Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/708

688 W. H. Barlow and Theodore Forster, April 27, 1848, and to E. W. Siemens, April 23, 1850). Efforts had been made to solve the problem of submarine telegraphy for some years. The Count de Moncel, in his Traité de Télégraphie Électrique, gives to Mr. Wheatstone, London, the palm as its inventor, but all do not agree in this. The first mention (The Atlantic Telegraph, W. H. Russell) we are able to find of a current being transmitted a distance under water refers to Sir W. O'Shaughnessy, Superintendent of Electric Telegraphs in India, who hauled an insulated wire across the Hoogly, at Calcutta, and produced electric phenomena on the other side of the river, in 1839. Wheatstone, who is said to have been thinking of binding England and the Continent in electric connection as early as 1837, laid a plan before the House of Commons in 1840 for a cable between Dover and Calais. He seems to have had no definite idea of the kind of insulator to be employed, and, as the insulating quality of gutta-percha was not yet known, his project was not carried out. Morse, in 1812, had succeeded in telegraphing with a copper cable in New York harbor from Castle Garden to Governor's Island, and said, in a letter to the Secretary of the Treasury in 1813, that electric communication "may with certainty be established across the Atlantic Ocean." Three years later Ezra Cornell had successfully employed a cable insulated with rubber in the Hudson at Fort Lee; and in 1846 Colonel Colt, the patentee of the revolver, and Mr. Robinson, of New York, laid a wire across the river from New York to Brooklyn and from Long Island to Coney Island. So this great fact of instantaneous exchange of intelligence with nations beyond seas was in a promising embryonic stage. Yet a satisfactory insulation still was wanting. Then, at the very time when science was earnestly seeking to find a suitable insulating material, Montgomery was studying the properties and supply of gutta-percha. The late distinguished German inventor, E. W. Siemens, recognized the superior insulating power of this substance in 1846, and constructed the first subterranean line in Germany in 1847. Thence to the submarine cable was but a step.

It is now interesting to Americans to note that S. T. Armstrong, of New York (The Story of the Telegraph, by Briggs and Maverick; The Telegraph Manual, by Schaffner), who had been invited to England in 1847 to inspect the products of the new industry, established this industry the same year in Brooklyn (as the president of a company), and made highly favorable experiments across the Hudson in the autumn in 1848. He was so sanguine of the success of gutta-percha insulation that he offered in The Journal of Commerce, the same year, to lay a line across the Atlantic for $3,500,000. (We have been careful to allude to this, as there is usually no reference to Armstrong's experiments