reasons: the one was, that Lionel possessed nothing to pay them with; the other, that he, John, never liked to be hard.
So the doctor had to content himself with a very trifling loan, compared with the sum he had fondly anticipated. He dropped some obscure hints that the evidence he could give, if he chose, with reference to the codicil, or rather what he knew to have been Mr. Verner’s intentions, might go far to deprive his nephew John of the estate. But his nephew only laughed at him, and could not by any manner of means be induced to treat the hints as serious. A will was a will, he said, and Verner’s Pride was indisputably his.
Altogether, taking one thing with another, Dr. West’s visit to Deerham had not been quite so satisfactory as he had anticipated it might be made. After quitting John Massingbird, he went to Deerham Court and remained a few hours with Sibylla. The rest of the day he divided between his daughters in their sitting-room, and Jan in the surgery, taking his departure again from Deerham by the night train.
And Deborah and Amilly, drowned in tears, said his visit could be compared only to the flash of a comet’s tail: no sooner seen than gone again.
THE ATLANTIC TELEGRAPH.
Every now and then people ask what has become of the Atlantic Telegraph. The City man, passing by Old Broad Street, still sees the office of the company, and hears that a staff is still maintained there; that there are directors, and a chairman, who every now and then meet, pass resolutions, and draw up fresh proposals. The question is not, therefore, so absurd a one as it may appear, for surely all this expensive machinery would not be maintained, if the scheme had perished, as it has long been admitted on all hands the cable itself has. It is dead by no means, and after the disastrous failure which took place four years ago, we see evident signs of real efforts to accomplish this great design.
That the second cable that crosses the Atlantic will be as great a success as the former one was a melancholy failure, no electrician of eminence any longer doubts. That the first cable was a failure in fact, was owing to causes so clearly traceable to the grossest negligence, that the wonder is not that it failed, but that it survived to give utterance to those few words which prove that it retained life after its bad treatment and perilous voyage. Let us recount a few of them. At the time of its manufacture, the working of the new material, gutta percha, was, so to say, a new art, and the material in itself so bad in quality, owing to the tricks played by the native gatherers, that it was far from being so perfect an insulator as it has since become; moreover, the method of laying it on the conducting wire was so defective that every now and then air-holes or bubbles, so minute as to escape observation, occurred. The significance of this fact may not appear to the general reader who is not aware of the conditions on which alone a submarine electric cable can act. The wire or conductor along which the electric message flows, may be likened to a hollow pipe, the walls of which are composed of the insulating material which surrounds it; this insulating material is the gutta percha, and it can be easily understood that if this envelope is perforated by fine holes, the electric current, instead of passing from end to end of the cable, as it otherwise would, must escape and diffuse itself in the surrounding ocean, which is a good conductor.
These fine holes, or “leaks” as they are termed, may have let out but a very small portion of the strong current sent through the cable, but their number so enfeebled the life of the telegraph, that it only required a few more blunders of construction to have killed it before it was laid. These were not wanting, as we know by the evidence given in this matter before the committee of the House of Commons. Whilst the cable lay coiled in the tank at the manufactory, ready to be shipped, it had the misfortune to be exposed to the direct rays of the sun during three of the hottest days ever known in this country. The effect of this great heat was so to soften the gutta percha envelope of the wire, as to allow the latter to sink by its own gravity until it merely appeared on its under-surface, instead of maintaining its position in the centre of its axis; indeed, at some points, the wire actually showed through the thin gutta-percha, and where it so showed, it had to be cut out.
So much for the defective manipulation of the first Atlantic cable. But these were only initial errors. In the course of “paying out” it was subjected to all kinds of strains from the pitching of the vessel; at times it had to be cut and re-spliced whilst the ship was progressing; and after the first failure to deposit it in the ocean took place, and it was returned to a tank prepared to receive it at Keyham, it was cut about so mercilessly, and spliced again—or rather bungled together so carelessly,—that the wonder is, not that its insulation was thereby hopelessly impaired, but that the continuity of the conducting wire was maintained at all.
It is not, however, a matter of entire regret that this cable failed, inasmuch as from its method of construction, so far as the conducting wire was concerned, it is very doubtful whether it would have been such a success as to have satisfied the shareholders. The Atlantic telegraph, to pay, must be able to send a certain number of words per minute; otherwise the cost of transmission would be so enormous as to prevent its being generally used. Now, it is very questionable indeed if the old cable (even supposing its insulation to have been perfect) could have worked this paying number. Some of our most eminent electricians said, No. And for this feebleness of conduction there were two causes. In the first place, the wire, or wires, were very fine; and as it is a rule in conducting bodies that their swiftness of conductibility depends upon their diameters, or bulk, it must be evident that these small wires were a great mistake, inasmuch as they retarded the current. Another advantage of a large conductor is, that it is not much affected by “leakages” that would paralyse a small one.
