TTA tree, was introduced to Europe in 1842
by Dr. Montgomerie, a Scotch surveyor in the service of the East India
Company. Twenty years before he had seen whips made of it in Singapore,
and believed that it would be useful in the fabrication of surgical
apparatus. Faraday and Wheatstone soon discovered its merits as an
insulator, and in 1845 the latter suggested that it should be employed
to cover the wire which it was proposed to lay from Dover to Calais. It
was tried on a wire laid across the Rhine between Deutz and Cologne. In
1849 Mr. C. V. Walker, electrician to the South Eastern Railway Company,
submerged a wire coated with it, or, as it is technically called, a
gutta-percha core, along the coast off Dover.

The following year Mr. John Watkins Brett laid the first line across the
Channel. It was simply a copper wire coated with gutta-percha, without
any other protection. The core was payed out from a reel mounted behind
the funnel of a steam tug, the Goliath, and sunk by means of lead
weights attached to it every sixteenth of a mile. She left Dover about
ten o'clock on the morning of August 28, 1850, with some thirty men on
board and a day's provisions. The route she was to follow was marked by
a line of buoys and flags. By eight o'clock in the evening she arrived
at Cape Grisnez, and came to anchor near the shore. Mr. Brett watched
the operations through a glass at Dover. 'The declining sun,' he says,
'enabled me to discern the moving shadow of the steamer's smoke on the
white cliff; thus indicating her progress. At length the shadow ceased
to move. The vessel had evidently come to an anchor. We gave them
half an hour to convey the end of the wire to shore and attach the
type-printing instrument, and then I sent the first electrical message
across the Channel. This was reserved for Louis Napoleon.' According to
Mr. F. C. Webb, however, the first of the signals were a mere jumble of
letters, which were torn up. He saved a specimen of the slip on which
they were printed, and it was afterwards presented to the Duke of
Wellington.

Next morning this pioneer line was broken down at a point about 200
Yards from Cape Grisnez, and it turned out that a Boulogne fisherman
had raised it on his trawl and cut a piece away, thinking he had found a
rare species of tangle with gold in its heart. This misfortune suggested
the propriety of arming the core against mechanical injury by sheathing
it in a cable of hemp and iron wires