Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 72.djvu/271

 word; but in the syllable "toe" the "e" is as indistinct as the hurriedly written scrawl that you are very glad to get some one else to read for you.

Thomson wanted a receiving instrument which, unlike the ordinary telegraph instruments used in post-offices and railway stations, could render the interpretation of such suggestions possible in the hands of an expert signaler, and he devised the mirror galvanometer speaking instrument to obtain this result.

Another most important fact that his theoretical investigation brought out was that no increase of battery power could counteract the retardation in the signals produced by an impurity existing in the copper conductor of a cable, and hence that every yard of copper wire used in the thousands of miles of a long cable must be electrically tested for resistance before being used.

But all this appeared to the electrician as arising from the ignorance of an inexperienced young man who had never erected a mile of telegraph line in his life, and would not have been given a job in any telegraph office. And so when signals through the 1858 Atlantic cable became weak, and a message from the president to our queen took thirty hours in transmission, although containing only 150 words, and which would need only three or four minutes to transmit through any one of the good Atlantic cables of to-day, the only remedy of those who looked down on the theories of the young Glasgow professor was to use Whitehouse's "thunder pump," a magneto-electric machine which produced a sudden large electromotive force when the armature of the permanent magnet was jerked off the poles of the magnet. But these shocks only sent sparks through the gutta-percha insulating coating and hurried the poor cable to its doom, so that even the three words per minute which would have been the utmost limit of speed possible had this cable been entirely uninjured, were replaced by absolute silence.

But Thomson energetically struggled on and, pursuing (as he told me afterwards) a "Parnell-Biggar policy" at the board meetings of the Atlantic Cable Company, obstructed all business until the directors promised to have all the copper wire tested for resistance before being made into cable; and thanks to Thomson for his theory of signaling, to that engineer of energy and surprising resource, even when quite a lad, Sir Charles Bright, to Captain Anderson of the Great Eastern, and to all those who have followed in the history of submarine cable development the London Stock Exchange is by cable to-day within thirty seconds of Wall Street.

Thomson's work in connection with submarine telegraphy has been epoch-making. But thirty-three years ago it was associated with what I felt was a national loss. I give it in an extract from a long letter