236 APPLIED SCIENCE 



placed, and have had to administer the affairs of a company 

 heavily involved in a dangerous undertaking, requiring con- 

 tinually large supplies of fresh capital, will be able to guess at 

 the work and anxiety they must have undergone. A pair of 

 baronetcies among them all is really a moderate reward. 



But now that the rewards are distributed, and the cables 

 are laid, how are they being used ? Alas ! very little as yet. 

 Perhaps no one even believes that a long submarine cable ever 

 will be laid, and so preparations are never made to meet it. 

 The Persian Gulf Cable was laid nine months before the land 

 lines were completed which allowed it to transmit messages. 

 Until very lately they were so wretchedly bad, or badly managed, 

 that messages often spent a week in the overland journey, and 

 arrived so much out of condition as to be unrecognisable by 

 their friends. 



The Atlantic Cables end at Heart's Content, Newfoundland, 

 and the journey of the messages often ends there too. It is 

 said that up to the beginning of November, since the line was 

 opened, the lines from Newfoundland to America have been in- 

 terrupted for thirty days, or nearly one-third of the whole time. 

 Through large tracts of desolate country a single wire was 

 expected to do all the work, and no due arrangement for its 

 management seems to have been made. The short submarine 

 line from the island to the mainland, laid in 1856, and eighty- 

 five miles long, was also out of order when the 1866 cables were 

 completed, and so we have hitherto reaped comparative little 

 benefit from those cables, looked on as a commercial speculation. 

 The high price of 201. for a twenty-word message, only recently 

 lowered to 10Z., has been justified by the fact that, if many 

 messages had been obtained from the public, they really could 

 not have been sent. So in practice one or two hours' work per 

 diem has been sufficient to send on one cable all the American 

 and European continents had to say in a hurry. This cannot 

 last, but it is almost amusing as a commentary on the lively dis- 

 putes which occurred on the power of the cables to transmit a 

 large amount of work. In time the outlet from Newfoundland 

 will be completed, and the cables will then surely be flooded to 

 such an extent as to test their utmost capabilities. 



Engineers and electricians, half alarmed at their own auda- 



