slow on long cables compared to land lines; and that a different form of instrument is required for cable work. This fact stood greatly in the way of early cable enterprise. Sir William (then Professor) Thomson first solved the difficulty by his invention of the ‘mirror galvanometer,’ and rendered at the same time the first Atlantic cable company a commercial success. The merit of this receiving instrument is, that it indicates with extreme sensibility all the variations of the current in the cable, so that, instead of having to wait until each signal wave sent into the cable has travelled to the receiving end before sending another, a series of waves may be sent after each other in rapid succession. These waves, encroaching upon each other, will coalesce at their bases; but if the crests remain separate, the delicate decipherer at the other end will take cognisance of them and make them known to the eye as the distinct signals of the message.
The mirror galvanometer is at once beautifully simple and exquisitely scientific. It consists of a very long fine coil of silk-covered copper wire, and in the heart of the coil, within a little air-chamber, a small round mirror, having four tiny magnets cemented to its back, is hung, by a single fibre of floss silk no thicker than a spider’s line. The mirror is of film glass silvered, the magnets of hair-spring, and both together sometimes weigh only one-tenth of a grain. A beam of light is thrown from a lamp upon the mirror, and reflected by it upon a white screen or scale a few feet distant, where it forms a bright spot of light.
When there is no current on the instrument, the spot of light remains stationary at the zero position on the screen; but the instant a current traverses the long wire of the coil, the suspended magnets twist themselves horizontally out of their former position, the mirror is of course inclined with them, and the beam of light is deflected along the screen to one side or the other, according to the nature of the current. If a POSITIVE current–that is to say, a current from the copper pole of the battery–gives a deflection to the RIGHT of zero, a NEGATIVE current, or a current from the zinc pole of the battery, will give a deflection to the left of zero, and VICE VERSA.
The air in the little chamber surrounding the mirror is compressed at will, so as to act like a cushion, and ‘deaden’ the movements of the mirror. The needle is thus prevented from idly swinging about at each deflection, and the separate signals are rendered abrupt and ‘dead beat,’ as it is called.
At a receiving station the current coming in from the cable has simply to be passed through the coil of the ‘speaker’ before it is sent into the ground, and the wandering light spot on the screen faithfully represents all its variations to the clerk, who, looking on, interprets these, and cries out the message word by word.
The small weight of the mirror and magnets which form the moving part of this instrument, and the range to which the minute motions of the mirror can be magnified on the screen by the reflected beam of light, which acts as a long impalpable hand or pointer, render the mirror galvanometer marvellously sensitive to the current, especially when compared with other forms of receiving instruments. Messages have been sent from England to America through one Atlantic cable and back again to England through another, and there received on the mirror galvanometer, the electric current used being that from a toy battery made out of a lady’s silver thimble, a grain of zinc, and a drop of acidulated water.
The practical advantage of this extreme delicacy is, that the signal waves of the current may follow each other so closely as almost entirely to coalesce, leaving only a very slight rise and fall of their crests, like ripples on the surface of a flowing stream, and yet the light spot will respond to each. The main flow of the current will of course shift the zero of the spot, but over and above this change of place the spot will follow the momentary fluctuations of the current which form the individual signals of the message. What with this shifting of the zero and the very slight rise and fall in the current produced by rapid signalling, the ordinary land line instruments are quite unserviceable for work upon long cables.
The mirror instrument has this drawback, however –it does not ‘record’ the message. There is a great practical advantage in a receiving instrument which records its messages; errors are avoided and time saved. It was to supply such a desideratum for cable work that Sir William Thomson invented the siphon recorder, his second important contribution to the province of practical telegraphy. He aimed at giving a GRAPHIC representation of the varying strength of the current, just as the mirror galvanometer gives a visual one. The difficulty of producing such a recorder was, as he himself says, due to a difficulty in obtaining marks from a very light body in rapid motion, without impeding that motion. The moving body must be quite free to follow the undulations of the current, and at the same time must record its motions by some indelible mark. As early as 1859, Sir William sent out to the Red Sea cable a piece of apparatus with this intent. The marker consisted of a light platinum wire, constantly emitting sparks from a Rhumkorff coil, so as to perforate a line on a strip of moving paper; and it was so connected to the movable needle of a species of galvanometer as to imitate the motions of the needle. But before it reached the Red Sea the cable had broken down, and the instrument was returned dismantled, to be superseded at length by the siphon recorder, in which the marking point is a fine glass siphon emitting ink, and the moving body a light coil of wire hung between the poles of a magnet.
The principle of the siphon recorder is exactly the inverse of the mirror galvanometer. In the latter we have a small magnet suspended in the centre of a large coil of wire–the wire enclosing the magnet, which is free to rotate round its own axis. In the former we have a small coil suspended between the poles of a large magnet–the magnet enclosing the coil, which is also free to rotate round its own axis. When a current passes through this coil, so suspended in the highly magnetic space between the poles of the magnet, the coil itself experiences a mechanical force, causing it to take up a particular position, which varies with the nature of the current, and the siphon which is attached to it faithfully figures its motion on the running paper.
The point of the siphon does not touch the paper, although it is very close. It would impede the motion of the coil if it did. But the ‘capillary attraction’ of so fine a tube will not permit the ink to flow freely of itself, so the inventor, true to his instincts, again called in the aid of electricity, and electrified the ink. The siphon and reservoir are together supported by an EBONITE bracket, separate from the rest of the instrument, and INSULATED from it; that is to say, electricity cannot escape from them to the instrument. The ink may, therefore, be electrified to an exalted state, or high POTENTIAL as it is called, while the body of the instrument, including the paper and metal writing-tablet, are in connection with the earth, and at low potential, or none at all, for the potential of the earth is in general taken as zero.
The ink, for example, is like a highly-charged thunder-cloud supported over the earth’s surface. Now the tendency of a charged body is to move from a place of higher to a place of lower potential, and consequently the ink tends to flow downwards to the writing-tablet. The only avenue of escape for it is by the fine glass siphon, and through this it rushes accordingly and discharges itself in a rain upon the paper. The natural repulsion between its like electrified particles causes the shower to issue in spray. As the paper moves over the pulleys a delicate hair line is marked, straight when the siphon is stationary, but curved when the siphon is pulled from side to side by the oscillations of the signal coil.
It is to the mouse-mill that me must look both for the electricity which is used to electrify the ink and for the motive power which drives the paper. This unique and interesting little motor owes its somewhat epigrammatic title to the resemblance of the drum to one of those sparred wheels turned by white mice, and to the amusing fact of its capacity for performing work having been originally computed in terms of a ‘mouse-power.’ The mill is turned by a stream of electricity flowing from the battery above described, and is, in fact, an electro-magnetic engine worked by the current.
The alphabet of signals employed is the ‘Morse code,’ so generally in vogue throughout the world. In the Morse code the letters of the alphabet are represented by combinations of two distinct elementary signals, technically called ‘dots’ and ‘dashes,’ from the fact that the Morse recorder actually marks the message in long and short lines, or dots and dashes. In the siphon recorder script dots and dashes are represented by curves of opposite flexure. The condensers are merely used to sharpen the action of the current, and render the signals more concise and distinct on long cables. On short cables, say under three hundred miles long, they are rarely, if ever, used.
The speed of signalling by the siphon recorder is of course regulated by the length of cable through which it is worked. The instrument itself is capable of a wide range of speed. The best operators cannot send over thirty-five words per minute by hand, but a hundred and twenty words or more per minute can be transmitted by an automatic sender, and the recorder has been found on land lines and short cables to write off the message at this incredible speed. When we consider that every word is, on the average, composed of fifteen separate waves, we may better appreciate the rapidity with which the siphon can move. On an ordinary cable of about a thousand miles long, the working speed is about twenty words per minute. On the French Atlantic it is usually about thirteen, although as many as seventeen have sometimes been sent.
The ‘duplex’ system, or method of telegraphing in opposite directions at once through the same wire, has of late years been applied, in connection with the recorder, to all the long cables of that most enterprising of telegraph companies–the Eastern–so that both stations may ‘speak’ to each other simultaneously. Thus the carrying capacity of the wire is in practice nearly doubled, and recorders are busy writing at both ends of the cable at once, as if the messages came up out of the sea itself.
We have thus far followed out the recorder in its practical application to submarine telegraphy. Let us now regard it for a moment in its more philosophic aspect. We are at once struck with its self-dependence as a machine, and even its resemblance in some respects to a living creature. All its activity depends on the galvanic current. From three separate sources invisible currents are led to its principal parts, and are at once physically changed. That entering the mouse-mill becomes transmuted in part into the mechanical motion of the revolving drum, and part into electricity of a more intense nature–into mimic lightning, in fact, with its accompaniments of heat and sound. That entering the signal magnet expends part of its force in the magnetism of the core. That entering the signal coil, which may be taken as the brain of the instrument, appears to us as INTELLIGENCE.
The recorder is now in use in all four quarters of the globe, from Northern Europe to Southern Brazil, from China to New England. Many and complete are the adjustments for rendering it serviceable under a wide range of electrical conditions and climatic changes. The siphon is, of course, in a mechanical sense, the most delicate part, but, in an electrical sense, the mouse-mill proves the most susceptible. It is essential for the fine marking of the siphon that the ink should neither be too strongly nor too feebly electrified. When the atmosphere is moderately humid, a proper supply of electricity is generated by the mouse-mill, the paper is sufficiently moist, and the ink flows freely. But an excess of moisture in the air diminishes the available supply of EXALTED electricity. In fact, the damp depositing on the parts leads the electricity away, and the ink tends to clog in the siphon. On the other hand, drought not only supercharges the ink, but dries the paper so much that it INSULATES the siphon point from the metal tablet and the earth. There is then an insufficient escape for the electricity of the ink to earth; the ink ceases to flow down the siphon; the siphon itself becomes highly electrified and agitated with vibrations of its own; the line becomes spluttered and uncertain.
Various devices are employed at different stations to cure these local complaints. The electrician soon learns to diagnose and prescribe for this, his most valuable charge. At Aden, where they suffer much from humidity, the mouse-mill is or has been surrounded with burning carbon. At Malta a gas flame was used for the same purpose. At Suez, where they suffer from drought, a cloud of steam was kept rising round the instrument, saturating the air and paper. At more temperate places the ordinary means of drying the air by taking advantage of the absorbing power of sulphuric acid for moisture prevailed. At Marseilles the recorder acted in some respects like a barometer. Marseilles is subject to sudden incursions of dry northerly winds, termed the MISTRAL. The recorder never failed to indicate the mistral when it blew, and sometimes even to predict it by many hours. Before the storm was itself felt, the delicate glass pen became agitated and disturbed, the frail blue line broken and irregular. The electrician knew that the mistral would blow before long, and, as it rarely blows for less than three days at a time, that rather rude wind, so dreaded by the Marseillaise, was doubly dreaded by him.
The recorder was first used experimentally at St. Pierre, on the French Atlantic cable, in 1869. This was numbered 0, as we were told by Mr. White of Glasgow, the maker, whose skill has contributed not a little to the success of the recorder. No. 1 was first used practically on the Falmouth and Gibraltar cable of the Eastern Telegraph Company in July, 1870. No. 1 was also exhibited at Mr. (now Sir John) Pender’s telegraph soiree in 1870. On that occasion, memorable even beyond telegraphic circles, ‘three hundred of the notabilities of rank and fashion gathered together at Mr. Pender’s house in Arlington Street, Piccadilly, to celebrate the completion of submarine communication between London and Bombay by the successful laying of the Falmouth, Gibraltar and Malta and the British Indian cable lines.’ Mr. Pender’s house was literally turned outside in; the front door was removed, the courtyard temporarily covered with an iron roof and the whole decorated in the grandest style. Over the gateway was a gallery filled with the band of the Scots Fusilier Guards; and over the portico of the house door hung the grapnel which brought up the 1865 cable, made resplendent to the eye by a coating of gold leaf. A handsome staircase, newly erected, permitted the guests to pass from the reception-room to the drawing-room. In the grounds at the back of the house stood the royal tent, where the Prince of Wales and a select party, including the Duke of Cambridge and Lady Mayo, wife of the Viceroy of India at that time, were entertained at supper. Into this tent were brought wires from India, America, Egypt, and other places, and Lady Mayo sent off a message to India about half- past eleven, and had received a reply before twelve, telling her that her husband and sons were quite well at five o’clock the next morning. The recorder, which was shown in operation, naturally stood in the place of honour, and attracted great attention.
The minor features of the recorder have been simplified by other inventors of late; for example, magnets of steel have been substituted for the electro-magnets which influence the swinging coil; and the ink, instead of being electrified by the mouse-mill, is shed on the paper by a rapid vibration of the siphon point.
To introduce his apparatus for signalling on long submarine cables, Sir William Thomson entered into a partnership with Mr. C. F. Varley, who first applied condensers to sharpen the signals, and Professor Fleeming Jenkin, of Edinburgh University. In conjunction with the latter, he also devised an ‘automatic curb sender,’ or key, for sending messages on a cable, as the well-known Wheatstone transmitter sends them on a land line.
In both instruments the signals are sent by means of a perforated ribbon of paper; but the cable sender was the more complicated, because the cable signals are formed by both positive and negative currents, and not merely by a single current, whether positive or negative. Moreover, to curb the prolongation of the signals due to induction, each signal was made by two opposite currents in succession–a positive followed by a negative, or a negative followed by a positive, as the case might be. The after-current had the effect of curbing its precursor. This self- acting cable key was brought out in 1876, and tried on the lines of the Eastern Telegraph Company.
Sir William Thomson took part in the laying of the French Atlantic cable of 1869, and with Professor Jenkin was engineer of the Western and Brazilian and Platino-Brazilian cables. He was present at the laying of the Para to Pernambuco section of the Brazilian coast cables in 1873, and introduced his method of deep-sea sounding, in which a steel pianoforte wire replaces the ordinary land line. The wire glides so easily to the bottom that ‘flying soundings’ can be taken while the ship is going at full speed. A pressure-gauge to register the depth of the sinker has been added by Sir William.
About the same time he revived the Sumner method of finding a ship’s place at sea, and calculated a set of tables for its ready application. His most important aid to the mariner is, however, the adjustable compass, which he brought out soon afterwards. It is a great improvement on the older instrument, being steadier, less hampered by friction, and the deviation due to the ship’s own magnetism can be corrected by movable masses of iron at the binnacle.
Sir William is himself a skilful navigator, and delights to cruise in his fine yacht, the Lalla Rookh, among the Western Islands, or up the Mediterranean, or across the Atlantic to Madeira and America. His interest in all things relating to the sea perhaps arose, or at any rate was fostered, by his experiences on the Agamemnon and the Great Eastern. Babbage was among the first to suggest that a lighthouse might be made to signal a distinctive number by occultations of its light; but Sir William pointed out the merits of the Morse telegraphic code for the purpose, and urged that the signals should consist of short and long flashes of the light to represent the dots and dashes.
Sir William has done more than any other electrician to introduce accurate methods and apparatus for measuring electricity. As early as 1845 his mind was attracted to this subject. He pointed out that the experimental results of William Snow Harris were in accordance with the laws of Coulomb.
In the Memoirs of the Roman Academy of Sciences for 1857 he published a description of his new divided ring electrometer, which is based on the old electroscope of Bohnenberger and since then he has introduced a chain or series of beautiful and effective instruments, including the quadrant electrometer, which cover the entire field of electrostatic measurement. His delicate mirror galvanometer has also been the forerunner of a later circle of equally precise apparatus for the measurement of current or dynamic electricity.
To give even a brief account of all his physical researches would require a separate volume; and many of them are too abstruse or mathematical for the general reader. His varied services have been acknowledged by numerous distinctions, including the highest honour a British man of science can obtain– the Presidency of the Royal Society of London, to which he was elected at the end of last year.
Sir William Thomson has been all his life a firm believer in the truth of Christianity, and his great scientific attainments add weight to the following words, spoken by him when in the chair at the annual meeting of the Christian Evidence Society, May 23, 1889 :-
‘I have long felt that there was a general impression in the non- scientific world, that the scientific world believes Science has discovered ways of explaining all the facts of Nature without adopting any definite belief in a Creator. I have never doubted that that impression was utterly groundless. It seems to me that when a scientific man says–as it has been said from time to time–that there is no God, he does not express his own ideas clearly. He is, perhaps, struggling with difficulties; but when he says he does not believe in a creative power, I am convinced he does not faithfully express what is in his own mind, He does not fully express his own ideas. He is out of his depth.
‘We are all out of our depth when we approach the subject of life. The scientific man, in looking at a piece of dead matter, thinking over the results of certain combinations which he can impose upon it, is himself a living miracle, proving that there is something beyond that mass of dead matter of which he is thinking. His very thought is in itself a contradiction to the idea that there is nothing in existence but dead matter. Science can do little positively towards the objects of this society. But it can do something, and that something is vital and fundamental. It is to show that what we see in the world of dead matter and of life around us is not a result of the fortuitous concourse of atoms.
‘I may refer to that old, but never uninteresting subject of the miracles of geology. Physical science does something for us here. St. Peter speaks of scoffers who said that “all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation;” but the apostle affirms himself that “all these things shall be dissolved.” It seems to me that even physical science absolutely demonstrates the scientific truth of these words. We feel that there is no possibility of things going on for ever as they have done for the last six thousand years. In science, as in morals and politics, there is absolutely no periodicity. One thing we may prophesy of the future for certain–it will be unlike the past. Everything is in a state of evolution and progress. The science of dead matter, which has been the principal subject of my thoughts during my life, is, I may say, strenuous on this point, that THE AGE OF THE EARTH IS DEFINITE. We do not say whether it is twenty million years or more, or less, but me say it is NOT INDEFINITE. And we can say very definitely that it is not an inconceivably great number of millions of years. Here, then, we are brought face to face with the most wonderful of all miracles, the commencement of life on this earth. This earth, certainly a moderate number of millions of years ago, was a red-hot globe; all scientific men of the present day agree that life came upon this earth somehow. If some form or some part of the life at present existing came to this earth, carried on some moss-grown stone perhaps broken away from mountains in other worlds; even if some part of the life had come in that way–for there is nothing too far-fetched in the idea, and probably some such action as that did take place, since meteors do come every day to the earth from other parts of the universe;–still, that does not in the slightest degree diminish the wonder, the tremendous miracle, we have in the commencement of life in this world.’
CHAPTER V.
CHARLES WILLIAM SIEMENS.
Charles William Siemens was born on April 4, 1823, at the little village of Lenthe, about eight miles from Hanover, where his father, Mr. Christian Ferdinand Siemens, was ‘Domanen-pachter,’ and farmed an estate belonging to the Crown. His mother was Eleonore Deichmann, a lady of noble disposition, and William, or Carl Wilhelm, was the fourth son of a family of fourteen children, several of whom have distinguished themselves in scientific pursuits. Of these, Ernst Werner Siemens, the fourth child, and now the famous electrician of Berlin, was associated with William in many of his inventions; Fritz, the ninth child, is the head of the well-known Dresden glass works; and Carl, the tenth child, is chief of the equally well-known electrical works at St. Petersburg. Several of the family died young; others remained in Germany; but the enterprising spirit, natural to them, led most of the sons abroad– Walter, the twelfth child, dying at Tiflis as the German Consul there, and Otto, the fourteenth child, also dying at the same place. It would be difficult to find a more remarkable family in any age or country. Soon after the birth of William, Mr. Siemens removed to a larger estate which he had leased at Menzendorf, near Lubeck.
As a child William was sensitive and affectionate, the baby of the family, liking to roam the woods and fields by himself, and curious to observe, but not otherwise giving any signs of the engineer. He received his education at a commercial academy in Lubeck, the Industrial School at Magdeburg (city of the memorable burgomaster, Otto von Guericke), and at the University of Gottingen, which he entered in 1841, while in his eighteenth year. Were he attended the chemical lectures of Woehler, the discoverer of organic synthesis, and of Professor Himly, the well-known physicist, who was married to Siemens’s eldest sister, Mathilde. With a year at Gottingen, during which he laid the basis of his theoretical knowledge, the academical training of Siemens came to an end, and he entered practical life in the engineering works of Count Stolberg, at Magdeburg. At the University he had been instructed in mechanical laws and designs; here he learned the nature and use of tools and the construction of machines. But as his University career at Gottingen lasted only about a year, so did his apprenticeship at the Stolberg Works. In this short time, however, he probably reaped as much advantage as a duller pupil during a far longer term.
Young Siemens appears to have been determined to push his way forward. In 1841 his brother Werner obtained a patent in Prussia for electro-silvering and gilding; and in 1843 Charles William came to England to try and introduce the process here. In his address on ‘Science and Industry,’ delivered before the Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1881, while the Paris Electrical Exhibition was running, Sir William gave a most interesting account of his experiences during that first visit to the country of his adoption.
‘When,’ said he, ‘the electrotype process first became known, it excited a very general interest; and although I was only a young student at Gottingen, under twenty years of age, who had just entered upon his practical career with a mechanical engineer, I joined my brother, Werner Siemens, then a young lieutenant of artillery in the Prussian service, in his endeavours to accomplish electro-gilding; the first impulse in this direction having been given by Professor C. Himly, then of Gottingen. After attaining some promising results, a spirit of enterprise came over me, so strong that I tore myself away from the narrow circumstances surrounding me, and landed at the east end of London with only a few pounds in my pocket and without friends, but with an ardent confidence of ultimate success within my breast.
‘I expected to find some office in which inventions were examined into, and rewarded if found meritorious, but no one could direct me to such a place. In walking along Finsbury Pavement, I saw written up in large letters, “So-and-so” (I forget the name), “Undertaker,” and the thought struck me that this must be the place I was in quest of; at any rate, I thought that a person advertising himself as an “undertaker” would not refuse to look into my invention with a view of obtaining for me the sought-for recognition or reward. On entering the place I soon convinced myself, however, that I came decidedly too soon for the kind of enterprise here contemplated, and, finding myself confronted with the proprietor of the establishment, I covered my retreat by what he must have thought a very lame excuse. By dint of perseverance I found my way to the patent office of Messrs. Poole and Carpmael, who received me kindly, and provided me with a letter of introduction to Mr. Elkington. Armed with this letter, I proceeded to Birmingham, to plead my cause before your townsman.
‘In looking back to that time, I wonder at the patience with which Mr. Elkington listened to what I had to say, being very young, and scarcely able to find English words to convey my meaning. After showing me what he was doing already in the way of electro-plating, Mr. Elkington sent me back to London in order to read some patents of his own, asking me to return if, after perusal, I still thought I could teach him anything. To my great disappointment, I found that the chemical solutions I had been using were actually mentioned in one of his patents, although in a manner that would hardly have sufficed to enable a third person to obtain practical results.
On my return to Birmingham I frankly stated what I had found, and with this frankness I evidently gained the favour of another townsman of yours, Mr. Josiah Mason, who had just joined Mr. Elkington in business, and whose name, as Sir Josiah Mason, will ever be remembered for his munificent endowment of education. It was agreed that I should not be judged by the novelty of my invention, but by the results which I promised, namely, of being able to deposit with a smooth surface 30 dwt. of silver upon a dish-cover, the crystalline structure of the deposit having theretofore been a source of difficulty. In this I succeeded, and I was able to return to my native country and my mechanical engineering a comparative Croesus.
‘But it was not for long, as in the following year (1844) I again landed in the Thames with another invention, worked out also with my brother, namely, the chronometric governor, which, though less successful, commercially speaking, than the first, obtained for me the advantage of bringing me into contact with the engineering world, and of fixing me permanently in this country. This invention was in course of time applied by Sir George Airy, the then Astronomer-Royal, for regulating the motion of his great transit and touch-recording instrument at the Royal Observatory, where it still continues to be employed.
‘Another early subject of mine, the anastatic printing process, found favour with Faraday, “the great and the good,” who made it the subject of a Friday evening lecture at the Royal Institution. These two circumstances, combined, obtained for me an entry into scientific circles, and helped to sustain me in difficulty, until, by dint of a certain determination to win, I was able to advance step by step up to this place of honour, situated within a gunshot of the scene of my earliest success in life, but separated from it by the time of a generation. But notwithstanding the lapse of time, my heart still beats quick each time I come back to the scene of this, the determining incident of my life.’
The ‘anastatic’ process, described by Faraday in 1845, and partly due to Werner Siemens, was a method of reproducing printed matter by transferring the print from paper to plates of zinc. Caustic baryta was applied to the printed sheet to convert the resinous ingredients of the ink into an insoluble soap, the stearine being precipitated with sulphuric acid. The letters were then transferred to the zinc by pressure, so as to be printed from. The process, though ingenious and of much interest at the time, has long ago been superseded by photographic methods.
Even at this time Siemens had several irons in the fire. Besides the printing process and the chronometric governor, which operated by the differential movement between the engine and a chronometer, he was occupied with some minor improvements at Hoyle’s Calico Printing Works. He also engaged in railway works from time to time; and in 1846 he brought out a double cylinder air-pump, in which the two cylinders are so combined, that the compressing side of the first and larger cylinder communicated with the suction side of the second and smaller cylinder, and the limit of exhaustion was thereby much extended. The invention was well received at the time, but is now almost forgotten.
Siemens had been trained as a mechanical engineer, and, although he became an eminent electrician in later life, his most important work at this early stage was non-electrical; indeed, the greatest achievement of his life was non-electrical, for we must regard the regenerative furnace as his MAGNUM OPUS. Though in 1847 he published a paper in Liebig’s ANNALEN DER CHEMIE on the ‘Mercaptan of Selenium,’ his mind was busy with the new ideas upon the nature of heat which were promulgated by Carnot, Clayperon, Joule, Clausius, Mayer, Thomson, and Rankine. He discarded the older notions of heat as a substance, and accepted it as a form of energy. Working on this new line of thought, which gave him an advantage over other inventors of his time, he made his first attempt to economise heat, by constructing, in 1847, at the factory of Mr. John Hick, of Bolton, an engine of four horse-power, having a condenser provided with regenerators, and utilising superheated steam. Two years later he continued his experiments at the works of Messrs. Fox, Henderson, and Co., of Smethwick, near Birmingham, who had taken the matter in hand. The use of superheated steam was, however, attended with many practical difficulties, and the invention was not entirely successful, but it embraced the elements of success; and the Society of Arts, in 1850, acknowledged the value of the principle, by awarding Mr. Siemens a gold medal for his regenerative condenser. Various papers read before the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Institution of Civil Engineers, or appearing in DINGLER’S JOURNAL and the JOURNAL OF THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE about this time, illustrate the workings of his mind upon the subject. That read in 1853, before the Institution of Civil Engineers, ‘On the Conversion of Heat into Mechanical Effect,’ was the first of a long series of communications to that learned body, and gained for its author the Telford premium and medal. In it he contended that a perfect engine would be one in which all the heat applied to the steam was used up in its expansion behind a working piston, leaving none to be sent into a condenser or the atmosphere, and that the best results in any actual engine would be attained by carrying expansion to the furthest possible limit, or, in practice, by the application of a regenerator. Anxious to realise his theories further, he constructed a twenty horse-power engine on the regenerative plan, and exhibited it at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855; but, not realising his expectations, he substituted for it another of seven-horse power, made by M. Farcot, of Paris, which was found to work with considerable economy. The use of superheated steam, however, still proved a drawback, and the Siemens engine has not been extensively used.
On the other hand, the Siemens water-meter, which he introduced in 1851, has been very widely used, not only in this country, but abroad. It acts equally well under all variations of pressure, and with a constant or an intermittent supply.
Meanwhile his brother Werner had been turning his attention to telegraphy, and the correspondence which never ceased between the brothers kept William acquainted with his doings. In 1844, Werner, then an officer in the Prussian army, was appointed to a berth in the artillery workshops of Berlin, where he began to take an interest in the new art of telegraphy. In 1845 Werner patented his dial and printing telegraph instruments, which came into use all over Germany, and introduced an automatic alarm on the same principle. These inventions led to his being made, in 1846, a member of a commission in Berlin for the introduction of electric telegraphs instead of semaphores. He advocated the use of gutta-percha, then a new material, for the insulation of underground wires, and in 1847 designed a screw-press for coating the wires with the gum rendered plastic by heat. The following year he laid the first great underground telegraph line from Berlin to Frankfort-on-the-Main, and soon afterwards left the army to engage with Mr. Halske in the management of a telegraph factory which they had conjointly established in 1847. In 1852 William took an office in John Street, Adelphi, with a view to practise as a civil engineer. Eleven years later, Mr. Halske and William Siemens founded in London the house of Siemens, Halske & Co., which began with a small factory at Millbank, and developed in course of time into the well-known firm of Messrs. Siemens Brothers, and was recently transformed into a limited liability company.
In 1859 William Siemens became a naturalised Englishman, and from this time forward took an active part in the progress of English engineering and telegraphy. He devoted a great part of his time to electrical invention and research; and the number of telegraph apparatus of all sorts–telegraph cables, land lines, and their accessories–which have emanated from the Siemens Telegraph Works has been remarkable. The engineers of this firm have been pioneers of the electric telegraph in every quarter of the globe, both by land and sea. The most important aerial line erected by the firm was the Indo-European telegraph line, through Prussia, Russia, and Persia, to India. The North China cable, the Platino-Brazileira, and the Direct United States cable, were laid by the firm, the latter in 1874-5 So also was the French Atlantic cable, and the two Jay Could Atlantic cables. At the time of his death the manufacture and laying of the Bennett-Mackay Atlantic cables was in progress at the company’s works, Charlton. Some idea of the extent of this manufactory may be gathered from the fact that it gives employment to some 2,000 men. All branches of electrical work are followed out in its various departments, including the construction of dynamos and electric lamps.
On July 23, 1859, Siemens was married at St. James’s, Paddington, to Anne, the youngest daughter of Mr. Joseph Gordon, Writer to the Signet, Edinburgh, and brother to Mr. Lewis Gordon, Professor of Engineering in the University of Glasgow, He used to say that on March 19 of that year he took oath and allegiance to two ladies in one day–to the Queen and his betrothed. The marriage was a thoroughly happy one.
Although much engaged in the advancement of telegraphy, he was also occupied with his favourite idea of regeneration. The regenerative gas furnace, originally invented in 1848 by his brother Friedrich, was perfected and introduced by him during many succeeding years. The difficulties overcome in the development of this invention were enormous, but the final triumph was complete.
The principle of this furnace consists in utilising the heat of the products of combustion to warm up the gaseous fuel and air which enters the furnace. This is done by making these products pass through brickwork chambers which absorb their heat and communicate it to the gas and air currents going to the flame. An extremely high temperature is thus obtained, and the furnace has, in consequence, been largely used in the manufacture of glass and steel.
Before the introduction of this furnace, attempts had been made to produce cast-steel without the use of a crucible–that is to say, on the ‘open hearth’ of the furnace. Reaumur was probably the first to show that steel could be made by fusing malleable iron with cast-iron. Heath patented the process in 1845; and a quantity of cast-steel was actually prepared in this way, on the bed of a reverberatory furnace, by Sudre, in France, during the year 1860. But the furnace was destroyed in the act; and it remained for Siemens, with his regenerative furnace, to realise the object. In 1862 Mr. Charles Atwood, of Tow Law, agreed to erect such a furnace, and give the process a fair trial; but although successful in producing the steel, he was afraid its temper was not satisfactory, and discontinued the experiment. Next year, however, Siemens, who was not to be disheartened, made another attempt with a large furnace erected at the Montlucon Works, in France, where he was assisted by the late M. le Chatellier, Inspecteur-General des Mines. Some charges of steel were produced; but here again the roof of the furnace melted down, and the company which had undertaken the trials gave them up. The temperature required for the manufacture of the steel was higher than the melting point of most fire-bricks. Further endeavours also led to disappointments; but in the end the inventor was successful. He erected experimental works at Birmingham, and gradually matured his process until it was so far advanced that it could be trusted to the hands of others. Siemens used a mixture of cast-steel and iron ore to make the steel; but another manufacturer, M. Martin, of Sireuil, in France, developed the older plan of mixing the cast-iron with wrought-iron scrap. While Siemens was improving his means at Birmingham, Martin was obtaining satisfactory results with a regenerative furnace of his own design; and at the Paris Exhibition of 1867 samples of good open-hearth steel were shown by both manufacturers. In England the process is now generally known as the ‘Siemens-Martin,’ and on the Continent as the ‘Martin-Siemens’ process.
The regenerative furnace is the greatest single invention of Charles William Siemens. Owing to the large demand for steel for engineering operations, both at home and abroad, it proved exceedingly remunerative. Extensive works for the application of the process were erected at Landore, where Siemens prosecuted his experiments on the subject with unfailing ardour, and, among other things, succeeded in making a basic brick for the lining of his furnaces which withstood the intense heat fairly well.
The process in detail consists in freeing the bath of melted pig-iron from excess of carbon by adding broken lumps of pure hematite or magnetite iron ore. This causes a violent boiling, which is kept up until the metal becomes soft enough, when it is allowed to stand to let the metal clear from the slag which floats in scum upon the top. The separation of the slag and iron is facilitated by throwing in some lime from time to time. Spiegel, or specular iron, is then added; about 1 per cent. more than in the scrap process. From 20 to 24 cwt. of ore are used in a 5-ton charge, and about half the metal is reduced and turned into steel, so that the yield in ingots is from 1 to 2 per cent. more than the weight of pig and spiegel iron in the charge. The consumption of coal is rather larger than in the scrap process, and is from 14 to 15 cwt. per ton of steel. The two processes of Siemens and Martin are often combined, both scrap and ore being used in the same charge, the latter being valuable as a tempering material.
At present there are several large works engaged in manufacturing the Siemens-Martin steel in England, namely, the Landore, the Parkhead Forge, those of the Steel Company of Scotland, of Messrs. Vickers & Co., Sheffield, and others. These produced no less than 340,000 tons of steel during the year 1881, and two years later the total output had risen to half a million tons. In 1876 the British Admiralty built two iron-clads, the Mercury and Iris, of Siemens-Martin steel, and the experiment proved so satisfactory, that this material only is now used in the Royal dockyards for the construction of hulls and boilers. Moreover, the use of it is gradually extending in the mercantile marine. Contemporaneous with his development of the open-hearth process, William Siemens introduced the rotary furnace for producing wrought-iron direct from the ore without the need of puddling.
The fervent heat of the Siemens furnace led the inventor to devise a novel means of measuring high temperatures, which illustrates the value of a broad scientific training to the inventor, and the happy manner in which William Siemens, above all others, turned his varied knowledge to account, and brought the facts and resources of one science to bear upon another. As early as 1860, while engaged in testing the conductor of the Malta to Alexandria telegraph cable, then in course of manufacture, he was struck by the increase of resistance in metallic wires occasioned by a rise of temperature, and the following year he devised a thermometer based on the fact which he exhibited before the British Association at Manchester. Mathiessen and others have since enunciated the law according to which this rise of resistance varies with rise of temperature; and Siemens has further perfected his apparatus, and applied it as a pyrometer to the measurement of furnace fires. It forms in reality an electric thermometer, which will indicate the temperature of an inaccessible spot. A coil of platinum or platinum-alloy wire is enclosed in a suitable fire-proof case and put into the furnace of which the temperature is wanted. Connecting wires, properly protected, lend from the coil to a differential voltameter, so that, by means of the current from a battery circulating in the system, the electric resistance of the coil in the furnace can be determined at any moment. Since this resistance depends on the temperature of the furnace, the temperature call be found from the resistance observed. The instrument formed the subject of the Bakerian lecture for the year 1871.
Siemens’s researches on this subject, as published in the JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF TELEGRAPH ENGINEERS (Vol. I., p. 123, and Vol. III., p. 297), included a set of curves graphically representing the relation between temperature and electrical resistance in the case of various metals.
The electric pyrometer, which is perhaps the most elegant and original of all William Siemens’s inventions, is also the link which connects his electrical with his metallurgical researches. His invention ran in two great grooves, one based upon the science of heat, the other based upon the science of electricity; and the electric thermometer was, as it were, a delicate cross-coupling which connected both. Siemens might have been two men, if we are to judge by the work he did; and either half of the twin-career he led would of itself suffice to make an eminent reputation.
The success of his metallurgical enterprise no doubt reacted on his telegraphic business. The making and laying of the Malta to Alexandria cable gave rise to researches on the resistance and electrification of insulating materials under pressure, which formed the subject of a paper read before the British Association in 1863. The effect of pressure up to 300 atmospheres was observed, and the fact elicited that the inductive capacity of gutta-percha is not affected by increased pressure, whereas that of india-rubber is diminished. The electrical tests employed during the construction of the Malta and Alexandria cable, and the insulation and protection of submarine cables, also formed the subject of a paper which was read before the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1862.
It is always interesting to trace the necessity which directly or indirectly was the parent of a particular invention; and in the great importance of an accurate record of the sea-depth in which a cable is being laid, together with the tedious and troublesome character of ordinary sounding by the lead-line, especially when a ship is actually paying out cable, we may find the requirements which led to the invention of the ‘bathometer,’ an instrument designed to indicate the depth of water over which a vessel is passing without submerging a line. The instrument was based on the ingenious idea that the attractive power of the earth on a body in the ship must depend on the depth of water interposed between it and the sea bottom; being less as the layer of water was thicker, owing to the lighter character of water as compared with the denser land. Siemens endeavoured to render this difference visible by means of mercury contained in a chamber having a bottom extremely sensitive to the pressure of the mercury upon it, and resembling in some respects the vacuous chamber of an aneroid barometer. Just as the latter instrument indicates the pressure of the atmosphere above it, so the bathometer was intended to show the pull of the earth below it; and experiment proved, we believe, that for every 1,000 fathoms of sea-water below the ship, the total gravity of the mercury was reduced by 1/3200 part. The bathometer, or attraction-meter, was brought out in 1876, and exhibited at the Loan Exhibition in South Kensington. The elastic bottom of the mercury chamber was supported by volute springs which, always having the same tension, caused a portion of the mercury to rise or fall in a spiral tube of glass, according to the variations of the earth’s attraction. The whole was kept at an even temperature, and correction was made for barometric influence. Though of high scientific interest, the apparatus appears to have failed at the time from its very sensitiveness; the waves on the surface of the sea having a greater disturbing action on its readings than the change of depth. Siemens took a great interest in this very original machine, and also devised a form applicable to the measurement of heights. Although he laid the subject aside for some years, he ultimately took it up again, in hopes of producing a practical apparatus which would be of immediate service in the cable expeditions of the s.s. Faraday.
This admirable cable steamer of 5,000 tons register was built for Messrs. Siemens Brothers by Messrs. Mitchell & Co., at Newcastle. The designs were mainly inspired by Siemens himself; and after the Hooper, now the Silvertown, she was the second ship expressly built for cable purposes. All the latest improvements that electric science and naval engineering could suggest were in her united. With a length of 360 feet, a width of 52 feet, and a depth of 36 feet in the hold, she was fitted with a rudder at each end, either of which could be locked when desired, and the other brought into play. Two screw propellers, actuated by a pair of compound engines, were the means of driving the vessel, and they were placed at a slight angle to each other, so that when the engines were worked in opposite directions the Faraday could turn completely round in her own length. Moreover, as the ship could steam forwards or backwards with equal ease, it became unnecessary to pass the cable forward before hauling it in, if a fault were discovered in the part submerged: the motion of the ship had only to be reversed, the stern rudder fixed, and the bow rudder turned, while a small engine was employed to haul the cable back over the stern drum, which had been used a few minutes before to pay it out.
The first expedition of the Faraday was the laying of the Direct United States cable in the winter of 1874 a work which, though interrupted by stormy weather, was resumed and completed in the summer of 1875. She has been engaged in laying several Atlantic cables since, and has been fitted with the electric light, a resource which has proved of the utmost service, not only in facilitating the night operations of paying-out, but in guarding the ship from collision with icebergs in foggy weather off the North American coast.
Mention of the electric light brings us to an important act of the inventor, which, though done on behalf of his brother Werner, was pregnant with great consequences. This was his announcement before a meeting of the Royal Society, held on February 14, 1867, of the discovery of the principle of reinforcing the field magnetism of magneto-electric generators by part or the whole of the current generated in the revolving armature–a principle which has been applied in the dynamo-electric machines, now so much used for producing electric light and effecting the transmission of power to a distance by means of the electric current. By a curious coincidence the same principle was enunciated by Sir Charles Wheatstone at the very same meeting; while a few months previously Mr. S. A. Varley had lodged an application for a British patent, in which the same idea was set forth. The claims of these three inventors to priority in the discovery were, however, anticipated by at least one other investigator, Herr Soren Hjorth, believed to be a Dane by birth, and still remembered by a few living electricians, though forgotten by the scientific world at large, until his neglected specification was unexpectedly dug out of the musty archives of the British Patent Office and brought into the light.
The announcement of Siemens and Wheatstone came at an apter time than Hjorth’s, and was more conspicuously made. Above all, in the affluent and enterprising hands of the brothers Siemens, it was not suffered to lie sterile, and the Siemens dynamo-electric machine was its offspring. This dynamo, as is well known, differs from those of Gramme and Paccinotti chiefly in the longitudinal winding of the armature, and it is unnecessary to describe it here. It has been adapted by its inventors to all kinds of electrical work, electrotyping, telegraphy, electric lighting, and the propulsion of vehicles.
The first electric tramway run at Berlin in 1879 was followed by another at Dusseldorf in 1880, and a third at Paris in 1881. With all of these the name of Werner Siemens was chiefly associated; but William Siemens had also taken up the matter, and established at his country house of Sherwood, near Tunbridge Wells, an arrangement of dynamos and water-wheel, by which the power of a neighbouring stream was made to light the house, cut chaff turn washing-machines, and perform other household duties. More recently the construction of the electric railway from Portrush to Bushmills, at the Giant’s Causeway, engaged his attention; and this, the first work of its kind in the United Kingdom, and to all appearance the pioneer of many similar lines, was one of his very last undertakings.
In the recent development of electric lighting, William Siemens, whose fame had been steadily growing, was a recognised leader, although he himself made no great discoveries therein. As a public man and a manufacturer of great resources his influence in assisting the introduction of the light has been immense. The number of Siemens machines and Siemens electric lamps, together with measuring instruments such as the Siemens electro-dynamometer, which has been supplied to different parts of the world by the firm of which he was the head, is very considerable, and probably exceeds that of any other manufacturer, at least in this country.
Employing a staff of skilful assistants to develop many of his ideas, Dr. Siemens was able to produce a great variety of electrical instruments for measuring and other auxiliary purposes, all of which bear the name of his firm, and have proved exceedingly useful in a practical sense.
Among the most interesting of Siemens’s investigations were his experiments on the influence of the electric light in promoting the growth of plants, carried out during the winter of 1880 in the greenhouses of Sherwood. These experiments showed that plants do not require a period of rest, but continue to grow if light and other necessaries are supplied to them. Siemens enhanced the daylight, and, as it were, prolonged it through the night by means of arc lamps, with the result of forcing excellent fruit and flowers to their maturity before the natural time in this climate.
While Siemens was testing the chemical and life-promoting influence of the electric arc light, he was also occupied in trying its temperature and heating power with an ‘electric furnace,’ consisting of a plumbago crucible having two carbon electrodes entering it in such a manner that the voltaic arc could be produced within it. He succeeded in fusing a variety of refractory metals in a comparatively short time: thus, a pound of broken files was melted in a cold crucible in thirteen minutes, a result which is not surprising when we consider that the temperature of the voltaic arc, as measured by Siemens and Rosetti, is between 2,000 and 3,000 Deg. Centigrade, or about one-third that of the probable temperature of the sun. Sir Humphry Davy was the first to observe the extraordinary fusing power of the voltaic arc, but Siemens first applied it to a practical purpose in his electric furnace.
Always ready to turn his inventive genius in any direction, the introduction of the electric light, which had given an impetus to improvement in the methods of utilising gas, led him to design a regenerative gas lamp, which is now employed on a small scale in this country, either for street lighting or in class-rooms and public halls. In this burner, as in the regenerative furnace, the products of combustion are made to warm up the air and gas which go to feed the flame, and the effect is a full and brilliant light with some economy of fuel. The use of coal-gas for heating purposes was another subject which he took up with characteristic earnestness, and he advocated for a time the use of gas stoves and fires in preference to those which burn coal, not only on account of their cleanliness and convenience, but on the score of preventing fogs in great cities, by checking the discharge of smoke into the atmosphere. He designed a regenerative gas and coke fireplace, in which the ingoing air was warmed by heat conducted from the back part of the grate; and by practical trials in his own office, calculated the economy of the system. The interest in this question, however, died away after the close of the Smoke Abatement Exhibition; and the experiments of Mr. Aiken, of Edinburgh, showed how futile was the hope that gas fires would prevent fogs altogether. They might indeed ameliorate the noxious character of a fog by checking the discharge of soot into the atmosphere; but Mr. Aiken’s experiments showed that particles of gas were in themselves capable of condensing the moisture of the air upon them. The great scheme of Siemens for making London a smokeless city, by manufacturing gas at the coal-pit and leading it in pipes from street to street, would not have rendered it altogether a fogless one, though the coke and gas fires would certainly have reduced the quantity of soot launched into the air. Siemens’s scheme was rejected by a Committee of the House of Lords on the somewhat mistaken ground that if the plan were as profitable as Siemens supposed, it would have been put in practice long ago by private enterprise.
>From the problem of heating a room, the mind of Siemens also passed to the maintenance of solar fires, and occupied itself with the supply of fuel to the sun. Some physicists have attributed the continuance of solar heat to the contraction of the solar mass, and others to the impact of cometary matter. Imbued with the idea of regeneration, and seeking in nature for that thrift of power which he, as an inventor, had always aimed at, Siemens suggested a hypothesis on which the sun conserves its heat by a circulation of its fuel in space. The elements dissociated in the intense heat of the glowing orb rush into the cooler regions of space, and recombine to stream again towards the sun, where the self-same process is renewed. The hypothesis was a daring one, and evoked a great deal of discussion, to which the author replied with interest, afterwards reprinting the controversy in a volume, ON THE CONSERVATION OF SOLAR ENERGY. Whether true or not–and time will probably decide–the solar hypothesis of Siemens revealed its author in a new light. Hitherto he had been the ingenious inventor, the enterprising man of business, the successful engineer; but now he took a prominent place in the ranks of pure science and speculative philosophy. The remarkable breadth of his mind and the abundance of his energies were also illustrated by the active part he played in public matters connected with the progress of science. His munificent gifts in the cause of education, as much as his achievements in science, had brought him a popular reputation of the best kind; and his public utterances in connection with smoke abatement, the electric light. Electric railways, and other topics of current interest, had rapidly brought him into a foremost place among English scientific men. During the last years of his life, Siemens advanced from the shade of mere professional celebrity into the strong light of public fame.
President of the British Association in 1882, and knighted in 1883, Siemens was a member of numerous learned societies both at home and abroad. In 1854 he became a Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers; and in 1862 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was twice President of the Society of Telegraph Engineers and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, besides being a Member of Council of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and a Vice-President of the Royal Institution. The Society of Arts, as we have already seen, was the first to honour him in the country of his adoption, by awarding him a gold medal for his regenerative condenser in 1850; and in 1883 he became its chairman. Many honours were conferred upon him in the course of his career–the Telford prize in 1853, gold medals at the various great Exhibitions, including that of Paris in 1881, and a GRAND PRIX at the earlier Paris Exhibition of 1867 for his regenerative furnace. In 1874 he received the Royal Albert Medal for his researches on heat, and in 1875 the Bessemer medal of the Iron and Steel Institute. Moreover, a few days before his death, the Council of the Institution of Civil Engineers awarded him the Howard Quinquennial prize for his improvements in the manufacture of iron and steel. At the request of his widow, it took the form of a bronze copy of the ‘Mourners,’ a piece of statuary by J. G. Lough, originally exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, in the Crystal Palace. In 1869 the University of Oxford conferred upon him the high distinction of D.C.L. (Doctor of Civil Law); and besides being a member of several foreign societies, he was a Dignitario of the Brazilian Order of the Rose, and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
Rich in honours and the appreciation of his contemporaries, in the prime of his working power and influence for good, and at the very climax of his career, Sir William Siemens was called away. The news of his death came with a shock of surprise, for hardly any one knew he had been ill. He died on the evening of Monday, November 19, 1883, at nine o’clock. A fortnight before, while returning from a managers’ meeting of the Royal Institution, in company with his friend Sir Frederick Bramwell, he tripped upon the kerbstone of the pavement, after crossing Hamilton Place, Piccadilly, and fell heavily to the ground, with his left arm under him. Though a good deal shaken by the fall, he attended at his office in Queen Anne’s Gate, Westminster, the next and for several following days; but the exertion proved too much for him, and almost for the first time in his busy life he was compelled to lay up. On his last visit to the office he was engaged most of the time in dictating to his private secretary a large portion of the address which he intended to deliver as Chairman of the Council of the Society of Arts. This was on Thursday, November 8, and the following Saturday he awoke early in the morning with an acute pain about the heart and a sense of coldness in the lower limbs. Hot baths and friction removed the pain, from which he did not suffer much afterwards. A slight congestion of the left lung was also relieved; and Sir William had so far recovered that he could leave his room. On Saturday, the 17th, he was to have gone for a change of air to his country seat at Sherwood; but on Wednesday, the 14th, he appears to have caught a chill which affected his lungs, for that night he was seized with a shortness of breath and a difficulty in breathing. Though not actually confined to bed, he never left his room again. On the last day, and within four hours of his death, we are told, his two medical attendants, after consultation, spoke so hopefully of the future, that no one was prepared for the sudden end which was then so near. In the evening, while he was sitting in an arm-chair, very quiet and calm, a change suddenly came over his face, and he died like one who falls asleep. Heart disease of long standing, aggravated by the fall, was the immediate cause; but the opinion has been expressed by one who knew him well, that Siemens ‘literally immolated himself on the shrine of labour.’ At any rate he did not spare himself, and his intense devotion to his work proved fatal.
Every day was a busy one with Siemens. His secretary was with him in his residence by nine o’clock nearly every morning, except on Sundays, assisting him in work for one society or another, the correction of proofs, or the dictation of letters giving official or scientific advice, and the preparation of lectures or patent specifications. Later on, he hurried across the Park ‘almost at racing speed,’ to his offices at Westminster, where the business of the Landore-Siemens Steel Company and the Electrical Works of Messrs. Siemens Brothers and Company was transacted. As chairman of these large undertakings, and principal inventor of the processes and systems carried out by them, he had a hundred things to attend to in connection with them, visitors to see, and inquiries to answer. In the afternoon and evenings he was generally engaged at council meetings of the learned societies, or directory meetings of the companies in which he was interested. He was a man who took little or no leisure, and though he never appeared to over-exert himself, few men could have withstood the strain so long.
Siemens was buried on Monday, November 26, in Kensal Green Cemetery. The interment was preceded by a funeral service held in Westminster Abbey, and attended by representatives of the numerous learned societies of which he had been a conspicuous member, by many leading men in all branches of science, and also by a large body of other friends and admirers, who thus united in doing honour to his memory, and showing their sense of the loss which all classes had sustained by his death.
Siemens was above all things a ‘labourer.’ Unhasting, unresting labour was the rule of his life; and the only relaxation, not to say recreation, which he seems to have allowed himself was a change of task or the calls of sleep. This natural activity was partly due to the spur of his genius, and partly to his energetic spirit. For a man of his temperament science is always holding out new problems to solve and fresh promises of triumph. All he did only revealed more work to be done; and many a scheme lies buried in his grave.
Though Siemens was a man of varied powers, and occasionally gave himself to pure speculation in matters of science, his mind was essentially practical; and it was rather as an engineer than a discoverer that he was great. Inventions are associated with his name, not laws or new phenomena. Standing on the borderland between pure and applied science, his sympathies were yet with the latter; and as the outgoing President of the British Association at Southport, in 1882, he expressed the opinion that ‘in the great workshop of nature there are no lines of demarcation to be drawn between the most exalted speculation and common-place practice.’ The truth of this is not to be gain-said, but it is the utterance of an engineer who judges the merit of a thing by its utility. He objected to the pursuit of science apart from its application, and held that the man of science does most for his kind who shows the world how to make use of scientific results. Such a view was natural on the part of Siemens, who was himself a living representative of the type in question; but it was not the view of such a man as Faraday or Newton, whose pure aim was to discover truth, well knowing that it would be turned to use thereafter. In Faraday’s eyes the new principle was a higher boon than the appliance which was founded upon it.
Tried by his own standard, however, Siemens was a conspicuous benefactor of his fellow-men; and at the time of his decease he had become our leading authority upon applied science. In electricity he was a pioneer of the new advances, and happily lived to obtain at least a Pisgah view of the great future which evidently lies before that pregnant force.
If we look for the secret of Siemens’s remarkable success, we shall assuredly find it in an inventive mind, coupled with a strong commercial instinct, and supported by a physical energy which enabled him to labour long and incessantly. It is told that when a mechanical problem was brought to him for solution, he would suggest six ways of overcoming the difficulty, three of which would be impracticable, the others feasible, and one at least successful. From this we gather that his mind was fertile in expedients. The large works which he established are also a proof that, unlike most inventors, he did not lose his interest in an invention, or forsake it for another before it had been brought into the market. On the contrary, he was never satisfied with an invention until it was put into practical operation.
To the ordinary observer, Siemens did not betray any signs of the untiring energy that possessed him. His countenance was usually serene and tranquil, as that of a thinker rather than a man of action; his demeanour was cool and collected; his words few and well-chosen. In his manner, as well as in his works, there was no useless waste of power.
To the young he was kind and sympathetic, hearing, encouraging, advising; a good master, a firm friend. His very presence had a calm and orderly influence on those about him, which when he presided at a Public meeting insensibly introduced a gracious tone. The diffident took heart before him, and the presumptuous were checked. The virtues which accompanied him into public life did not desert him in private. In losing him, we have lost not only a powerful intellect, but a bright example, and an amiable man.
CHAPTER VI
FLEEMING JENKIN.
The late Fleeming Jenkin, Professor of Engineering in Edinburgh University, was remarkable for the versatility of his talent. Known to the world as the inventor of Telpherage, he was an electrician and cable engineer of the first rank, a lucid lecturer, and a good linguist, a skilful critic, a writer and actor of plays, and a clever sketcher. In popular parlance, Jenkin was a dab at everything.
His father, Captain Charles Jenkin, R.N., was the second son of Mr. Charles Jenkin, of Stowting Court, himself a naval officer, who had taken part in the actions with De Grasse. Stowting Court, a small estate some six miles north of Hythe, had been in the family since the year 1633, and was held of the Crown by the feudal service of six men and a constable to defend the sea-way at Sandgate. Certain Jenkins had settled in Kent during the reign of Henry VIII., and claimed to have come from Yorkshire. They bore the arms of Jenkin ap Phillip of St. Melans, who traced his descent from ‘Guaith Voeth,’ Lord of Cardigan.
While cruising in the West Indies, carrying specie, or chasing buccaneers and slavers, Charles Jenkin, junior, was introduced to the family of a fellow midshipman, son of Mr. Jackson, Custos Rotulorum of Kingston, Jamaica, and fell in love with Henrietta Camilla, the youngest daughter. Mr. Jackson came of a Yorkshire stock, said to be of Scottish origin, and Susan, his wife, was a daughter of [Sir] Colin Campbell, a Greenock merchant, who inherited but never assumed the baronetcy of Auchinbreck. [According to BURKE’S PEERAGE (1889), the title went to another branch.]
Charles Jenkin, senior, died in 1831, leaving his estate so heavily encumbered, through extravagance and high living, that only the mill- farm was saved for John, the heir, an easy-going, unpractical man, with a turn for abortive devices. His brother Charles married soon afterwards, and with the help of his wife’s money bought in most of Stowting Court, which, however, yielded him no income until late in life. Charles was a useful officer and an amiable gentleman; but lacking energy and talent, he never rose above the grade of Commander, and was superseded after forty-five years of service. He is represented as a brave, single-minded, and affectionate sailor, who on one occasion saved several men from suffocation by a burning cargo at the risk of his own life. Henrietta Camilla Jackson, his wife, was a woman of a strong and energetic character. Without beauty of countenance, she possessed the art of pleasing, and in default of genius she was endowed with a variety of gifts. She played the harp, sang, and sketched with native art. At seventeen, on hearing Pasta sing in Paris, she sought out the artist and solicited lessons. Pasta, on hearing her sing, encouraged her, and recommended a teacher. She wrote novels, which, however, failed to make their mark. At forty, on losing her voice, she took to playing the piano, practising eight hours a day; and when she was over sixty she began the study of Hebrew.
The only child of this union was Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin, generally called Fleeming Jenkin, after Admiral Fleeming, one of his father’s patrons. He was born on March 25, 1833, in a building of the Government near Dungeness, his father at that time being on the coast- guard service. His versatility was evidently derived from his mother, who, owing to her husband’s frequent absence at sea and his weaker character, had the principal share in the boy’s earlier training.
Jenkin was fortunate in having an excellent education. His mother took him to the south of Scotland, where, chiefly at Barjarg, she taught him drawing among other things, and allowed him to ride his pony on the moors. He went to school at Jedburgh, and afterwards to the Edinburgh Academy, where he carried off many prizes. Among his schoolfellows were Clerk Maxwell and Peter Guthrie Tait, the friends of his maturer life.
On the retirement of his father the family removed to Frankfort in 1847, partly from motives of economy and partly for the boy’s instruction. Here Fleeming and his father spent a pleasant time together, sketching old castles, and observing the customs of the peasantry. Fleeming was precocious, and at thirteen had finished a romance of three hundred lines in heroic measure, a Scotch novel, and innumerable poetical fragments, none of which are now extant. He learned German in Frankfort; and on the family migrating to Paris the following year, he studied French and mathematics under a certain M. Deluc. While here, Fleeming witnessed the outbreak of the Revolution of 1848, and heard the first shot. In a letter written to an old schoolfellow while the sound still rang in his ears, and his hand trembled with excitement, he gives a boyish account of the circumstances. The family were living in the Rue Caumartin, and on the evening of February 23 he and his father were taking a walk along the boulevards, which were illuminated for joy at the resignation of M. Guizot. They passed the residence of the Foreign Minister, which was guarded with troops, and further on encountered a band of rioters marching along the street with torches, and singing the Marseillaise. After them came a rabble of men and women of all sorts, rich and poor, some of them armed with sticks and sabres. They turned back with these, the boy delighted with the spectacle, ‘I remarked to papa’ (he writes),’I would not have missed the scene for anything. I might never see such a splendid one ; when PONG went one shot. Every face went pale: R–R–R–R–R went the whole detachment [of troops], and the whole crowd of gentlemen and ladies turned and cut. Such a scene!—ladies, gentlemen, and vagabonds went sprawling in the mud, not shot but tripped up, and those that went down could not rise–they were trampled over. . . . I ran a short time straight on and did not fall, then turned down a side street, ran fifty yards, and felt tolerably safe; looked for papa; did not see him; so walked on quickly, giving the news as I went.’
Next day, while with his father in the Place de la Concorde, which was filled with troops, the gates of the Tuileries Garden were suddenly flung open, and out galloped a troop of cuirassiers, in the midst of whom was an open carriage containing the king and queen, who had abdicated. Then came the sacking of the Tuileries, the people mounting a cannon on the roof, and firing blank cartridges to testify their joy. ‘It was a sight to see a palace sacked’ (wrote the boy), ‘and armed vagabonds firing out of the windows, and throwing shirts, papers, and dresses of all kinds out…. They are not rogues, the French; they are not stealing, burning, or doing much harm.’ [MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN, by R. L. Stevenson.]
The Revolution obliged the Jenkins to leave Paris, and they proceeded to Genoa, where they experienced another, and Mrs. Jenkin, with her son and sister-in-law, had to seek the protection of a British vessel in the harbour, leaving their house stored with the property of their friends, and guarded by the Union Jack and Captain Jenkin.
At Genoa, Fleeming attended the University, and was its first Protestant student. Professor Bancalari was the professor of natural philosophy, and lectured on electro-magnetism, his physical laboratory being the best in Italy. Jenkin took the degree of M.A. with first-class honours, his special subject having been electro-magnetism. The questions in the examinations were put in Latin, and answered in Italian. Fleeming also attended an Art school in the city, and gained a silver medal for a drawing from one of Raphael’s cartoons. His holidays were spent in sketching, and his evenings in learning to play the piano; or, when permissible, at the theatre or opera-house; for ever since hearing Rachel recite the Marseillaise at the Theatre Francaise, he had conceived a taste for acting.
In 1850 Fleeming spent some time in a Genoese locomotive shop under Mr. Philip Taylor, of Marseilles; but on the death of his Aunt Anna, who lived with them, Captain Jenkin took his family to England, and settled in Manchester, where the lad, in 1851, was apprenticed to mechanical engineering at the works of Messrs. Fairbairn, and from half-past eight in the morning till six at night had, as he says, ‘to file and chip vigorously, in a moleskin suit, and infernally dirty.’ At home he pursued his studies, and was for a time engaged with Dr. Bell in working out a geometrical method of arriving at the proportions of Greek architecture. His stay amidst the smoke and bustle of Manchester, though in striking contrast to his life in Genoa, was on the whole agreeable. He liked his work, had the good spirits of youth, and made some pleasant friends, one of them the authoress, Mrs. Gaskell. Even as a boy he was disputatious, and his mother tells of his having overcome a Consul at Genoa in a political discussion when he was only sixteen, ‘simply from being well-informed on the subject, and honest. He is as true as steel,’ she writes, ‘and for no one will he bend right or left… Do not fancy him a Bobadil; he is only a very true, candid boy. I am so glad he remains in all respects but information a great child.’
On leaving Fairbairn’s he was engaged for a time on a survey for the proposed Lukmanier Railway, in Switzerland, and in 1856 he entered the engineering works of Mr. Penn, at Greenwich, as a draughtsman, and was occupied on the plans of a vessel designed for the Crimean war. He did not care for his berth, and complained of its late hours, his rough comrades, with whom he had to be ‘as little like himself as possible,’ and his humble lodgings, ‘across a dirty green and through some half- built streets of two-storied houses…. Luckily,’ he adds, ‘I am fond of my profession, or I could not stand this life.’ There was probably no real hardship in his present situation, and thousands of young engineers go through the like experience at the outset of their career without a murmur,’ and even with enjoyment; but Jenkin had been his mother’s pet until then, with a girl’s delicate training, and probably felt the change from home more keenly on that account. At night he read engineering and mathematics, or Carlyle and the poets, and cheered his drooping spirits with frequent trips to London to see his mother.
Another social pleasure was his visits to the house of Mr. Alfred Austin, a barrister, who became permanent secretary to Her Majesty’s Office of Works and Public Buildings, and retired in 1868 with the title of C.B. His wife, Eliza Barron, was the youngest daughter of Mr. E. Barron, a gentleman of Norwich, the son of a rich saddler, or leather- seller, in the Borough, who, when a child, had been patted on the head, in his father’s shop, by Dr. Johnson, while canvassing for Mr. Thrale. Jenkin had been introduced to the Austins by a letter from Mrs. Gaskell, and was charmed with the atmosphere of their choice home, where intellectual conversation was happily united with kind and courteous manners, without any pretence or affectation. ‘Each of the Austins,’ says Mr. Stevenson, in his memoir of Jenkin, to which we are much indebted, ‘was full of high spirits; each practised something of the same repression; no sharp word was uttered in the house. The same point of honour ruled them: a guest was sacred, and stood within the pale from criticism.’ In short, the Austins were truly hospitable and cultured, not merely so in form and appearance. It was a rare privilege and preservative for a solitary young man in Jenkin’s position to have the entry into such elevating society, and he appreciated his good fortune.
Annie Austin, their only child, had been highly educated, and knew Greek among other things. Though Jenkin loved and admired her parents, he did not at first care for Annie, who, on her part, thought him vain, and by no means good-looking. Mr. Stevenson hints that she vanquished his stubborn heart by correcting a ‘false quantity’ of his one day, for he was the man to reflect over a correction, and ‘admire the castigator.’ Be this as it may, Jenkin by degrees fell deeply in love with her.
He was poor and nameless, and this made him diffident; but the liking of her parents for him gave him hope. Moreover, he had entered the service of Messrs. Liddell and Gordon, who were engaged in the new work of submarine telegraphy, which satisfied his aspirations, and promised him a successful career. With this new-born confidence in his future, he solicited the Austins for leave to court their daughter, and it was not withheld. Mrs. Austin consented freely, and Mr. Austin only reserved the right to inquire into his character. Neither of them mentioned his income or prospects, and Jenkin, overcome by their disinterestedness, exclaimed in one of his letters, ‘Are these people the same as other people?’ Thus permitted, he addressed himself to Annie, and was nearly rejected for his pains. Miss Austin seems to have resented his courtship of her parents first; but the mother’s favour, and his own spirited behaviour, saved him, and won her consent.
Then followed one of the happiest epochs in Jenkin’s life. After leaving Penn’s he worked at railway engineering for a time under Messrs. Liddell and Gordon; and, in 1857, became engineer to Messrs. R. S. Newall & Co., of Gateshead, who shared the work of making the first Atlantic cable with Messrs. Glass, Elliott & Co., of Greenwich. Jenkin was busy designing and fitting up machinery for cableships, and making electrical experiments. ‘I am half crazy with work,’ he wrote to his betrothed; ‘I like it though: it’s like a good ball, the excitement carries you through.’ Again he wrote, ‘My profession gives me all the excitement and interest I ever hope for.’… ‘I am at the works till ten, and sometimes till eleven. But I have a nice office to sit in, with a fire to myself, and bright brass scientific instruments all round me, and books to read, and experiments to make, and enjoy myself amazingly. I find the study of electricity so entertaining that I am apt to neglect my other work.’… ‘What shall I compare them to,’ he writes of some electrical experiments, ‘a new song? or a Greek play?’ In the spring of 1855 he was fitting out the s.s. Elba, at Birkenhead, for his first telegraph cruise. It appears that in 1855 Mr. Henry Brett attempted to lay a cable across the Mediterranean between Cape Spartivento, in the south of Sardinia, and a point near Bona, on the coast of Algeria. It was a gutta-percha cable of six wires or conductors, and manufactured by Messrs. Glass & Elliott, of Greenwich–a firm which afterwards combined with the Gutta-Percha Company, and became the existing Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company. Mr. Brett laid the cable from the Result, a sailing ship in tow, instead of a more manageable steamer; and, meeting with 600 fathoms of water when twenty- five miles from land, the cable ran out so fast that a tangled skein came up out of the hold, and the line had to be severed. Having only 150 miles on board to span the whole distance of 140 miles, he grappled the lost cable near the shore, raised it, and ‘under-run’ or passed it over the ship, for some twenty miles, then cut it, leaving the seaward end on the bottom. He then spliced the ship’s cable to the shoreward end and resumed his paying-out; but after seventy miles in all were laid, another rapid rush of cable took place, and Mr. Brett was obliged to cut and abandon the line.
Another attempt was made the following year, but with no better success. Mr. Brett then tried to lay a three-wire cable from the steamer Dutchman, but owing to the deep water–in some places 1500 fathoms –its egress was so rapid, that when he came to a few miles from Galita, his destination on the Algerian coast, he had not enough cable to reach the land. He therefore telegraphed to London for more cable to be made and sent out, while the ship remained there holding to the end. For five days he succeeded in doing so, sending and receiving messages ; but heavy weather came on, and the cable parted, having, it is said, been chafed through by rubbing on the bottom. After that Mr. Brett went home.
It was to recover the lost cable of these expeditions that the Elba was got ready for sea. Jenkin had fitted her out the year before for laying the Cagliari to Malta and Corfu cables; but on this occasion she was better equipped. She had a new machine for picking up the cable, and a sheave or pulley at the bows for it to run over, both designed by Jenkin, together with a variety of wooden buoys, ropes, and chains. Mr. Liddell, assisted by Mr. F. C. Webb and Fleeming Jenkin, were in charge of the expedition. The latter had nothing to do with the electrical work, his care being the deck machinery for raising the cable; but it entailed a good deal of responsibility, which was flattering and agreeable to a young man of his parts.
‘I own I like responsibility,’ he wrote to Miss Austin, while fitting up the vessel; ‘it flatters one; and then, your father might say, I have more to gain than lose. Moreover, I do like this bloodless, painless combat with wood and iron, forcing the stubborn rascals to do my will, licking the clumsy cubs into an active shape, seeing the child of to- day’s thought working to-morrow in full vigour at his appointed task.’ Another letter, dated May 17, gives a picture of the start. ‘Not a sailor will join us till the last moment; and then, just as the ship forges ahead through the narrow pass, beds and baggage fly on board, the men, half tipsy, clutch at the rigging, the captain swears, the women scream and sob, the crowd cheer and laugh, while one or two pretty little girls stand still and cry outright, regardless of all eyes.’
The Elba arrived at Bona on June 3, and Jenkin landed at Fort Genova, on Cape Hamrah, where some Arabs were building a land line. ‘It was a strange scene,’ he writes, ‘far more novel than I had imagined; the high, steep bank covered with rich, spicy vegetation, of which I hardly knew one plant. The dwarf palm, with fan-like leaves, growing about two feet high, forms the staple verdure.’ After dining in Fort Genova, he had nothing to do but watch the sailors ordering the Arabs about under the ‘generic term “Johnny.” ‘ He began to tire of the scene, although, as he confesses, he had willingly paid more money for less strange and lovely sights. Jenkin was not a dreamer; he disliked being idle, and if he had had a pencil he would have amused himself in sketching what he saw. That his eyes were busy is evident from the particulars given in his letter, where he notes the yellow thistles and ‘Scotch-looking gowans’ which grow there, along with the cistus and the fig-tree.
They left Bona on June 5, and, after calling at Cagliari and Chia, arrived at Cape Spartivento on the morning of June 8. The coast here is a low range of heathy hills, with brilliant green bushes and marshy pools. Mr. Webb remarks that its reputation for fever was so bad as to cause Italian men-of-war to sheer off in passing by. Jenkin suffered a little from malaria, but of a different origin. ‘A number of the SATURDAY REVIEW here,’ he writes; ‘it reads so hot and feverish, so tomb-like and unhealthy, in the midst of dear Nature’s hills and sea, with good wholesome work to do.’
There were several pieces of submerged cable to lift, two with their ends on shore, and one or two lying out at sea. Next day operations were begun on the shore end, which had become buried under the sand, and could not be raised without grappling. After attempts to free the cable from the sand in small boats, the Elba came up to help, and anchored in shallow water about sunset. Curiously enough, the anchor happened to hook, and so discover the cable, which was thereupon grappled, cut, and the sea end brought on board over the bow sheave. After being passed six times round the picking-up drum it was led into the hold, and the Elba slowly forged ahead, hauling in the cable from the bottom as she proceeded. At half-past nine she anchored for the night some distance from the shore, and at three next morning resumed her picking up. ‘With a small delay for one or two improvements I had seen to be necessary last night,’ writes Jenkin, ‘the engine started, and since that time I do not think there has been half an hour’s stoppage. A rope to splice, a block to change, a wheel to oil, an old rusted anchor to disengage from the cable, which brought it up– these have been our only obstructions. Sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty revolutions at last my little engine tears away. The even black rope comes straight out of the blue, heaving water, passes slowly round an open-hearted, good-tempered-looking pulley, five feet in diameter, aft past a vicious nipper, to bring all up should anything go wrong, through a gentle guide on to a huge bluff drum, who wraps him round his body, and says, ” Come you must,” as plain as drum can speak; the chattering pauls say, “I’ve got him, I’ve got him; he can’t come back,” whilst black cable, much slacker and easier in mind and body, is taken by a slim V-pulley and passed down into the huge hold, where half a dozen men put him comfortably to bed after his exertion in rising from his long bath.
‘I am very glad I am here, for my machines are my own children, and I look on their little failings with a parent’s eye, and lead them into the path of duty with gentleness and firmness. I am naturally in good spirits, but keep very quiet, for misfortunes may arise at any instant; moreover, to-morrow my paying-out apparatus will be wanted should all go well, and that will be another nervous operation. Fifteen miles are safely in, but no one knows better than I do that nothing is done till all is done.’
JUNE 11.–‘It would amuse you to see how cool (in head) and jolly everybody is. A testy word now and then shows the nerves are strained a little, but every one laughs and makes his little jokes as if it were all in fun….I enjoy it very much.’
JUNE 13, SUNDAY.–‘It now (at 10.30) blows a pretty stiff gale, and the sea has also risen, and the Elba’s bows rise and fall about nine feet. We make twelve pitches to the minute, and the poor cable must feel very sea-sick by this time. We are quite unable to do anything, and continue riding at anchor in one thousand fathoms, the engines going constantly, so as to keep the ship’s bows close up to the cable, which by this means hangs nearly vertical, and sustains no strain but that caused by its own weight and the pitching of the vessel. We were all up at four, but the weather entirely forbade work for to-day; so some went to bed, and most lay down, making up our lee-way, as we nautically term our loss of sleep. I must say Liddell is a fine fellow, and keeps his patience and his temper wonderfully; and yet how he does fret and fume about trifles at home!’
JUNE 16.–‘By some odd chance a TIMES of June 7 has found its way on board through the agency of a wretched old peasant who watches the end of the line here. A long account of breakages in the Atlantic trial trip. To-night we grapple for the heavy cable, eight tons to the mile. I long to have a tug at him; he may puzzle me; and though misfortunes, or rather difficulties, are a bore at the time, life, when working with cables, is tame without them.–2 p.m. Hurrah! he is hooked–the big fellow–almost at the first cast. He hangs under our bows, looking so huge and imposing that I could find it in my heart to be afraid of him.’
JUNE 17.–‘We went to a little bay called Chia, where a fresh-water stream falls into the sea, and took in water. This is rather a long operation, so I went up the valley with Mr. Liddell. The coast here consists of rocky mountains 800 to 1000 feet high, covered with shrubs of a brilliant green. On landing, our first amusement was watching the hundreds of large fish who lazily swam in shoals about the river. The big canes on the further side hold numberless tortoises, we are told, but see none, for just now they prefer taking a siesta. A little further on, and what is this with large pink flowers in such abundance?- -the oleander in full flower! At first I fear to pluck them, thinking they must be cultivated and valuable; but soon the banks show a long line of thick tall shrubs, one mass of glorious pink and green, set there in a little valley, whose rocks gleam out blue and purple colours, such as pre-Raphaelites only dare attempt, shining out hard and weird- like amongst the clumps of castor-oil plants, cistus, arbor-vitae, and many other evergreens, whose names, alas! I know not; the cistus is brown now, the rest all deep and brilliant green. Large herds of cattle browse on the baked deposit at the foot of these large crags. One or two half-savage herdsmen in sheepskin kilts, etc., ask for cigars; partridges whirr up on either side of us; pigeons coo and nightingales sing amongst the blooming oleander. We get six sheep, and many fowls too, from the priest of the small village, and then run back to Spartivento and make preparations for the morning.’
JUNE 18.–‘The short length (of the big-cable) we have picked up was covered at places with beautiful sprays of coral, twisted and twined with shells of those small fairy animals we saw in the aquarium at home. Poor little things! they died at once, with their little bells and delicate bright tints.’
JUNE 19.–‘Hour after hour I stand on the fore-castle-head picking off little specimens of polypi and coral, or lie on the saloon deck reading back numbers of the TIMES, till something hitches, and then all is hurly-burly once more. There are awnings all along the ship, and a most ancient and fish-like smell (from the decaying polypi) beneath.’
JUNE 22.–‘Yesterday the cable was often a lovely sight, coming out of the water one large incrustation of delicate net-like corals and long white curling shells. No portion of the dirty black wire was visible; instead we had a garland of soft pink, with little scarlet sprays and white enamel intermixed. All was fragile, however, and could hardly be secured in safety; and inexorable iron crushed the tender leaves to atoms.’
JUNE 24.–‘The whole day spent in dredging, without success. This operation consists in allowing the ship to drift slowly across the line where you expect the cable to be, while at the end of a long rope, fast either to the bow or stern, a grapnel drags along the ground. The grapnel is a small anchor, made like four pot-hooks tied back to back. When the rope gets taut the ship is stopped and the grapnel hauled up to the surface in the hopes of finding the cable on its prongs. I am much discontented with myself for idly lounging about and reading WESTWARD HO! for the second time instead of taking to electricity or picking up nautical information.’
During the latter part of the work much of the cable was found to be looped and twisted into ‘kinks’ from having been so slackly laid, and two immense tangled skeins were raised on board, one by means of the mast-head and fore-yard tackle. Photographs of this ravelled cable were for a long time exhibited as a curiosity in the windows of Messrs. Newall & Co’s. shop in the Strand, where we remember to have seen them.
By July 5 the whole of the six-wire cable had been recovered, and a portion of the three-wire cable, the rest being abandoned as unfit for use, owing to its twisted condition. Their work was over, but an unfortunate accident marred its conclusion. On the evening of the 2nd the first mate, while on the water unshackling a buoy, was struck in the back by a fluke of the ship’s anchor as she drifted, and so severely injured that he lay for many weeks at Cagliari. Jenkin’s knowledge of languages made him useful as an interpreter; but in mentioning this incident to Miss Austin, he writes, ‘For no fortune would I be a doctor to witness these scenes continually. Pain is a terrible thing.’
In the beginning of 1859 he made the acquaintance of Sir William Thomson, his future friend and partner. Mr. Lewis Gordon, of Messrs. R. S. Newall & Co., afterwards the earliest professor of engineering in a British University, was then in Glasgow seeing Sir William’s instruments for testing and signalling on the first Atlantic cable during the six weeks of its working. Mr. Gordon said he should like to show them to ‘a young man of remarkable ability,’ engaged at their Birkenhead Works, and Jenkin, being telegraphed for, arrived next morning, and spent a week in Glasgow, mostly in Sir William’s class-room and laboratory at the old college. Sir William tells us that he was struck not only with Jenkin’s brightness and ability, but with his resolution to understand everything spoken of; to see, if possible, thoroughly into every difficult question, and to slur over nothing. ‘I soon found,’ he remarks, ‘that thoroughness of honesty was as strongly engrained in the scientific as in the moral side of his character.’ Their talk was chiefly on the electric telegraph; but Jenkin was eager, too, on the subject of physics. After staying a week he returned to the factory; but he began experiments, and corresponded briskly with Sir William about cable work. That great electrician, indeed, seems to have infected his visitor during their brief contact with the magnetic force of his personality and enthusiasm.
The year was propitious, and, in addition to this friend, Fortune about the same time bestowed a still better gift on Jenkin. On Saturday, February 26, during a four days’ leave, he was married to Miss Austin at Northiam, returning to his work the following Tuesday. This was the great event of his life; he was strongly attached to his wife, and his letters reveal a warmth of affection, a chivalry of sentiment, and even a romance of expression, which a casual observer would never have suspected in him. Jenkin seemed to the outside world a man without a heart, and yet we find him saying in the year 1869, ‘People may write novels, and other people may write poems, but not a man or woman among them can say how happy a man can be who is desperately in love with his wife after ten years of marriage.’ Five weeks before his death he wrote to her, ‘Your first letter from Bournemouth gives me heavenly pleasure –for which I thank Heaven and you, too, who are my heaven on earth.’
During the summer he enjoyed another telegraph cruise in the Mediterranean, a sea which for its classical memories, its lovely climate, and diversified scenes, is by far the most interesting in the