Page:A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury.pdf/120

106

I have now before me coils upon coils of the Telegraphic Cable, in samples, for the Atlantic. I have been most happy devising a plan for making coilings and laying it down, which appear to me to obviate every difficulty. We shall see. . . . Johnny, Molly, and I go down to Fredericksburg Friday night; I shall return here Monday, join Dick, and start for the land of the Dakotas. We are going, by invitation, to help lay the cornerstone of the Minnesota Historical Society at Saint Paul's.

I have been in the depths of the ocean. Brook's lead has finished Hecla or Vesuvius, or some other volcano. The Gulf Stream has its foot on it. . ..

The bottom of the sea all along there is two miles deep and strewed with volcanic cinders and Gulf Stream organisms. A letter yesterday from C. W. Field. He was urging telegraphic patrons in London to adopt my plan for laying the cable. We shall see, after a while, what will come of it. If I could only get the right to one wire across the Atlantic! . . ..

I have a piece of the cable they are making for the Atlantic; it's a great improvement over the others; but it costs three or four times as much as it ought to cost. Its breaking strain is four tons, and its weight about a ton to the mile. Its breaking strain need not have been over half of a ton, and its weight 500 or 600 lbs. to the mile. I'll risk anything on that.

Maury said, in a lecture delivered in Cincinnati, in November 1858, that he believed that the present "Atlantic Cable