THE SIMPLE IDEA OF AN ATLANTIC CABLE 35 
wires, insulated with rubber and enclosed in a lead pipe. It 
worked well for a few months until broken by the ice. Also a 
gutta-percha-covered wire across the Connecticut river at 
Middletown had operated successfully. 
When Field was in England, the British already had tele- 
graph cables operating under the English channel to the Con- 
tinent, and between Scotland and Ireland. John W Brett, al- 
ready named, was prominent in this work; he and his brother 
had suggested a cable to America several years previously. 
Other attempts to lay short cables were being made in several 
parts of Europe, some successful, others not. ‘The deep waters 
of the Mediterranean proved difficult to contend with, espe- 
cially steep declivities and deep ravines; and the strong tides 
and rough bottom around Ireland had given trouble. The 
first proposals for a cable across the Atlantic were met in 
England by skepticism and ridicule. The obstacles were 
thought to be overwhelming. The British were not, in gen- 
eral, inclined to be any too hospitable to Yankee promoters 
arriving in London with fantastic schemes requiring capital; 
they could sneer very effectively at such attempts. A few of 
them, however, recalled the successful operation of a 400-mile 
telegraph under the Black Sea during the Crimean War; this 
was a single wire, insulated only by gutta-percha—the whole 
no thicker than a lead pencil. 
Besides Brett, another British proponent of an Atlantic 
cable was Professor William Thomson of the University of 
Glasgow, afterward Lord Kelvin. Even before Field appeared 
in England in 1855, Thomson had written to the Royal So- 
ciety in London expressing support for an Atlantic telegraph 
and suggesting means of calculating the effect of electricity in 
a cable. Later Thomson was to act as technical adviser in the 
arduous work of laying the first deep-sea cable. His name will 
always be associated with that achievement, although, of 
course, it was only one of many activities that marked his 
long career as an outstanding leader in nineteenth-century 
