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NATURE 



[August 4, 1887 



reminds me how important is the connexion between England 

 and the younger Englands beyond the sea — but by going forward 

 in connecting the various races of mankind by binding island to 

 island and continent to continent. The telegraph is doing in 

 its own quiet, its own noiseless, and its own unobtrusive way, 

 more than all the noisiest missionaries of peace and universal 

 brotherhood have ever accomplished. 



Mr. Edwin Clark, in acknowledging the toast on behalf of 

 "The Past," described the origin of the Electric Telegraph Com- 

 pany, in the organization of which he took a prominent part, the 

 difficulties he had to encounter in curtailing expenditure, and in 

 putting into a thoroughly sound state the wires and the system 

 of insulation which then prevailed. He pointed out that the 

 railway companies were really in its early stages the greatest 

 benefactors of the telegraph. He had been deputed to examine 

 the telegraph system prevalent in Europe in those early years in 

 connexion with the railways, and he had recommended what 

 had now become universal on the railway system of this country 

 — the block system. 



Mr. John Pender, on behalf of "The Present," said : — My 

 mission to-night is to tell you what submarine telegraphy has 

 done. I am one of those few commercial men who at an early 

 period of telegraphy saw that there was in it the promise of a 

 beneficent instrument for the future progress of the world. I 

 have gone into submarine telegraphy, not as an expert, but as 

 one of those who have come forward and taken science by the 

 hand, and led it up to the glorious results which we have seen. 

 Twenty years ago there was only something like 2000 miles of 

 submarine cables; now there are 115,000 miles ; and it has 

 cost something like ;^38,ooo,ooo or ;[^39,ooo,ooo sterling to put 

 that amount of telegraph cable to the bottom of tlie sea. There 

 was a prophecy long ago that the earth was to be girdled round 

 in forty minutes. Why, we have got as much submarine tele- 

 graph cable as will go round the world five times, and we can 

 send a message round the world in twenty minutes at the present 

 moment. You ask me where does all this submarine telegraphy 

 extend, and I reply in those beautiful lines of the poet : — 



" Far as th^ breeie can b'^ar the billows' foam 

 Survey our Empire, and behold our home ! " 



Wherever the British ship goes, or the British flag flies, there 

 we have the submarine telegraph ; and at the present moment, 

 while I am speaking to you, human thought is travelling like 

 lightning to every part of the world. The future of that no man 

 can tell. Of the 100,000,000 words which are now carried by 

 submarine telegraphy, nine-tenths are for commercial purposes. 

 When the history of these fifty years of Her Majesty's glorious 

 reign is written, telegraphy, and more especially submarine 

 telegraphy, will be shown to have done more than anything else 

 to federate the great colonies with the mother country, to spread 

 civilization throughout the world, and to make this great world 

 of ours as near as possible one common country. 



Sir William Thomson (who was warmly received) said : — I 

 feel that when the telegraph has been so important a bond for 

 all the nations of the world we ought to go even beyond our 

 fifty years jubilee and think for a moment of the great names 

 from other countries to whom the possibility of the jubilee of the 

 electric telegraph has been due — the great apostles of electric 

 science in France, Coulomb and Ampere, — Ampere, whose 

 work and whose discoveries constitute the foundation of the 

 most important of modern telegraphic and electrical instruments 

 generally ; Ampere, whose name has become Anglicized and is 

 invariably used in measuring the currents which produce the 

 electric light. Then Gauss and Weber, who made the first 

 electric telegraph. The telegraph of Gauss and Weber, and the 

 Munich telegraph of Steinheil, and the Steinheil key, which is 

 the manipulating telegraph key of the present day — those were 

 the elements of telegraphy. We justly rejoice that in England 

 so much was made of the work of those grand pioneers in science. 

 In America the race of practical work commenced almost simul- 

 taneously with our own in the splendid telegraph of Morse. In 

 speaking of the telegraph we almost forget time and space, and 

 I must go back to the previous work of Henry, who anticipated 

 in some points sone of the finest discoveries of Faraday, and 

 laid a large part of the theory of current induction, which is at 

 the very root of some of the most splendid realizations of modern 

 electric science, not merely for the electric telegraph, but for 

 electric lighting. By the work of 1857 — a few years before the 

 half of the jubilee — the two brothers, Edward and Charles 

 Bright, and Whitehouse, those three men, with Mr. Cyrus 



Field, reduced to practice that brilliant dream of Cyrus Field to 

 connect England and America by means of submarine tele- 

 graphy. Then there were the brothers Werner and William . 

 Siemens working in the same direction, and the great navigator I 

 Moriarty, who was out in the Agatnemnon in 1857, and navi- 

 gated the Agamemnon in 1868, and was on the Great Eastern as 

 navigator with Sir James Anderson. In 1865 he picked up the 

 cable where it was broken, and in 1866, coming back a year 

 after to the same place, hit upon it just a quarter of a mile away, 

 by his splendid navigational powers. Canning and Clifford 

 were also engaged in the work ; then there were Varley and 

 Jenkin (who was my special partner) with both of whom I 

 worked for many years. I alone am here to speak for the three. 

 Willoughby Smith, who did such fine work in 1865-66 in 

 testing the cable, applying the newest developments of science, 

 many of them his own inventions, to do what had never been 

 done before, to test a submarine cable with the delicacy that 

 was necessary under circumstances so peculiar, so utterly new. 

 I am exceedingly sorry he is not with us this evening. But I 

 can never forget that we scientists alone could not have done 

 what has been done. To two men, I believe, is due the 

 existence of the 1865 cable, and all the consequences that 

 followed from the 1865-66 cable — ^John Pender and Cyrus Field. 

 But I must remember that there are other things besides ocean 

 telegraphs. You have told us how splendidly the land telegraphs 

 are worked ; you have pointed out how admirably under the in- 

 fluence of the Government system, the application of science to 

 telegraphy has been developed. I think you may feel proud, sir, 

 in knowing that under Government management within these last 

 seventeen years the applications of science to telegraphy have not 

 stood still, but, on the contrary, have been pushed forward with 

 every possible energy and with the most marvellous success. You 

 have told us that the rate of working between Dublin and London 

 has reached 462 words per minute, I think we may say 500 words 

 per minute, and that is ten times what it was ten years ago. That 

 is something for a Government department to be proud of, and 

 for a Government I must say there is some little political import- 

 ance in the fact that Dublin can now communicate its requests, 

 its complaints, and its gratitudes, to London at the rate of 500 

 words per minute. It seems to me an ample demonstration of 

 the utter scientific absurdity of any sentimental need for separate 

 Parliaments in Ireland. I should have failed in my duty in 

 speaking for science if I had omitted to point out this, which 

 seems to me a great contribution of science to the political welfare 

 of the world. 



Sir Lyon Playfair, M. P., proposed "The Scientific Societies." 

 The scientific Societies, he pointed out, did not profess invention ; 

 they professed to lay down the laws of science and to advance 

 natural knowledge. Men who had contributed to the advance- 

 ment of natural knowledge, like Oersted and Ampere, were as 

 much discoverers of the electric telegraph as if they had them- 

 selves actually aided in the invention. The duty of the scientific 

 Societies was to cultivate the tree of knowledge. A great inven- 

 tion never came, as Minerva did, panoplied in complete armour 

 from the brain of Jupiter. But even the brain of Jupiter could 

 not produce this wonderful product of evolution until he had 

 swallowed her mother, Metis, while in the first month of gesta- 

 tion. Our great inventors swallowed science, the mother of in- 

 vention, and then produced their progeny, always, however, in 

 a state of infancy. The steam-engine, which had done so much 

 for human progress, has had so many inventors that a Court 

 of law, reviewing the steps of invention, came to a solemn 

 decision that Watt had done nothing for the improvement of 

 the steam-engine. Scientific Societies, looking to the advance- 

 ment of science for its own sake, laid the surest founda- 

 tions for industrial applications. Oersted and Faraday were 

 as true discoverers of the electric telegraph as Wheatstone, 

 Cooke, or Morse. It was not the annihilation of space and 

 time which was the most wonderful result of the telegraph, but 

 it was the profound change which it had produced in our sys- 

 tems of government and of commerce. Who at its introduction 

 would have supposed that the whole system of commerce would 

 have been transformed by it, that capital would have to change 

 the channels of its usefulness, and that the system of exchanges 

 would undergo such profound alterations ? If telegraphy had 

 one lesson which we should lay to heart it was this — that 

 science should be studied for the sake of knowledge, because 

 discoveries in natural knowledge led inevitably to industrial 

 inventions. We should, in regard to all discoveries, however 

 unimportant they seemed, do everything in our power to pro- 



