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1874 – Adventure on the high seas
The Siemens brothers Carl, Werner and William (photomontage)
After the major successes of the land and sea telegraph lines on the continents it had become rapidly clear that laying a telegraph cable between the American continent and Europe would be an extremely lucrative business. In 1854 the entrepreneur Cyrus Field had already founded the “Atlantic Telegraph Co. of New York, Newfoundland and London.” The route chosen by Field and his colleagues ran between Ireland and Newfoundland, since the ocean maps showed a raised plateau on the sea floor; the submarine conditions looked ideal. Field began in 1854 by constructing a link from New York to Newfoundland, before he ventured on the actual task of crossing beneath the Atlantic, three years after the company was founded.
After a failed attempt in summer 1857, on August 5, 1858, Field succeeded in establishing the first connection between the European and American telegraph network. However, due to the lack of experience with the laying of cables over such long distances, the cable had not been made thick enough and was thus too vulnerable to environmental influences. After around 400 dispatches and 23 days in operation it was destroyed. It was to take Field seven years to collect enough money to finance a further attempt. This cable too broke when it was first being laid, so that it was only on the second attempt on July 27, 1866 that a permanent telegraph link was established between America and Europe. Since in the meantime the broken cable had also been recovered, two functioning lines were now available. Field was saved financially and was able to pay back all his debts by 1867. He was celebrated as a hero in both New York and London.
The Siemens brothers enter the business
The profitable business with the transatlantic link soon became a highly competitive market. After the British cotton manufacturer John Pender had succeeded in gaining control of the existing cables, he formed a monopoly which he defended fiercely against new competitors. As a result of this domination, investors approached the Siemens brothers in the early 1870s with the request to lay their own “direct” cable between Germany or the UK and the U.S. Werner von Siemens first wrote about this in 1871 in a letter to his brother Carl: “At the general meeting of the Deutsche Bank yesterday […] the third director asked me […] whether we would be interested in participating in a direct German-American cable, for which there was a great deal of support and a lot of money in America.” It would however be over a year before this idea took concrete shape, not least because of the hesitation of Werner von Siemens, who was still very aware of the financial losses of some earlier cable laying projects.
His brothers William and Carl were much more inclined towards the project: throughout 1872, Carl in particular looked for investors in the English-speaking world – and was successful. In spite of all the reservations on the part of Werner von Siemens, by the end of 1872/beginning of 1873 it was clear that the Siemens brothers were going to lay a cable through the Atlantic – either for an American company or at their own cost. Finally, in March 1873 the ”Direct United States Cable Company” (DUSC) was founded, the purpose of which was “to produce a direct and independent telegraph link between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the United States of North America.” Werner’s brother William was the “Consulting Director.” In spite of the company’s name, it was evident right at the beginning of the project that there was no way a direct link was going to be created between Ireland and the United States. Instead the main cable – as with the previous cables – was going to run from Ireland to Nova Scotia and from there a further cable would be laid on the American continent. According to an Internet source, the main reason for this was that the cable technology of the time was not sufficiently advanced for a direct link of this kind. The signals would have been so weak over such a great distance that it would not have been possible to receive them. There is no mention of this in the sources preserved in Corporate Archives.
A special cable-laying steam ship is built
While the converted steamer “Great Eastern” had been used to lay the first transatlantic cable, in 1872, an English company built the first special cable-laying ship, the “Hooper.” This encouraged William Siemens to build a cable steamship himself, based on this vessel and his own extensive experience, which he christened “Faraday” in honor of his friend Michael Faraday. Its main distinguishing features were the two paddlewheels on the sides which had previously only been seen on American riverboats, and the additional rudder on the bow which made the Faraday extremely maneuverable. Superstructures on the deck also made it possible to lay the cable via the bow or the stern. After its completion in spring 1874, the steamer set out at eight o’clock on May 16 on its first transatlantic crossing.
The first cable-laying
Before the main submarine stretch was tackled, the cable between Newfoundland and the United States was laid. The first section went from Halifax in Nova Scotia to Portsmouth in New Hampshire. The next section went from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland, though they were prohibited from going on land in Newfoundland due to the monopoly of the Anglo American Telegraph Company. According to the letters that the brothers wrote to one another, the work was completed at the beginning of August. The Faraday returned to the UK, and Carl wrote to Werner and William about the “shore end,” in Torbay in Newfoundland. The spot where the cable was brought ashore is marked today by the Tor Bay Atlantic Provincial Park in Nova Scotia, however.
Laying of the main cable
The laying of the actual Atlantic cable probably began between the middle and end of August. According to Pole, the biographer of William Siemens, the Faraday set out to sea again on August 26 and began laying the cable near the Irish coastal village of Ballinskelligs Bay. From this point on Werner von Siemens was there in person. The laying had hardly begun when disaster struck, as reported by Werner himself: “[…] but when I arrived early this morning on my Irish cart in the usual ghastly rain from my hotel 16 English miles away, I was met by long faces. There was a defect in the cable, which the ship was trying to recover.” The cable had broken – so deep down the entire Mont Blanc could have been sunk in the sea at this point. It took seven hours for the grapnel which was lowered to search for the cable to reach the sea bed. A cable had never been recovered from such a depth before. But Carl achieved the impossible: within two days the lost cable was picked up and the laying could continue. Werner wrote to Berlin with relief: “The recovery of the cable from such a great depth (2,580 fathoms) and its repair all within a day is something new in this field and will establish our reputation!”
It was to take another year….
However, the project was not further blessed with good fortune. The Faraday had to fish up and repair the cable several times, until a shortage of coal and stormy weather forced the “unhappy cable squadron” to return to Ireland. There could however be no question of abandoning the cable, since this would have meant a huge loss of prestige for the Direct United States Cable Company and the Siemens brothers. At the end of October the Faraday was already on its way again – and once more had bad luck. Near Newfoundland the cable was lost again in a storm, and this time the ship was damaged as well. Because of the necessary repair work and the permanently bad weather it was no longer possible to think of completing the cable before the end of 1874. It was not until the beginning of April that the Faraday set sail again, and in June 1875 a link was established between Torbay and Ballinskelligs Bay for the first time. However, the cable was still not operating properly. There were repeated interruptions, which had a very negative effect on both the costs and the mood of those involved. William reported several times to Werner that the Direct United shareholders were demanding that Carl be replaced as director of the project on board the ship.
In the middle of August the search for the fault was recommenced and this time the crew succeeded in finding the defect in the cable. At the beginning of September a permanent link between the stations in Torbay and Ballinskelligs Bay was achieved. Werner was relieved: “So at last the cable is working perfectly! Thank God this nightmare is over.” Shortly afterwards it was handed over to the public, and on September 15, 1875 Carl wrote as follows: “Today is the opening day! I hope to hear soon how the dispatching is going.” It evidently went very well: the cable beat that of the competition hands down. Carl reported from London: “The cable is continuing to operate well. On the first day the stock exchange people held a competition and the DUS beat the English [the competition] by more than an hour.”
They had made it!
In his “Recollections,” Werner von Siemens subsequently summed up the project in positive terms: “This first transatlantic cable laying of ours was not only exceedingly instructive for us, but in point of fact led for the first time to the completely clear apprehension and mastery of cable laying in deep water.” And for the English subsidiary of Siemens & Halske it was also enormously important: “At a stroke, the successful completion of the American cable raised the London firm to a far higher level of English business life than it had occupied hitherto.”
September 15, 2011 – Dr. Florian Kiuntk