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

EUROPEAN SUBMARINE TELEGRAPHS.
CHAPTER XLIII.
The English and French Cables-Mode of Shipping and Submerging CablesHolyhead and Howth Telegraph-The Irish Channel Cable of 1852-The
English and Belgian Submarine Telegraph-Donaghadee and Port Patrick
Submarine Line-English and Holland Submarine Cable-Prince Edward's
Island Cable-Danish Baltic Sea Telegraph-The Gulf of St. Lawrence
Telegraph-The Balize, Hudson and Zuyder Zee Cables-The Black Sea
Telegraphs-The Mediterranean Submarine Telegraph Lines.
THE ENGLISH AND FRENCH CABLES.
HAVING fully explained in another chapter the different submarine telegraph conductors as employed in America, I will in
this refer to those of Europe, where that department of the
telegraph enterprise has been carried out to a far more extended
degree.
The first prominent undertaking was that for the connection
of England with France by a subaqueous conductor across
the channel between Dover and Calais. A concession was obtained for this purpose from the French government, but upon
the condition that the connection by telegraph was to be
effected before September, 1850. On the 27th of August,
1850, a cable was laid across the channel, and communication
was made, telegraphically, through the wire. Unfortunately
this grand enterprise was interrupted by the action of the
waves, which produced a movement of the cable upon the rocks
near the shore at Cape Grinez, by which the gutta-percha insulation was chafed entirely from the conducting wire. This
cable was composed of an electric copper wire No. 14, and
covered with three substantial coatings of gutta-percha. It
was weighted to the bottom of the sea by lead sinkers. Its
length was thirty miles, and the width of the channel was
twenty-one miles. I have a piece of this cable taken from the
sea after it had been submerged some five years. The gutta.
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