688 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



W. H. Barlow and Theodore Forster, April 27, 1848, and to E. W. 

 Siemens, April 23, 1850). Efforts had been made to solve the prob- 

 lem of submarine telegraphy for some years. The Count de Mon- 

 cel, in his Traite de TeUgraphie Eledrique, gives to Mr. Wheat- 

 stone, 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 Com- 

 mons in 18-10 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 bej^ond seas was in a prom- 

 ising embryonic stage. Yet a satisfactory insulation still was 

 wanting. Then, at the very time when science was earnestly seek- 

 ing to find a suitable insulating material, Montgomery was study- 

 ing the properties and supply of gutta-jjercha. The late distin- 

 guished 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 sub- 

 marine cable was but a step. 



It is now interesting to Americans to note that S. T. Arm- 

 strong, 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 in- 

 dustry, estcxblished this industry the same year in Brooklyn (as 

 the president of a company), and made highly favorable experi- 

 ments across the Hudson in the autumn in 1848. He was so san- 

 guine 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 in 



