614 
for enabling the position of a fault on a telegraph line to 
be ascertained electrically by the use of resistance coils. 
In two more years they both left the Electric Telegraph 
Company, and joined other companies which had started 
as rivals of this company and of one another, viz. the 
British Telegraph Company, to which Charles became 
the assistant engineer, and the Magnetic Telegraph 
Company, with which Edward associated himself. 
But it was the ingenuity and energy which the subject 
of this memoir displayed in laying the telegraph wires 
under the streets of Manchester that first brought him 
into prominent notice. In one night the many gangs of 
navvies under his superintendence had the streets up, the 
lower halves of cast iron tubes laid down, gutta-percha 
covered telegraph wires (wrapped into ropes with tarred 
yarn) unwound off drums into this iron channel, the two 
halves of the tubes placed in position, the trench filled 
up, and the pavement laid down before the inhabitants 
were out of their beds in the morning. 
This account reads like that of a cutting-out expedition 
of a young Nelson, or a surprise attack of a youthful 
Wellington, and such an exploit hardly seems possible in 
the case of the County Council scholar of the modern 
day, full, it is true, of facts and knowledge, but who has 
devoted so much attention to learning off what other 
people have thought out, that he has never had time to 
find out what he thinks himself, and the bent of whose 
activity seems to be directed to begging his numerous 
teachers to give him a sheaf of testimonials and to furnish 
him with a post. 
We can also recommend the study of this exploit of 
the nineteen-year old Bright to the notice of the local 
authorities of London from another point of view. In 
entire oblivion apparently of the fact that the traffic in 
our streets is not only as great as it was half a century 
ago, but has become one of the most perplexing diffi- 
culties of the present time, and probably in ignorance 
also of the fact that the developments that have taken 
place during the past ten years in electric lighting have 
supplied facilities for carrying on night work in the 
streets such as were not dreamt of fifty years ago, 
Bumble still lays long lines of pipes under Fleet Street, 
Holborn, and the Strand, on what may be called the 
one man, one boy and a donkey-cart method. And 
further, since it is generally during the height of the 
London season that the streets remain broken up for 
days at a time, we presume that the local authorities are 
labouring under some delusion that the navvy periodically 
spends his autumn away from town—say in Switzerland— 
and is, therefore, only available as an obstructionist 
about the month of May. 
The cable to Ireland having been successfully laid in 
1853, attention began to be turned to connecting Great 
Britain with America. The Atlantic Telegraph Com- 
pany was consequently formed, but without advertise- 
ments or a board of directors, without brokers, com- 
missions, executive officers, promotion money, or even a 
prospectus. What a striking contrast to the present 
philanthropic efforts of the “vendor” to benefit the 
world, and the anxiety of the “scientific expert” to give 
wide publicity to the extraordinary efficiency of every- 
thing that is brought to his notice—professionally. 
NO. 1565, VOL. 60] 
NATURE 
[OcToBER 26, 1899 
Considerable vagueness existed at that period as to 
what the speed of sending messages through a submarine 
cable really depended on; the memoir states that Sir 
Charles Bright advocated the employment of a thick 
copper conductor, weighing 34 cwt: per mile, surrounded 
by a coating of gutta-percha having the same weight, 
but that Faraday, Morse and Whitehouse did not under- 
stand the problem properly, and therefore that they 
opposed Bright’s proposal to use a large conductor for 
the reason that the electric capacity of the cable would 
be thereby made large, and as, therefore, a large amount 
of electricity would be required to charge it at each 
signal the speed would be slow. Lord Kelvin in his 
Royal Society paper pointed out that the retardation 
depended neither on the capacity alone nor on the 
resistance of the conductor alone, but on the product of 
the two ; and so made the whole theory clear—at least 
made it clear to those who were able to appreciate what 
a Fourier series could possibly have to do with telegraph- 
ing to America. 
But economical counsels prevailed, and the copper 
conductor of the actual Atlantic cable weighed only 
107 Ibs. a mile, and the gutta-percha coating 261. 
The account of the laying of the first Atlantic cable is 
stirring, thanks partly to the long extracts from the 
graphic and exciting descriptions which were published 
by Mr. Nicholas Woods in the Zz7zes. Numerous were 
the attempts to lay this cable, and, although they were at 
last crowned with success—in so far that an Atlantic 
cable was completed in August 1858, and several messages 
were actually sent through it—this cable had but a very 
brief life, one of only three short months in fact. 
Numerous arguments are adduced to prove that the 
causes which led to its break-down all arose from one 
reason, viz. that the directors did not take the advice of 
Sir Charles Bright. But, although it is undoubtedly true 
that the subject of the memoir was an exceptionally able, 
enthusiastic and energetic man, the contention that if 
only his advice had been followed the 1858 Atlantic cable 
would have been a permanent success is not quite so 
obvious. 
For example the use of a powerful induction coil to 
work a long cable, which is so properly denounced in the 
body of the book itself, and to which the speedy death of 
the first Atlantic cable was undoubtedly, at any rate in 
part, due, was actually resorted to by Sir Charles in his 
experiments on ten separate lengths of underground wire, 
joined up to make a total length of two thousand miles, 
as described in his remarks at the Institution of Civil 
Engineers in 1857, and quoted in Appendix v. of the book 
under review. And the successful results obtained with 
these induction coils “thirty-six inches in length and 
excited by a powerful Grove battery of fifty pint cells,” 
were advanced as a reason why “he could not see what 
there was to prevent the working, successfully, through a 
direct line of two thousand miles” such as an Atlantic 
cable. 
Again, the folly of the Atlantic Telegraph Company 
in not adopting the larger dimensions which Sir Charles 
Bright desired to give to the first Atlantic cable is not so 
evident, since the 1865 cable, which possessed these 
dimensions, had to be abandoned—broken, after many 
