The telegraph manual: a complete history and description of the semaphoric, electric and magnetic telegraphs of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, ancient and modern.

GUTTA-PERCIIA INSULATION.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Application of Gutta-Percha as an Insulation-Discovery of Gutta-Percha, its
Nature, Qualities, and Chemical Properties.
APPLICATION OF GUTTA-PERCHA AS AN INSULATION.
ALL efforts to insulate telegraph wires for submarine and subterranean lines proved ineffective until the introduction of guttapercha, a substance of peculiar growth as hereinafter described.
I do not propose to determine when it was first applied to telegraphing. In the year 1847 a manufactory of gutta-percha
for the insulation of telegraph wires was established in Brooklyn, New-York, by Mr. Samuel T. Armstrong, who had ascertained that the substance was a non-conductor of electricity.
Immediately following this scientific fact, machinery was made
for the application of gutta-percha to telegraph wires, and a
trial of the same was made across the Hudson river in 1848.
It was eminently successful, and at the time Mr. Armstrong
was so sanguine of the perfection of the insulation, that he
published, in the New-York Journal of Commerce in 1848, a
proposition to insulate and lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean for the sum of $3,500,000.
Since that time sub-aqueous conductors have been very
greatly improved, and minds of great power are still at w'ork
for the perfection of submarine telegraphy.
The manufacture of gutta-percha as an insulation was commenced in England about the same time as it was in America,
and the establishment in London, under the direction of Messrs.
Statham & Co., has done wonders in the progress of the
art. They have from the beginning exhibited a degree of
enterprise not surpassed by any others in the art of telegraphing. To London and New-York manufactories the telegraphic
world is greatly indebted for the degree of perfection now
enjoyed in the use of gutta-percha.
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