The Man Who Shrank The World Groundbreakers

In the mid-19th century, a handful of visionaries

embarked on a quest to change the world for ever.

Involving some of the greatest minds of the era,

financed on an unimaginable scale

and radical new breakthroughs in engineering and technology,

the goal was to physically link

the two mightiest nations on Earth across thousands of miles of ocean.

In a single stroke, they would slash communication times

between Britain and America from weeks to minutes.

Amongst those who made this astonishing feat possible

was one of the greatest scientific minds of his day,

an Ulsterman, William Thompson, later known as Lord Kelvin.

This is the story of the man who shrank the world.

This is the story of Kelvin's cable.

Today we live in an age of communication,

where information, images and data

are transmitted in the blink of an eye all around the globe.

Far from being astonished by this capability,

we simply take it for granted, each and every day.

If, like me, you're old enough to remember life before e-mails,

the internet and instant messages,

it is still hard to imagine that until relatively recently,

a message sent overseas

could only travel as fast as it could be physically carried.

Nowhere was this problem more apparent

than in mid-1850s Britain,

when it came to keeping in touch with our cousins across the Atlantic

in the New World.

For news of America to reach British ears or vice versa

meant a minimum ten-day journey by steamship.

Even the most basic dialogue took weeks, or months to complete.

But this was about to change for ever.

The Victorian age had already witnessed one revolution,

fuelled by the power of steam.

BEEPING

As a direct result, the pace of transport,

industry and life in general had begun to increase rapidly.

It becomes a culture of speed, a marketable commodity.

So shrinking the world was part of the rhetoric of the new age of steam.

The need for communication and a fast

means of communication around the world is becoming

ever more evident, because you had colonies, you had empires,

you had newly-forming trade routes

and information had to be passed at a rate that made it useful.

So it had already been done between Britain and France,

and it had been done within countries using telegraphs,

but to be able to connect Britain and America in that way

was so, so important and that's really why the transatlantic cable project was such a big deal.

I think all of us know that the world today is almost literally

bound up like a Christmas present by fibre-optic cables,

many of them around the world.

That all began more than 150 years ago.

With pioneers on both sides of the Atlantic experimenting with

the newfangled technology of the electric telegraph,

the American inventor Samuel Morse

transmitted his first official message in 1844,

along 38 miles of wire, connecting Washington to Baltimore.

Travelling at the unheard-of speed of 30 characters a minute,

or one every two seconds, Morse's historic message simply read,

"What hath God wrought?"

Despite that rather ominous first note,

the electric telegraph spread like wildfire

and soon much of the landmass of the civilised world

was crisscrossed with the wires of this wonderful new invention.

And yet, despite the phenomenal impact the telegraph would have on the world,

the technology behind it was relatively straightforward.

So, this is a very simple electrical telegraph circuit.

And what we've got here is a source of electricity,

which are these batteries.

We have something that will detect there's electricity flowing,

which are these bulbs and then we have a way

of switching on and off the electricity, which is this key here.

And this is really a very simple way of using an electrical current

to produce a signal.

In this case, these bulbs either being on or off.

And that's really the concept of an electrical telegraph.

These wires could be travelling from one village to another,

so you're able to do this over some distance.

However, it's all very well being able to switch bulbs on and off like that.

In order to send a message, you really need some sort of code.

And that's where Samuel Morse came in.

He developed a code depending on whether the bulbs

were on for a long time...

..or for a short time.

So he called those dashes and dots.

And a sequence of dashes and dots together

corresponded to different letters of the alphabet.

So, a skilled telegrapher would be able to send messages

using these sequences of dashes and dots

and therefore transmit messages from one place to another.

And that's really the concept of an electrical telegraph.

Electricity, like steam before it,

soon began to shrink the world,

and the new network of railway tracks provided an easy

path for the telegraph wires to follow.

But while steam had conquered both the land and the sea,

once the electric telegraph reached the coast,

it was literally the end of the line.

All news had to continue its journey from there by ship.

By the mid-1800s

some visionaries had dared to dream of a cable spanning

even the Atlantic Ocean.

One such man was Cyrus Field,

a successful New York entrepreneur in his early 30s,

who was enjoying retirement, having made an absolute fortune

in the paper business.

As he stared at the globe in his study one day,

Field traced a line from Newfoundland,

the most easterly point on the North American continent,

across thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean

until his finger happened across

the nearest piece of European soil,

which turned out to be Valentia,

a tiny island off the south coast of Ireland.

Fields knew nothing of electricity or telegraph technology

but he knew that time is money

and so, in the bold spirit of the age,

he set about recruiting other equally unqualified

American millionaires to share in his venture.

Collectively they became known as the Atlantic Cable Projectors

and in 1854 they founded the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company

with the express purpose of laying a working telegraph cable

across the Atlantic.

For its day, and given Fields' complete lack

of technical expertise,

it was as bold a statement of ambition

as that of President Kennedy a century later

to put a man on the moon.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY: We choose to go to the moon in this decade

and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard.

MISSION CONTROL: We're go.

NEIL ARMSTRONG: Tranquility Base Here. The Eagle has landed.

They were reaching beyond the technology that was available

and it's really remarkable that

sometimes you get an idea and you pursue it

and it actually works, sort of,

or works closely enough so that you can go on,

and that's what happened here, because the technology was barely available to them.

A very ambitious project for sure,

because a lot of the key physical constraints were really challenging.

You had all the North Atlantic weather to contend with,

a sea bed that hadn't been properly charted or mapped at that time -

none of these technologies were available.

So it drove engineering to the limit

but also, from an electrical point of view,

the process of sending a signal from one side of the Atlantic to the other

was electrically very challenging.

The success of this Victorian information super-highway

would be due in no small part

to the Belfast-born scientist

whose name is perhaps a little less well-known

then it deserves to be.

Even here in the city where he was born,

people walking past his statue pay him very little attention,

if they even know who he is.

But in the world of science,

he's numbered amongst the very greatest of physicists.

Known to history as Lord Kelvin of Largs,

his given name was William Thomson.

From the very earliest age, young Thomson's path towards academia

was influenced by his father, James Thomson,

the son of an Ulster-Scots farmer.

Through sheer determination,

James had worked his way up to the position of

Professor of Mathematics at Belfast's

Royal Academical Institution.

When the death of his wife left him with six children to look after,

he also personally undertook the home-schooling

of his eldest sons, including young William.

The leading characteristic of James Thomson Senior

and the children, including William, especially,

is that the worst sin in life is waste.

Useful work is the key to their entire lives.

Their life is like an allocation from God

and every minute of that life has to be occupied

not wasting their time but performing useful work.

Spurred on by this most Presbyterian of work ethics,

William's father attained even greater academic heights

in 1832 when he was appointed to the Chair of Mathematics

at the University of Glasgow.

Along with his older brother, James,

William Thomson entered university life here in Glasgow,

the city that was to play such a profound role

in his own story. At the time, he was all of ten years old

Seemingly in those days it was quite normal for kids

with ability to get opportunities to join university.

So at the age of ten

he began studying at Glasgow University, which would seem quite amazing nowadays.

But within two years he was publishing papers

and winning prizes already

in some of his investigations and some of his work,

so quite quickly he began to show that the investment in time

and effort was paying off.

At 22, the future Lord Kelvin became Professor of Natural Philosophy

at Glasgow University,

marking the beginning of a half-century of scientific achievement.

If you go on the internet and look at Wikipedia,

you will find the longest list of achievements for anybody

that I've ever found.

The man was just across so many fields.

Kelvin did a lot of work on energy

and particularly the relationship between mechanical energy and heat energy

and that was pioneering stuff.

And he and his colleagues created

a new branch of physics called thermodynamics.

In fact he coined the phrase thermodynamics.

Kelvin, the unit of temperature, is named after him.

He arrived at the concept of having an absolute zero of temperature.

But he was also a very good applied scientist,

he was essentially an inventor.

The mariner's compass, as reinvented, really, by Kelvin

in his own time, was a very famous artefact

of the 19th century and even into the 20th century.

Secondly, his work focused on electricity and magnetism and that links in

with the telegraphic industry very much.

Naturally this expertise brought him to the attention

of Cyrus Field and so it was that in 1857

Thomson was invited to join the Atlantic Cable Company's growing list of directors.

To look after the technical side of things, however,

Field engaged the services of the fantastically named

Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse as the project's chief electrician.

Almost immediately, the two experts began to clash

over their fiercely opposing scientific views.

Innocently enough, all Thomson had done initially

was to publish a few scientific theories

about how electricity behaves in long-distance submerged cables

and how those cables might be specifically designed for that purpose.

Whitehouse, who was mostly self-taught through experiments,

took that as a personal sleight,

and launched a series of personal attacks.

Of course it's just possible that Whitehouse

was feeling a little defensive, given that he had trained

not as a scientist but as a surgeon.

Whitehouse and Thomson disagreed on how the cables should be designed.

There were experiments that had been done by Whitehouse

but they were using fairly short lengths of cable

and done in the lab.

To try and extrapolate that to the problem of the transatlantic

cable run, the 2,500-mile run,

was something that Whitehouse didn't really have the ability to do

whereas Thomson's mathematical background

and analysing the problem from that standpoint

was a much more effective and reliable way.

The essence of this disagreement

centred on how the cable should cope with an electrical phenomenon

known as retardation.

What we've got here is a set-up that illustrates

the problem that telegraphers had

when the cables became very, very long.

This device is going to produce

effectively the same thing as I would do if I tapped

the Morse key very, very quickly.

We've got two cables here.

We've got a fairly short black cable

and a much longer blue cable, wound into a drum, in fact.

What you can see here is that

the short black cable produces very nice, clean on-off signals

but when we plug the blue cable in,

which is in this case 40 metres long,

you can see two things happen.

First of all, the signal becomes smeared out,

and it's not actually as large a signal.

It's attenuated.

The problem that the long-distance telegraphers had

was the transatlantic cable

wasn't 40 metres long, it was 4,000 kilometres long,

so these problems became 100,000 times worse.

But with public interest and financial pressure mounting,

the company ignored Thomson's theoretical reservations

and pressed ahead with Whitehouse's cheaper, thinner,

and ultimately inferior, design.

We have here a sample of the original transatlantic cable.

This cable is barely wider than the width of my thumb,

so you can really see the engineering challenge this posed.

This cable was based on Whitehouse's original design

and there are couple of features

of this that Thomson had reservations on.

One of them was the smallness of the core here,

because that made it very difficult to send a signal all the way

through the cable and be detected at the other end.

The other was around the basic integrity of the copper,

because the purer the copper was, the easier the electrical signal would travel through it.

Even Whitehouse's cheaper design

still cost £225,000 to manufacture,

equivalent to almost £16 million today.

And at more than a tonne per mile,

the full cable weighed over 2,500 tonnes.

No ship in existence could carry such a load

but the solution was simple - they used two.

The British HMS Agamemnon

and the American USS Niagara

would each carry one half of the massive cable.

It still took 30 men three weeks to load each ship.

But in August 1857, off the southern tip of Ireland,

the two ships anchored side-by-side

and the separate halves were joined and tested.

As the signal flowed successfully through the 2,500 miles of cable,

everyone involved must have breathed a huge sigh of relief.

One end was brought ashore on Valentia Island

and the two ships began their expedition to Newfoundland

with that cable paying out from behind the Niagara.

Among those on board were Cyrus Field,

Samuel Morse and our own William Thomson.

You could be forgiven for thinking it was just

a simple matter of spooling out the cable as they went,

but as they were soon to discover, there's a little more to it than that.

As the cable pays out from the back of the ship,

two forces tug on it, creating tension.

First, there's the pull of the water on the cable

from the forward motion of the ship,

then there's the physical weight of the cable itself.

It starts out easily enough

in the shallow waters near the coast

but as the sea becomes deeper,

those forces increase rapidly, pulling on the cable.

To counter that, they had a breaking mechanism, of course,

but applying this created even more tension in the cable.

With the ocean floor of the Atlantic as much as 2½ miles below,

it wasn't long before the inevitable happened.

Suddenly, 400 miles out to sea,

the cable snapped and was lost for ever

in the depths of the Atlantic.

There was no way to retrieve the lost cable

but despite the cost, the intrepid Projectors

simply manufactured more and tried again.

The first attempt at spanning the Atlantic

had been based on a play out the cable from one side and head straight across.

That was unfortunately a failure and then they adopted

a new approach - to join the two ships in the middle,

splice the cable and then play out the cable

as both of them moved to their respective shores.

Their efforts were hampered by storms,

passing icebergs and even inquisitive whales.

But on the 5th of August, 1858,

exactly a year after the first attempt,

the cable from the Agamemnon came ashore at Valentia,

stretching all the way back to the Niagara

at Newfoundland.

As the messages began to flow,

there was a flurry of excitement on both sides of the Atlantic

with firework displays and a 100-gun salute in New York.

Queen Victoria telegraphed her congratulations

to the US President, James Buchanan,

himself a man of Ulster-Scots heritage.

But the celebrations were to be short-lived.

Over a course of days, the rate of signalling declined,

so the health of the cable was not good.

Queen Victoria's message was getting there at the rate of 0.1 words per minute,

so her original message of congratulations to the US took 16 hours to cross.

So it was by no means anywhere within the current thinking of what

speed-of-light communication is.

They didn't have the instruments yet to receive these very feeble

messages, the signals that came across.

Indeed, they didn't understand

what was happening in the cable to the signal.

So the tiny signals coming out of the end of the transatlantic cable

really tested Thomson's inventiveness to the limit.

He came up with solutions to detect those tiny signals

and one of them, the mirror galvanometer,

we have a display version of here.

What this does is detect

very small amounts of electricity,

just enough to move the needle of that meter.

You could make that needle much bigger,

but that would make it much more difficult mechanically to move.

Thomson's inventive step

was to shine a beam of light off a little mirror attached

to the base of the needle and project that on a wall.

By doing that, you would see a much bigger effect

for a small signal.

Now in a state of near-panic, however,

Whitehouse rejected Thomson's elegant solution

and opted for something altogether more brutal.

He started to use devices like these.

This is an induction coil which produces thousands of volts

and he used induction coils like this to increase the signal

going into the cable.

But the problem with doing that was

that these devices are so powerful...

ELECTRICITY CRACKLES

..actually what he was doing, without realising it, perhaps,

was burning away the insulation of the cable itself.

Inevitably, just weeks after the first message was sent,

the cable spoke no more.

This was a crushing blow to everyone involved

in the Atlantic cable project,

but for Whitehouse in particular it was an instant career killer.

With his reputation in shreds, he was ignominiously dumped

as the Chief Electrician.

And, even worse,

he was soon replaced by his arch rival,

the now-exonerated William Thomson.

Then they had to begin thinking, "Where do we go from here?"

"How do we build on the back of this?"

It would take a period of some eight years

before they would be able to ultimately have a successful retry

at bridging the Atlantic.

It's amazing they got as far as they did

and what's even more amazing is that, having failed in 1858,

they were able to come back and say,

"All right, we dumped a lot of money into the Atlantic,

"but we can now raise some more money

"and go back and do it again," and they did.

With the silence of the previous failures still ringing

in investors' ears,

Field sold his interest in the paper trade

and put his remaining finances and efforts

into the Atlantic cable.

Even so, the whole project could still have been abandoned

had it not been for the advent of another

colossal achievement of the Victorian age.

Built by engineering genius Isambard Kingdom Brunel,

the 22,500-ton Great Eastern

was quite simply the world's largest ship by far

and would remain so for almost half a century.

If you were to stand it upright on its stern,

the Great Eastern would have been 70 storeys high.

That's three times the length of this elegant vessel behind me.

It was so massive that its construction actually drove up

the global price of iron.

It was such an immense undertaking

and took such a toll on Brunel's health

that shortly before its maiden voyage, at the age of 51,

he collapsed and died.

Just before his untimely demise, however,

the great engineer had given Cyrus Field

a tour of the enormous vessel,

telling him, "Here is the ship to lay your cable."

All that was needed now was a cable as mighty

as the Great Eastern itself.

So, by comparison,

this is a sample of the cable Thomson designed

for the later cable-laying expeditions.

This is much better in various ways.

It has much more armoury, so it's more robust.

It was easier to lay without breaking it,

but it also has a much thicker core

which lets the electricity flow through it much more easily.

It has more insulation,

so, overall, this was the cable that would lead to the success of the project.

The now mainly British-funded project

had a purpose-built cable,

the largest ship on Earth

and a new wave of optimism and expertise behind it.

Surely this time

the Atlantic would be conquered at last.

I would love to tell you this new, improved venture

was a complete success, but, alas, no.

This time they got almost all the way,

but once again, the cable snapped.

It took another 12 months and another 2,500 miles

of shiny new cable,

but in July, 1866,

after a departure that fell on Friday the 13th,

their luck, and the cable, finally held.

Almost a decade after her previous message to the US president,

Queen Victoria sent another, this time to Andrew Johnson,

who, coincidentally, was also of Ulster-Scots heritage,

but the Ulsterman who would receive the lion's share

of national recognition and royal reward was William Thomson.

The success of the 1866 cable

meant a big elevation in status,

in social status, for William Thomson.

Queen Victoria knighted him for all his efforts

and subsequently he became the first British scientist

to be elevated to the House of Lords.

He'd come a long way from the origins in Belfast

and it was clearly linked to a project

which took on national importance.

Hailed by The Times as, "the most wonderful achievement

"of this victorious century",

Kelvin's cable signalled the arrival of a communications revolution.

A full ten years before Alexander Graham Bell

made the very first phone call,

information could now flow freely

and almost instantaneously

between the two mightiest nations on Earth.

It was really important, especially to commerce.

It connected the markets

in New York and Chicago

with those in Liverpool and Paris and so forth.

Prices of raw materials, particularly cotton prices,

both in the United States and also in India,

were communicated by cable.

Within another six or seven years,

all of the major countries of the world were joined by these cables.

Countries as far apart as Malaya, Singapore,

Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand,

even across the Pacific by the 1890s.

There's a complete chain of developments

right across the world from those early scientific days.

You had the land telegraph, the submarine cable,

radio and TV, the second generation of information,

and now you have the digital information revolution.

We have the internet, we have all sorts of ways

of sending messages to one another almost instantaneously.

But that's part of a story,

and I think Kelvin's contribution at the beginning of that story

was pretty pioneering and pretty fundamental,

so we shouldn't forget that.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd