BBC Groundbreakers The Man Who Shrank the World
The story of Belfast-born scientist Lord Kelvin and a group of visionaries, who long before the first telephone call embarked on a quest to join Europe and America, spanning the Atlantic with a single 2,500-mile telegraph cable.
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00:00In the mid-19th century, a handful of visionaries embarked on a quest to change the world forever.
00:14Involving some of the greatest minds of the era, finance on an unimaginable scale, and
00:20radical new breakthroughs in engineering and technology, their goal was to physically link
00:26the two mightiest nations on earth across thousands of miles of ocean.
00:34In a single stroke, they would slash communication times between Britain and America from weeks
00:40to minutes.
00:42Amongst those who made this astonishing feat possible was one of the greatest scientific
00:47minds of his day, an Ulsterman, William Thompson, later known as Lord Kelvin.
00:54This is the story of the man who shrank the world.
00:58This is the story of Kelvin's Cable.
01:17Today we live in an age of communication, where information, images and data are transmitted
01:23in the blink of an eye all around the globe.
01:28Far from being astonished by this capability, we simply take it for granted, each and every
01:34day.
01:36If like me you're old enough to remember life before emails, the internet and instant messages,
01:41it is still hard to imagine that until relatively recently, a message sent overseas could only
01:48travel as fast as it could be physically carried.
01:53Nowhere was this problem more apparent than in mid-1850s Britain, when it came to keeping
01:59in touch with our cousins across the Atlantic in the New World.
02:05For news of America to reach British ears, or vice versa, meant a minimum ten-day journey
02:11by steamship.
02:13Even the most basic dialogue took weeks or months to complete.
02:19But this was about to change, forever.
02:27The Victorian age had already witnessed one revolution, fuelled by the power of steam.
02:35As a direct result, the pace of transport, industry and life in general had begun to
02:40increase rapidly.
02:43It becomes a culture of speed, a marketable commodity, so shrinking the world was part
02:49of the rhetoric of the new age of steam.
02:53The need for communication and a fast means of communication around the world was becoming
02:57ever more evident because you had colonies, you had empires, you had newly forming trade
03:02routes, and information had to be passed at a rate that made it useful.
03:07So it had already been done between Britain and France, and it had been done within countries
03:10using telegraphs.
03:12But to be able to connect Britain and America in that way was so, so important, and that's
03:16really why the Transatlantic Cable Project was such a big deal.
03:20I think all of us know that the world today is almost literally bound up like a Christmas
03:25present by fibre optic cables, many of them around the world.
03:29That all began more than 150 years ago.
03:33With pioneers on both sides of the Atlantic experimenting with the newfangled technology
03:38of the electric telegraph, the American inventor Samuel Morse transmitted his first official
03:43message in 1844 along 38 miles of wire connecting Washington to Baltimore.
03:52Travelling at the unheard of speed of 30 characters a minute, or one every two seconds, Morse's
03:59historic message simply read, What hath God wrought?
04:04At that rather ominous first note, the electric telegraph spread like wildfire, and soon much
04:10of the land mass of the civilised world was crisscrossed with the wires of this wonderful
04:17new invention.
04:19And yet, despite the phenomenal impact the telegraph would have on the world, the technology
04:24behind it was relatively straightforward.
04:29So this is a very simple electrical telegraph circuit, and what we've got here is a source
04:34of electricity, which are these batteries.
04:37We have something that will detect that there's electricity flowing, which are these bulbs.
04:42And then we have a way of switching on and off the electricity, which is this key here.
04:47And this is really a very simple way of using an electrical current to produce a signal.
04:55In this case, these bulbs either being on or off.
04:58And that is really the concept of an electrical telegraph.
05:01These wires could be travelling from one village to another, so you'd be able to do this over
05:07some distance.
05:08However, it's all very well being able to switch bulbs on and off like that, but in
05:12order to send a message, you really need some sort of code.
05:14And that's where Samuel Morse came in.
05:16He developed a code depending on whether the bulbs were on for a long time, or for a short
05:23time.
05:25So he called those dashes and dots.
05:29And sequence of dashes and dots together corresponded to different letters of the alphabet.
05:33So a skilled telegrapher would be able to send messages using these sequences of dashes
05:38and dots, and therefore transmit messages from one place to another.
05:42And that's really the concept of an electrical telegraph.
05:55Electricity, like steam before it, soon began to shrink the world, and the new network of
06:03railway tracks provided an easy path for the telegraph wires to follow.
06:11But while steam had conquered both the land and the sea, once the electric telegraph reached
06:17the coast, it was literally the end of the line.
06:21All news had to continue its journey from there, by ship.
06:26By the mid-1800s, some visionaries had dared to dream of a cable spanning even the Atlantic Ocean.
06:41One such man was Cyrus Field, a successful New York entrepreneur in his early 30s, who
06:47was enjoying retirement, having made an absolute fortune in the paper business.
06:54As he stared at the globe in his study one day, Field traced a line from Newfoundland,
06:59the most easterly point on the North American continent, across thousands of miles of Atlantic
07:04Ocean, until his finger happened across the nearest piece of European soil, which turned
07:10out to be Valencia, a tiny island off the south coast of Ireland.
07:17Field knew nothing of electricity or telegraph technology, but he knew that time is money,
07:23and so, in the bold spirit of the age, he set about recruiting other, equally unqualified
07:29American millionaires to share in his venture.
07:33Collectively, they became known as the Atlantic Cable Projectors, and in 1854, they founded
07:40the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company, with the express purpose of laying
07:46a working telegraph cable across the Atlantic.
07:52For its day, and given Field's complete lack of technical expertise, it was as bold a statement
07:58of ambition as that of President Kennedy a century later, to put a man on the moon.
08:05We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they
08:11are easy, but because they are hard.
08:13We're go, same time, we're go.
08:16Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.
08:23They were reaching beyond the technology that was available, and it's really remarkable
08:28that sometimes you get an idea and you pursue it, and it actually works, sort of, or it
08:34works closely enough so that you can go on, and that's what happened here, because the
08:37technology was barely available to them.
08:40Very ambitious project for sure, a lot of the key physical constraints were really challenging,
08:45you know, you had all the North Atlantic weather to contend with, you had probably a seabed
08:49that really hadn't been charted or mapped at that time, none of these technologies were
08:53available.
08:54So it drove engineering to the limit, but also from an electrical point of view, the
08:59process of sending a signal from one side of the Atlantic to the other was electrically
09:03very challenging.
09:06The success of this Victorian information superhighway would be due in no small part
09:12to the Belfast-born scientist whose name is perhaps a little less well-known than it deserves
09:18to be.
09:23Even here in the city where he was born, people walking past his statue pay him very little
09:28attention, if they even know who he is.
09:31But in the world of science, he's numbered amongst the very greatest of physicists.
09:36Known to history as Lord Kelvin of L'Ars, his given name was William Thompson.
09:44From the very earliest age, young Thompson's path towards academia was influenced by his
09:50father, James Thompson, the son of an Ulster Scots farmer.
09:55Through sheer determination, James had worked his way up to the position of Professor of
10:01Mathematics at Belfast's Royal Academical Institution.
10:05When the death of his wife left him with six children to look after, he also personally
10:11undertook the homeschooling of his eldest sons, including young William.
10:17The leading characteristic of James Thompson Sr. and the children, including William especially,
10:25is that the worst sin in life is waste.
10:29Useful work is the key to their entire lives.
10:34Their life is like an allocation from God, and every minute of that life has to be occupied
10:41not wasting their time, but performing useful work.
10:47Spurred on by this most Presbyterian of work ethics, William's father attained even greater
10:53academic heights in 1832, when he was appointed to the Chair of Mathematics at the University of Glasgow.
11:00Along with his older brother James, William Thompson entered university life here in Glasgow,
11:06the city that was to play such a profound role in his own story.
11:11At the time, he was all of ten years old.
11:17Seemingly in those days it was quite normal for kids with ability to get opportunities
11:22to join universities, so at the age of ten he actually began studying at Glasgow University,
11:27which would seem quite amazing nowadays.
11:29But within two years he was publishing papers and winning prizes already in some of his
11:34investigations and some of his work, so quite quickly he began to show that the investment
11:38and time and effort was paying off.
11:42At 22, the future Lord Kelvin became Professor of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University,
11:48marking the beginning of a half century of scientific achievement.
11:59If you go on the internet and look up, say, Wikipedia, you will find the longest list of
12:03achievements for anybody that I've ever found.
12:06The man was just across so many fields.
12:08Well, Kelvin did a lot of work on energy and particularly the relationship between mechanical
12:13energy and heat energy, and that was pioneering stuff.
12:17And he and his colleagues created a new branch of physics called thermodynamics.
12:22In fact, he coined the phrase thermodynamics.
12:26Kelvin, the unit of temperature, is named after him.
12:29He arrived at the concept of having an absolute zero of temperature.
12:33But he was also a very good applied scientist. He was essentially an inventor.
12:37The Mariner's compass, as reinvented really by Kelvin in his own time, was a very famous
12:44artefact of the 19th century and even into the 20th century.
12:48Secondly, his work focused on electricity and magnetism, and that of course links in
12:53with the telegraphic industry very much.
12:56Naturally, this expertise brought him to the attention of Cyrus Field, and so it was that
13:02in 1857, Thomson was invited to join the Atlantic Cable Company's growing list of directors.
13:09To look after the technical side of things, however, Field engaged the services of the
13:14fantastically named Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse as the project's chief electrician.
13:21Almost immediately, the two experts began to clash over their fiercely opposing scientific views.
13:30Innocently enough, all Thomson had done initially was to publish a few scientific theories about
13:36how electricity behaves in long-distance submerged cables, and how those cables might be specifically
13:43designed for that purpose.
13:45Whitehouse, who was mostly self-taught through experiments, took that as a personal slight
13:51and launched a series of public counterattacks.
13:54Of course, it's just possible that Whitehouse was feeling a little defensive, given that
13:59he had trained not as a scientist, but as a surgeon.
14:04Whitehouse and Thomson disagreed on how the cable should be designed, so there were experiments
14:11that had been done by Whitehouse, but they were using fairly short lengths of cable and
14:16done in the lab, and to try and extrapolate that to the problem of the transatlantic cable run,
14:21the 2,500 mile run, was something that Whitehouse didn't really have the ability to do, whereas
14:29Thomson's mathematical background in analysing the problem from that standpoint was a much
14:35more effective and reliable way.
14:37The essence of this disagreement centred on how the cable should cope with an electrical
14:42phenomenon known as retardation.
14:45So what we've got here is a set-up that illustrates the problem that telegraphers had when the
14:50cables became very, very long.
14:53This device here is going to produce effectively the same thing as I would do if I tapped the
14:58Morse key very, very quickly.
15:01And we've got two cables here.
15:03We've got a fairly short black cable, and then we've got a much longer blue cable wound
15:08into a drum, in fact.
15:10And what you can see here is that the short black cable produces very nice, clean on-off
15:18signals.
15:19But when we plug the blue cable in, which is in this case 40 metres long, you can see
15:26two things happen.
15:27First of all, the signal becomes smeared out, and it's not actually as large a signal.
15:33So it's attenuated.
15:35And the problem that the long-distance telegraphers had was the transatlantic cable wasn't 40
15:41metres long, it was 4,000 kilometres long.
15:45So these problems became 100,000 times worse.
15:49But with public interest and financial pressure mounting, the company ignored Thomson's theoretical
15:55reservations and pressed ahead with Whitehouse's cheaper, thinner, and ultimately inferior
16:02design.
16:05So I have here a sample of the original transatlantic cable.
16:09This cable is barely wider than the width of my thumb, so you can really see the engineering
16:13challenge that this posed.
16:15Now, this cable was based on Whitehouse's original design, and there were a couple of
16:20features of this that Thomson had reservations on.
16:23One of them was the smallness of the core here, because that made it very difficult
16:27to send a signal all the way through the cable and be detected at the other end.
16:31The other was around the basic integrity of the copper, because the purer the copper was,
16:35the easier the electrical signal would travel through it.
16:39Even Whitehouse's cheaper design still cost £225,000 to manufacture, equivalent
16:47to almost £16 million today.
16:50And at more than a tonne per mile, the full cable weighed over 2,500 tonnes.
16:57No ship in existence could carry such a load, but the solution was simple.
17:02They used two.
17:05The British HMS Agamemnon and the American USS Niagara would each carry one half of the
17:11mass of cable.
17:13It still took 30 men three weeks to load each ship.
17:17But in August 1857, off the southern tip of Ireland, the two ships anchored side by side
17:24and the separate halves were joined and tested.
17:29As the signal flowed successfully through the 2,500 miles of cable,
17:34everyone involved must have breathed a huge sigh of relief.
17:40One end was brought ashore on Valencia Island and the two ships began their expedition
17:45to Newfoundland with the cable paying out from behind the Niagara.
17:50Among those on board were Cyrus Field, Samuel Morse and our own William Thompson.
17:59Now you could be forgiven for thinking it was just a simple matter of spooling out the cable
18:04as they went, but as they were soon to discover, there's a little more to it than that.
18:09As the cable pays out from the back of the ship, two forces tug on it, creating tension.
18:15First there's the pull of the water on the cable from the forward motion of the ship.
18:20Then there's the physical weight of the actual cable itself.
18:25It starts out easily enough in the shallow waters near the coast,
18:29but as the sea becomes deeper, those forces increase rapidly, pulling on the cable.
18:37To counter that, they had a braking mechanism of course,
18:40but applying this created even more tension in the cable.
18:45And with the ocean floor of the Atlantic as much as two and a half miles below,
18:50it wasn't long before the inevitable happened.
18:53Suddenly, four hundred miles out to sea, the cable snapped
18:58and was lost forever in the depths of the Atlantic.
19:04There was no way to retrieve the lost cable, but despite the cost,
19:08the intrepid projectors simply manufactured more and tried again.
19:14The first attempt at spinning the Atlantic had been very much based on
19:17a play out the cable from one side and head straight across.
19:20That was unfortunately a failure, and then they adopted a new approach
19:24to join the two ships in the middle, splice the cable,
19:27and then play out the cable as both of them moved to their respective shores.
19:32Their efforts were hampered by storms, passing icebergs and even inquisitive whales.
19:39But on the 5th of August, 1858, exactly a year after the first attempt,
19:44the cable from the Agamemnon came ashore at Valencia,
19:48stretching all the way back to the Niagara at Newfoundland.
19:53As the messages began to flow, there was a flurry of excitement on both sides of the Atlantic.
19:58With firework displays and a 100-gun salute in New York,
20:02Queen Victoria telegraphed her congratulations to the US President,
20:07James Buchanan, himself a man of Ulster Scots heritage.
20:13But the celebrations were to be short-lived.
20:17Over a course of days, the rate of signalling declined,
20:22so the health of the cable was not good.
20:25Queen Victoria's message was getting there at the rate of 0.1 words per minute,
20:30so her original message of congratulations to the US took 16 hours to cross,
20:34so it was by no means anywhere within the current thinking
20:37of what suite of light communication is.
20:39They didn't have the instruments yet to receive these very feeble messages,
20:45the signals that came across.
20:47Indeed, they didn't understand what was happening in the cable to the signal.
20:53So the tiny signals coming out of the end of the transatlantic cable
20:57really tested Thomson's inventiveness to the limit.
21:00He came up with solutions to detect those tiny signals,
21:04and one of them, the mirror galvanometer, we have a display version of here.
21:08And basically what this does is it detects very small amounts of electricity,
21:13just enough to move the needle of that meter.
21:16Now, you could make that needle much bigger,
21:19but that would make it much more difficult mechanically to move.
21:22Thomson's inventive step was to shine a beam of light
21:26off a little mirror attached to the base of the needle and project that on a wall.
21:30So by doing that, you would see a much bigger effect for a small signal.
21:37Now in a state of near panic, however,
21:40Lucas rejected Thomson's elegant solution
21:43and opted for something altogether more brutal.
21:48He started to use devices like these.
21:50This is an induction coil which produces thousands of volts.
21:54And he used induction coils like this to increase the signal going into the cable.
21:59But the problem with doing that was that these devices are so powerful...
22:05Actually, what he was doing, without realising it perhaps,
22:09was burning away the insulation of the cable itself.
22:14Inevitably, just weeks after the first message was sent,
22:18the cable spoke no more.
22:21This was a crushing blow to everyone involved in the Atlantic Cable Project,
22:26but for Whitehouse in particular, it was an instant career killer.
22:30With his reputation in shreds, he was ignominiously dumped as the chief electrician.
22:36And even worse, he was soon replaced by his arch-rival,
22:40the now exonerated William Thomson.
22:45And then they had to begin thinking, so where do we go from here?
22:48And how do we sort of build on the back list?
22:50But it was going to take a period of some eight years
22:54before they would be able to ultimately have a successful retry
22:58at bridging the Atlantic.
23:01It's amazing that they got as far as they did.
23:04And what's even more amazing is that having failed in 1858,
23:08that they were able to come back and say,
23:10well, all right, we dumped a lot of money into the Atlantic,
23:14but we can now raise some more money and we can go back and do it again.
23:17And they did.
23:19With the silence of the previous failures still ringing in investors' ears,
23:24Field sold his interest in the paper trade
23:26and put his remaining finances and efforts into the Atlantic Cable.
23:31Even so, the whole project could still have been abandoned
23:35had it not been for the advent of another colossal achievement of the Victorian age.
23:45Built by engineering genius Isambard Kingdom Brunel,
23:50the 22,500-tonne Great Eastern was quite simply the world's largest ship by far
23:58and would remain so for almost half a century.
24:03If you were to stand it upright on its stern,
24:06the Great Eastern would have been 70 storeys high.
24:10That's three times the length of this elegant vessel behind me.
24:14It was so massive that its construction actually drove up the global price of iron.
24:20And it was such an immense undertaking and took such a toll on Brunel's health
24:25that shortly before its maiden voyage, at the age of 51, he collapsed and died.
24:33Just before his untimely demise, however,
24:36the great engineer had given Cyrus Field a tour of the enormous vessel,
24:40telling him,
24:41''Here is the ship to lay your cable.''
24:44All that was needed now was a cable as mighty as the Great Eastern itself.
24:51So by comparison, this is actually a sample of the cable that Thomson designed
24:56for the later cable-laying expeditions.
24:58And this is much better in various ways.
25:00It's got much more armoury, so it's more robust.
25:03It was easier to lay without breaking it.
25:05But it also has a much thicker core,
25:07which lets the electricity flow through it much more easily.
25:10It's got more insulation.
25:12So overall, this was the cable that would lead to the success of the project.
25:20The now mainly British-funded project had a purpose-built cable,
25:24the largest ship on Earth,
25:26and a new wave of optimism and expertise behind it.
25:30Surely this time, the Atlantic would be conquered at last.
25:37I would love to tell you this new, improved venture was a complete success.
25:42But alas, no.
25:44This time, they got almost all the way.
25:46But once again, the cable snapped.
25:49It took another 12 months and another 2,500 miles of shiny new cable.
25:56But in July 1866, after a departure that failed on Friday the 13th,
26:02their luck and the cable finally held.
26:08Almost a decade after her previous message to the US President,
26:12Queen Victoria sent another, this time to Andrew Johnston,
26:16who coincidentally was also of Ulster Scots heritage,
26:20but the Ulsterman who would receive the lion's share of national recognition
26:24and royal reward was William Thompson.
26:28The success of the 1866 cable
26:32meant a big elevation in status, in social status, for William Thompson.
26:38Queen Victoria knighted him for all his efforts
26:41and subsequently he became the first British scientist
26:43to be elevated to the House of Lords as well.
26:45So he'd come a long way from the origins in Belfast
26:51and it was clearly linked to a project which took on national importance.
26:56Hailed by the Times as the most wonderful achievement of this victorious century,
27:02Kelvin's cable signalled the arrival of a communications revolution.
27:07A full 10 years before Alexander Graham Bell made the very first phone call,
27:12information could now flow freely and almost instantaneously
27:17between the two mightiest nations on earth.
27:21It was really important, especially to commerce.
27:24It connected the markets in New York and Chicago
27:27with those in Liverpool and Paris and so forth.
27:30Prices of raw materials, particularly cotton prices,
27:34both in the United States and also in India, were communicated by cable.
27:40Within another six, seven years,
27:43all of the major countries of the world were joined by these cables.
27:49Countries as far apart as Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand,
27:55even across the Pacific by the 1890s.
27:59There's a complete chain of developments right across the world
28:02from those early scientific days.
28:04You had the land telegraph, you had the submarine cable,
28:07you had radio and TV, the second generation of information,
28:10and now you have the digital information revolution that's happening.
28:14We have the internet, we have all sorts of ways of sending messages
28:17to one another almost instantaneously.
28:19But that's part of a story, and I think Kelvin's contribution
28:23at the beginning of that story was pretty pioneering and pretty fundamental.
28:27So, you know, we shouldn't forget that.
28:34Next tonight on BBC Four,
28:36two teams that floundered in the first round get another chance to advance.
28:39Victoria Corrin-Mitchell adjudicates the fight for survival in Only Connect next,
28:43then at nine, a body in a quarry lake raises some unsettling questions
28:47for DCI Matthias in Hinterland.
28:49Stay with us.