lly lay an experimental cable. We
have already heard of his experiments in New York Harbor in 1842. His
insulation was tarred hemp and India rubber. Wheatstone performed a
similar experiment in the Bay of Swansea a few months later.

Perhaps the first practical submarine cable was laid by Ezra Cornell,
one of Morse's associates, in 1845. He laid twelve miles of cable in
the Hudson River, connecting Fort Lee with New York City. The cable
consisted of two cotton-covered wires inclosed in rubber, and the
whole incased in a lead pipe. This cable was in use for several months
until it was carried away by the ice in the winter of 1846.

These early experimenters found the greatest difficulty in incasing
their wires in rubber, practical methods of working that substance
being then unknown. The discovery of gutta-percha by a Scotch surveyor
of the East India Company in 1842, and the invention of a machine for
applying it to a wire, by Dr. Werner Siemens, proved a great aid
to the cable-makers. These gutta-percha-covered wires were used for
underground telegraphy both in England and on the Continent. Tests
were made with such a cable for submarine work off Dover in 1849, and,
proving successful, the first cable across the English Channel was
laid the next year by John Watkins Brett. The cable was weighted
with pieces of lead fastened on every hundred yards. A few incoherent
signals were exchanged and the communication ceased. A Boulogne
fisherman had caught the new cable in his trawl, and, raising it, had
cut a section away. This he had borne to port as a great treasure,
believing the copper to be gold in some new form of deposit. This
experience taught the need of greater protection for a cable, and the
next year another was laid across the Channel, which was protected by
hemp and wire wrappings. This proved successful. In 1852 England
and Ireland were joined by cable, and the next year a cable was laid
across the North Sea to Holland. The success of these short cables
might have promised success in an attempt to cross the Atlantic had
not failures in the deep water of the Mediterranean made it seem an
impossibility.

We have noted that Morse suggested the possibility of uniting Europe
and America by cable. The same thought had occurred to others, but the
undertaking was so vast and the problems so little understood that for
many years none were bold enough to undertake the project. A telegraph
from New York to St. John's, N