Ed 0:01

Hey all, this is Ed. And this is Kara. And this is your day as dumpster fire. Wow. And my whole screen just went white.

Kara 0:40

Oh yeah, I have my window open.

Ed 0:43

I bet mine probably did the same thing, but it's just like all of a sudden it's like boom, my whole screen was white. I'm like, whoa, okay. Guess uh I guess Kara's in heaven right now.

Kara 0:57

I guess. I'm at home with four dogs waiting for my husband to get home.

Ed 1:00

Right. And I see you're braving it with the door open.

Kara 1:04

Yeah. Yeah. I had to separate them so the baby gate's up, but Okay. I have my big girl here with me, so.

Ed 1:13

Uh Nebs.

Kara 1:14

Angel.

Ed 1:15

Angel, okay.

Kara 1:16

Yeah.

Ed 1:17

So you just kind of rotate them out from your little recording area?

Kara 1:21

Yeah, it kind of depends on who's being crazy at the moment.

Ed 1:25

Nice. Yeah. So if they're the craziest end up in there.

Kara 1:28

Yep, if they're the craziest, and it was me.

Ed 1:30

Okay. Probably because then they just fall asleep.

Kara 1:33

Yeah, she's asleep.

Ed 1:35

Nice. And not chewing on random dog toys.

Kara 1:41

No, no. We're good. We're good right now. So let's take let's take advantage of this quiet moment.

Ed 1:47

Yeah, I know. Like I'll have my Pookie in here. I have a stuffed dodo that I got from uh Utah. It was literally the last one at this dinosaur bone place. So I bought this stuffed dodo and I brought it home and I tried recording, and Pookie just ate the eyeballs out of it. Sick. Yeah. Did it end up in a poop? No, no. They they were just sitting on the floor. So I kind of like super glued them in. So now like the eyes are pulling in two different directions. Oh yeah. And the dodo somehow looks smarter. Like I I have been inspired to draw a dodo, like like the chicken hey hey, where the eyes are in two different directions.

Kara 2:26

Yes, exactly.

Ed 2:28

Yeah, well, speaking of dodos, uh, today's episode has nothing to do with dodos.

Kara 2:33

Excellent.

Ed 2:33

Yes, hear it. Today we are talking about a wire. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, children, like go grab your parents, come bring them in to your uh wherever you have this playing, or really crank up the audio on your uh on your radio. Because today we are talking about a multi-thousand mile long wire. Perfect. Yes, it's what makes it special. Oh yeah, yeah, no. This is uh this is gonna be podcasting gold right here. So hopefully I can uh hopefully I can tell this story right because it really does check all the boxes. Like, you know, the theme of this show is humanity sees a problem, like a battle or you know, or whatever, they see a problem and they try to engineer out a solution to the problem, and they try to account for every single contingency. It is just a natural human thing to do. Like you and I, we will try to devise a lesson for our kiddos, and the intent is to try to account for that one kid who's gonna, you know, steer the conversation the wrong way, and we try to account for you know, the the the two girls that we know that always fall asleep in class, and we try to account for not having supplies or having a tour coming through. And it seems like every single time we implement this plan, just something unforeseen goes wrong. Thankfully, you and I are very good at dealing with yeah, like how many times have we tried to do a lesson and the electricity or the internet goes out, and we're like, okay, guys, we're going back to 1995 teaching.

Kara 4:18

All right, get your books out. Yep. Uh I'm gonna write it on the board.

Ed 4:22

Yeah, like it it's we've gotten very good at that. Um, but like when it comes to humanity as a whole, humanity one likes to take on super massive projects, whether it's building gigantic skyscrapers or building pyramids or trying to build pyramids without the help of aliens, it all goes up in flames. And no, I don't think humanity built pyramids with the help of aliens. Maybe the help of gods, but not aliens, because what incentive does an alien have to come to this planet and for funsies? Yeah, I think they would have more fun coming here now than they do back then, because back then, like humans were really trying. Humans were like, okay, we're young, we're ignorant, but let's really try to tackle this really big problem. But now they probably just watch like 24-7 news media, and they just probably just do like, oh my god, humanity is so screwed right now. Yeah, they just they just see the stupidity that goes on, and then like they may turn on like an episode of ridiculousness or something like that, and then they're like, Okay, yeah, these people are doomed. But but yeah, like we we we tend to uh we try to come up with really, really, really big projects, and we try to figure out a way to make these projects work, and it fails instantly. So, like this is a uh this is a story that literally checks all the boxes of things falling apart, and it starts with the precursor to the cell phone, actually, the precursor to the telephone. So we're talking before email, or yeah, before cell phones, before email, before internet, before uh the telephone, like Alexander Graham and Bell's, like you know, 1890s invention. We're talking about the telegraph wire. And what's really funny is that you look at that telegraph wire for about 60, 70 years was one of the most important forms of communication in humanity, all the way up until like everybody had a telephone, which is kind of shocking because we've only had access to cell phones for like 20 years.

Kara 6:54

Yeah, right.

Ed 6:56

I remember when I was in high school getting, I was like a sophomore or junior, and my brother bought me a cell phone, like a flip phone, and I that was like the coolest thing in the world. That's back when like a data, not a data plan, but a uh you paid by the minute, and yeah, and I I had 300 minutes on there, and I and I paid like $40 a month for that, and uh no internet, and I had to spend five cents a text message, and I uh and you had to hit like one, three times, and then five, two times, and then oh god, that was horrible. And it's just like man, the telegraph was actually faster than this. It's fine, we're doing great. Yeah, we gotta start somewhere. So the telegraph was an amazing piece of technology that when we look at it by today's standards, it is fairly simple. Like it just involves magnets. Literally, that's all it is, and then a little bit of electricity. Uh now, granted, if you were to look at the schematics of the original telegraph, a lot of math went into it, a lot of modeling, a lot of stuff that like even when I was in engineering school, like I would have had a tough time following this stuff. Like, I would have a tough time following the math behind it. So the concept is really, really simple. And what it was designed to do was be a long-range form of communication. Because before, like the French had lanterns, so our friend Napoleon was a huge fan of using lanterns at night and opening and closing a uh diaphragm or a diopter, and they could communicate for miles that way, and you can shield that light so that you could only see it from a certain angle. Uh, so that like many of Napoleon's enemies wondered how in the world was he able to execute these super elaborate maneuvers overnight without like you didn't see any horses going back and forth, you didn't see any runners. Like, what were they doing? Well, they were they were positioning themselves at certain angles to see each other via lantern light. Um, the Native Americans before that they used smoke signals and like a smoke signal, like how many times have you been driving to and from work and you see smoke in the distance? And you're like, oh the time. Yeah, it's it's all the time. You're like, oh, somebody's house is burning down. And you you think it's close, but it's not. It's like 20, 30 miles away.

Kara 9:33

Mm-hmm. Happened to me yesterday, actually.

Ed 9:35

Uh yeah. Yeah, it seems like uh yeah, there was a uh we were driving home yesterday from the aquarium and we saw smoke out. It looked like it was out towards Buckeye.

Kara 9:45

Yeah.

Ed 9:45

I don't know what was burning, but I don't either. Yeah.

Kara 9:49

Maybe we should look.

Ed 9:50

Yeah. In Arizona, things catch on fire so often around here. Uh remember the uh the big pile of burning brush and tree trimmings up at my place that caught on fire. And it smoked out our classroom like 45 miles away. Oh, that was so miserable. So, yeah, the Native Americans had smoke signals that they could use to communicate. And then there's also like horns and trumpets, drums. So the Chinese were real big on drums. Uh, the Mythbusters actually tested the idea that you could put drums underground and you could hear footsteps miles away of people coming. Interesting. It's uh yeah, it's it's pretty uh it's pretty crazy what we had up to this point. But now with the telegraph, we start like we are now in a position where you can use coded messages and you're not just transmitting data or information a few hundred yards away, like in Napoleon's case, or we're been a few miles away in case of like a smoke signal, but now you're talking miles, and the way that it works is you have what's known as an electromagnet. An electromagnet is simply a piece of iron that is not magnetic until you run an electricity or electric current through it, then it becomes magnetized, and then when you stop running that current through it, it's stopped being a magnet. So it's just a piece of iron that uh that you turn on and off with electricity and you make it magnetic. So what you would do is I on the sending end of the telegraph, you would emit these electrical pulses, and that's where that ticking comes from. Like on one end, you see the guy like pushing that little button really, really fast. Um, he's sending out a coded message where it's basically making contact, disconnecting, making contact, disconnecting, and he's doing that multiple times a second. And what it's doing is it's sending these little bursts of electricity to the receiver, and that receiver then, like the little burst of current, will go to that receiver, hit that little iron metal piece there, make a current, and then another piece of metal will be attracted to that that current, and then it would come down and make a tapping noise. It would do that at the same rate that that person was, you know, sending that signal out. So it's a really basic concept that was actually it it dates back to 1800 with Alessandro Volta. Uh, he created the voltaic cell, which kind of fed into it that you know, when he when he came up with like a battery that made it so that oh electricity can be transmitted. So it eventually developed into a uh you would have like a piece of paper that would be fed on a spool, and a strip of paper would be resting underneath like a pencil. And what would happen is the little armature would come down, it would receive a current, come down, make a mark on the paper, and it would make a series of dots and dashes and spaces, and that was code that was that what would later be known as Morse code, and you can transmit a lot of information that way. Keep in mind, by today's standards, it would have been a fraction of a kilobyte of information. So if you think about it, you know, like our phones, like we don't even deal in megabytes anymore, which is a thousand kilobytes, we deal with gigabytes. Like a video game nowadays, the idea of a megabyte or a kilobyte is a joke. Yeah. Like, golly, download um certain games, and it's like eight, nine, ten gigabytes.

Kara 13:51

And so yeah, yeah. No, there are some games that I've downloaded that are even more than that.

Ed 13:56

Yeah, to me to me, that's wild. Now, imagine trying to transmit all the code for that via a uh telegraph wire, it would take thousands of years. Yeah, like it's it's it that's not it's not a lot, but back then, hey, a the written word was the most powerful form of communication in the world, and if you could transmit that, then yeah, like that's a big deal. Uh yeah, especially if you can transmit something over the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. And that's and that's kind of where our story goes to is the very famous transatlantic telegraph wire or cable. So we'll get into that, but first I want to talk about the guy that kind of started it all, uh, Samuel F. B. Morse. Uh, he's not the integral figure in it, but he's such a fascinating guy in a way, because if it wasn't for him being screwed over, uh, we would not have communication the way we have today, which is kind of kind of strange. It's one of those things I look back at it and I'm like, you look at you look back at everything nice that you have, or everything that you have that you appreciate, and that is tied to some disaster in your life, or somebody else's disaster in a previous life that changed things in a certain way that led up to what you have now. And good old Sam Morse here is a prime example of that. And the first thing that really stands out to me is that he was born April 27th, 1791, and he died on April 2nd, 1872. Dang. Yeah, yeah. He was born in Charleston, Massachusetts, died in New York. That's a like he saw America through its infancy up through the end of the Civil War and into the Gilded Age.

Kara 15:58

Yeah.

Ed 15:59

Like, that's a lot of American history that that went on there. So yeah, he it's like Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman is another one where he just he was like the epitome of 1800s. He was born in the early 1800s and died in the late 1800s, and he just saw America go from just trying to survive to like American aristocrats forming. So as a student, uh, he was like it seems like everybody who's super famous or like really contributed to humanity all have this uh quality or this trait when they were younger that they are strange, aloof, like they're kind of like a kid in their own little world in a way, and it seems like as a result, they grew up to do incredible things.

Kara 16:46

They I feel like it's a trait that is really prominent in the 1800s, like it's it's usually noted. Yeah, especially like those big industrialists, that's something that's really common. And I don't know if that's because like they're they're just seen as weird because they're a little bit different compared to what the expectations of society was at the time.

Ed 17:12

Yeah, I think too at that time, most of us would have been born, uh, raised, worked, and died in the same way.

Kara 17:21

Or like you're a farmer and you're going to be a farmer, and that's what you're going to be, because my dad was a farmer, I'm a farmer, you're going to be a farmer. And then all of yeah. Yeah. It's not like it's illegal like it was back in the day, but it's still almost taboo.

Ed 17:36

Yeah. And if you choose anything beyond that, you're kind of weird. And and especially if you were born in a way where you just see the world a little differently. That was especially in America, where in the 1800s everything was a necessity-based. America in the 1800s, it was like you've got to do everything you can to survive before you can think about thriving.

Kara 17:59

I was gonna say that was life all the way up until, I would argue, up until the early to mid-1900s.

Ed 18:06

Yeah. Yeah, because like you could take things like a massive drought and that destroyed in the 1930s, like that destroyed the Midwest. Yeah, I I would say, yeah, that that that element of survival. Now, if you're living in a city and as long as you had work, you were okay. Like you didn't have to worry about starving to death and stuff like that.

Kara 18:29

But it really goes to show how important the industrial revolution was.

Ed 18:33

Uh yeah.

Kara 18:34

Because that that's like that weird mark between how different life was before and after. You can point it back to the industrial revolution every time.

Ed 18:44

Well, I was I was listening to a podcast, and I can I can easily edit this up if if we so deem, but um it he talked about the host of this podcast, talked about the idea of like, is has there been an advanced civilization before humanity? Like, we're talking 40, 50, 60,000 years ago. Was there an advanced race of beings on earth uh that somehow went extinct and then humans came around, or was there an advanced race of humans, say like 20,000 years ago that went extinct and all that kind of stuff? And one of the biggest pieces of evidence to kind of go against that is there were no signs of an industrial revolution.

Kara 19:27

Like well, I was gonna say, from what my understanding, there's no archaeological evidence to prove that at all.

Ed 19:33

That's the problem. Yeah, it's like how is it that we can find a snail shell from 250 million years ago, but we can't find anything, especially like uh like I'm sorry, uh a civilization doesn't go from Stone Age to nuclear technology overnight. No, there's a progression.

Kara 19:51

There's yeah, it takes a long time.

Ed 19:52

Yeah, and and there would have to be signs of an industrial age that you would even identify in the atmosphere. Like, we can still find rock sediments that go back to the 1820s from when Britain industrialized and there was just pumping coal everywhere. Like there's just no evidence that dates back to even atmospheric stuff that would indicate that you had a uh an industrialized civilization, let alone something with flying cars and yeah, crap like that. So so yeah, I don't know what that has to do with anything. Um, but good old Sam Morse, uh he yeah, he he saw the world a little differently. He he was the kind of guy that would be interested in a lot of different things, but his parents, deeply conservative, uh very austere, um, you know, hey, you're gonna become this. Like parents decided what you were gonna become.

Kara 20:50

Very 1800s, standard, traditional yes.

Ed 20:54

And so they sent him to Yale, and uh, which, you know, that's a podunk little school. It's like a community college, right?

Kara 21:02

Yeah, it's fine.

Ed 21:03

Yeah. Well, actually, at that time, Yale was a established college, but it's it I don't think it held the prestige that it has today, but still, it's a good school.

SPEAKER_02 21:14

Yeah.

Ed 21:14

Um, and it was at Yale that he was introduced to electricity, and uh, he always had like a fascination with electricity. Uh, but the other thing that he was really interested in, it was art. And I guess this guy was really good at it, like he was really good at portraits. That's kind of what he was known for. He was really known for his artwork in terms of Renaissance, like he could replicate that Renaissance 3D effect fluently, like on demand, especially when it came to uh portraits. He even has a few paintings in the Louvre. Like, that's how how good of an artist he was. Yeah, he had a good reputation as being an artist. The only problem uh is that his Favorite uh artwork that or topic that he really liked to do was uh he really liked to paint um what I would call 1800 C-SPAN. He loved to paint scenes of American democracy at work. So he has like these paintings, and some of these paintings are massive, they're like 10 feet by 10 feet, they are huge, and it's literally guys voting.

Kara 22:31

Yeah, yeah, there's like which has some historical value, but not like in the moment while he's trying to sell something, yeah. So I get it, but I also appreciate him the more for that, so because now we can see what it looked like.

Ed 22:48

Yeah, and and it was always very opulent and it was very uh um showy, very uh dramatic. And it's it could have been Congress voting on like okay, do we want to set our lunchtime at 11:30 to 12:30, or do we want to go from 12 to 1? Like it could have been something as basic as Congress voting on that, and it looked like George Washington was in the room and everybody's voting on a speech that he just gave, and it's the most monumental change in American history. Don't get me wrong, the paintings are spectacular, but it is literally 1800s C-span. The only thing he needed to put on is an overlay of like Democrats, so many vote yay, so many vote nay, somebody abstained, and then Republicans, so many said yay, so many nay, and then so many abstained. They need to have like a white overlay of that, and then have like a description of what the bill is above that.

Kara 23:51

Yeah, that's fair. Though I'm looking at his paintings right now, I do really like them. Yeah, I like his um his portraiture work is pretty good, but what I like the most about it are how he depicts architecture. It's really nice. Like he has this painting for the US representatives, and it looks really cool with all of the archways and the dome ceiling and all anyway. Sorry, I'm I'm going on a tangent, but it's good. I like it.

Ed 24:20

Well, and and that's the thing, it's like his his portrait work is kind of how he made a living. He and this is how you had pictures of people before before the camera shows up.

Kara 24:34

Not not too far after this, actually.

Ed 24:36

Uh yeah, we're talking about 1850s.

Kara 24:39

1890s, I think, is when the camera came out.

Ed 24:42

Oh, no, no, no. Don't forget the American Civil War. So, oh, that's right.

Kara 24:45

It was photographed. It was photographed, that's right.

Ed 24:47

So, yeah, probably 1850s. 1850s, and then in the 1830s, 1840s, there was the Deguerro type where you would basically project an image of somebody on like a plate, and then you would draw on that plate. That so then a lot more people could do it, but still the quality of the paintings went down from there. But yeah, Morris was a very good portrait artist, and he was very prolific and all that kind of stuff. But again, it's just like he well, he he kind of got screwed over because he wanted to they were doing a remodel on the uh whatchamacallit, uh the Congress building. Okay, and so President John Quincy Adams sent out like this uh uh this request to all of American artists hey, you know, supply designs, and if we select your design, we'll have your mural as one of the panels in the Congress building. And I guess like Sam Morse was like, I'm a shoe-in for this. Like, I've I know all these congressmen, I've done other portrait work, like I have this reputation. But I guess Adams and Morris's father had like a falling out or like a feud between them over some business thing in the past, and yeah, Morris never got the job, and that was like the worst thing that ever happened to him. Is that that was gonna be the thing that was gonna set him apart was to be one of the painters of these murals in the Congress building, and um, he got screwed over on that, or so he felt. He always felt that uh Quincy Adams had something against him because of his father. So we don't know what the real story is behind that, or if Morris is just reading into it too much. But as a result, though, this setback is what gave Morse the bandwidth to create the Morse code system, and that's where like all of humanity changed. Because one thing about painting something, especially in the Renaissance style, is that it takes forever. You just don't slam out a Renaissance style painting in an afternoon, it takes days to weeks, days, yeah, it takes a long time, yeah. So, because of that, you know, he now had the bandwidth, and he decided to take up teaching art at the University of New York. And um, so yeah, now he had a little bit more steady income. It wasn't that great, but he had a steady income, he had more time now, and he started experimenting and playing around with basically electricity. And this is also the time that he came up with the um whatchamacallit, the Morse code system of using dots and dashes. So in 1837, Morse, along with a chemist Leonard Gale, and a friend Alfred Vale, uh, yeah, Gale and Vale, uh, had created a prototype telegraph machine that could send messages up to 10 miles. And then in 1838, the trio came up with the dots and dashes of what would become uh later on would be known as Morse code. And then Morris was like, hey, I think I'm onto something here. And he tried to get Congress to approve funding for a longer test that would show the power of the machine, but of course that failed. It seemed like I feel like Morris had this relationship, this one-way relationship with Congress, where he thought Congress liked him more than they really did.

Kara 28:22

Maybe.

Ed 28:23

I think they maybe saw Morris as like an outsider, like you're not voted in here, you're just an artist, you're not like, yeah, we'll listen to you, but you're not you're not one of us, if that makes sense. That's the vibe I get.

Kara 28:38

For me, it just seems like he's somebody who's trying all of these different things, and some like either they're not thought through all the way, or it's just not like he's too progressive in his ideas for this time period. So Congress is like, I don't know about that. Um, I feel like there's more a more logical reason than just how they felt about him.

Ed 29:00

It's probably a mixture of both.

Kara 29:02

Yeah, very likely.

Ed 29:04

Like maybe he he would come running into Congress with this idea written on like a post-it note. And okay, yeah, you're a little out there, you're it's a little half-baked idea. Go and work on it some more and then come back. I felt like they probably just tried to like, oh yeah, yeah, we'll we'll listen to you, but just keep working on it some. Just to just get them out there so they could go back and decide.

Kara 29:29

It's like that guy in the movies who comes in, I have an idea, I have an idea. Oh god, this guy again.

Ed 29:34

Yeah. All right, yeah, kind of like kind of like a doc brown attitude, yeah, like personality. Yeah. I can see them like, like, okay, yeah, yeah, we'll hear you, but just go back, think on it more, come back to us later on. And then, like, these these politicians are now like, okay, lunch from 11 30 to 12:30, or should we go from 12 to 1? Perfect. Like, this is the the critical decision that has to be made for the day. And then, oh, yeah, before we go on on break, we need to give ourselves another raise. Because that is how it works. So, um, yeah, Morris never got Congress to approve funding for anything. So he kind of changed the strategies. He's like, Okay, if I can't get everybody on board, then let's try to get somebody who can. Let's try to find a person that can do that, and that is where Maine Congressman FOJ Smith comes into play. And this would be a partnership that would pay off eventually. So now we jump forward to 1843. Congress finally approved funding for Morse's telegraphing machine to run from Baltimore, Maryland to Washington, DC. And the original plan was that Morse wanted to bury the lines underground. Keep in mind we are talking about wires that really weren't much bigger than telephone wire. And for those of you who don't know what telephone wire is, think of like the cable that you use to charge your phone with. Uh, telephone wire is a little bigger than that. And it would have been like this a single copper line, whereas like cables today are made with dozens of small filaments, so that's why they're flexible. Uh, Morris wanted to run everything underground because he probably thought that people didn't want uh people didn't want like giant wires hanging over their houses, which that kind of didn't work, or it did, well, yeah, you'll see here. So um a good portion of the budget was spent digging uh trenches to lay the wire. Uh the problem was is that when you bury the wire, the ground moves, and the ground is very hard on buried things, and it it was a disaster, like nothing worked, and then they went to go dig it up. They found like the line was broken in so many different places, they're like, Oh, okay, that didn't work. So they concluded the line either broke in a lot of places, or the other thing is is that every every wire, everything that can conduct electricity has impurities in it that will absorb electricity, it's called resistance. So, like uh, the bigger the wire and the more current you run through it, the hotter the wire gets. So, the reason why, if you go look at your wires inside your circuit breaker outside, the wires coming out of there are a lot thicker, especially the ones that feed into the house. Those things are like an inch in diameter, but then the wires that go to your electrical sockets are not even an eighth of an inch in diameter, like they get smaller and smaller, the gauges get smaller, and that's just because there's just going to be impurities in that wire that will absorb electricity. And if you have too much electricity running through it, those impurities will slow that down, and electricity can't just disappear, it has to convert to something and it converts to heat. And uh yeah, you can start fires that way. So they concluded that they're either the wire wasn't intact all the way or that there was just too much resistance, which would make the signal that comes in at the end uh be too weak. So they're like, crap, we don't have a lot of time left. So the other method that they came up with was way more iconic. They started building telegraph poles, and these telegraph poles were kind of funny because some of them were like placed in people's backyards, like they didn't care. They just like, ah, we need to put a pole here and plop, there it is, and then they go down a little more and like up, we need to put a pole here, and they plopped it down there. But what they found was that like a lot of neighborhoods thought that this was cool, like this is the future, this is where uh like our our house is being used to propel the future of communication forever. Whereas like nowadays, telephone wires are kind of like a uh a property value degrader to a certain extent. Um, but yeah, so people actually wanted to have these telephones, uh, telephone poles or telegraph wires put up. Um so on May 24th, 1844, the line was complete and the first test was run. Um, it took a little bit of time and some retries, uh, but the message was finally received in DC. And the Morse code or the coded message that time was a simple what has God brought? Which sounds kind of intimidating, like, oh boy, what has God allowed to happen now?

Kara 34:53

Yeah, that that does sound more negative than positive.

Ed 34:58

Yeah, it's just that's fine. Okay. Uh maybe, maybe they had a different view of it than what we have today. The eight the 1800s. Yeah, the eighteen hundreds of it all. And yeah, there's still a lot of God in a lot of stuff. So yes. Um, as we will see when we get into the telegraph wires span the Atlantic Ocean. Um so yeah, from this day forward, all of the communication would never be the same. So now we are going to jump forward 20 years. But before we do that, I need to pee.

Kara 35:32

Okay.

Ed 35:33

So I'm gonna pause it and I'll be right back. Um yeah, so now uh we jumped forward 20 years, and the world has been inundated with telegraph wires. Um by the 1850s, over what is it, 30,000 miles of telegraph cable had stretched all over Europe. So this is one of these inventions that yes, it it obviously was invented in America, it had a big impact on America. Europe took it and ran with it. And I think a lot, a lot of it had to do with the fact that Europe was way more interconnected than America was. Right. America hadn't even really gone much past, I don't know. I mean, yeah, technically, but by this time, America was like in the Midwest. It still hadn't really gone coast to coast quite yet.

Kara 36:33

We've still got Wild West things happening, and we're still getting lands and yeah, yeah.

Ed 36:40

So like I feel like Europe though, like you know, Paris would be talking to Nuremberg, and Britain would be talking to Madrid, and there's all in Italy, and I feel like there's a lot more interconnectedness going on. So, yeah, 30,000 miles of telegraph wires stretched all over Europe, and it wasn't just over land, they actually did some uh submarine lines between the English Channel and France. So it's funny because the uh late 1900s, early 2000s, the biggest thing was the uh that tunnel that went underneath the English Channel uh that you could drive through. Uh before that, it was a wire. So, yeah, they also had another submarine line that went from England into Ireland, and then another cable went across the Black Sea. So there was little doubt in anyone's mind that telegraph lines could be submerged in water and still be perfectly fine. So, like at the time, it was believed that oh yeah, you could submerge these things, electricity goes underwater just fine. But there was a bigger question that needed to be addressed. And the question was is it possible to place a telegraph wire from one side of the Atlantic Ocean to the other? So, more specifically, the question came up is can we lay a cable thousands of miles long, stretching from England to the American Eastern Seaboard, and still have it be useful? So now we enter a guy that I'm I'm really fascinated with. I kind of want to read up more on him, primarily because he's got a cool name, Cyrus Westfield.

Kara 38:24

That is a cool name, yeah.

Ed 38:26

It's just it's it's just that this sounds like um 1800s entrepreneur. Oh, to me he sounds like a Bond villain. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, and there were Cyrus the Virus from Conair.

Kara 38:40

I forgot about that.

Ed 38:42

I actually liked that character. That villain was cool. That movie is something else. Yes, all of Nicolas Cage's movies back then were something else. That's true. Yeah, they're like uh Steven Seagal, but better. Yeah, they actually had like a plot and stuff like that. But I remember Cyrus the virus, like that that is that that's a villain that had a good sense of humor about doing terrible things. Cyrus the virus. But yeah, um, so Cyrus Westfield, uh bit younger. He was born in 1819, died in 1892. As a teenager, Field started off as an errand boy. So, like, he he just yeah, he just from very early on, he's like, Okay, I gotta work, I'm gonna make money. And that was his thing. In 1838, he became an assistant to his brother in the paper manufacturing industry. A year later, he went into business for himself. He also became a junior uh partner at E Routin Company, uh, which was a paper wholesaler. I get like today, you don't think about it, like yeah, it's paper, but yeah, back then paper was like you need it.

Kara 39:52

That's how you communicate with people. Yeah, well, and that's how you kept records, print things on it, and like yeah, paper's everything.

Ed 40:00

Yeah, that that was the thing. Imagine trying to do your job today, listeners out there, if you didn't have email, especially if you're an office jockey, like but Kara and I were for a little bit in the trucking industry. Email was everything. Could you imagine trying to do that job in trucking without email and all paper?

Kara 40:19

I mean, I feel like you'd just be on the phone a lot.

Ed 40:23

Yeah, you would yeah, you'd be forced to talk to people a lot more, but yeah, even still, like, oh man, getting uh bills of lading in, missing signatures. Like, there would be people in the past that would literally cut out signatures from another form and then physically paste it and then run it through the copy machine and then fax it over. Like there, I bet there was a lot of that that went on. Um, yeah, the cut copy and paste keys on your keyboard are there's a history literally copy paste. Yeah, there's a history behind them because boy, could you do some wild things with the cut copy and paste keys back before they were keys on a keyboard? But anyways, um uh he was a he was like a junior partner at this paper company that should have done very well, but but it went out of business. And basically, Field was the kind of guy that stuck around like all the business partners, like they saw this ship was sinking and they they just bailed, and then what Field himself was like, Okay, um, I've gotta figure this out, and somebody's gotta be around to take care of all this. So he absorbed after he dissolved all the assets of the company, he absorbed all the debts himself, even though like these debts weren't even accrued by him, these debts existed years before he came aboard. He's like, Okay, I'm just going to absorb everything, like I'll I'll I'll take on the debts. And what's interesting is that like even when this company went under, he and he set up a uh another business with his brother-in-law, uh Joseph Stone, and that's kind of where he made his money. But he he developed a reputation for a man of integrity because even though he still had these debts ranging, it was like up to a million dollars, and it was long way after this original company went out of business. Uh, he he could have easily disabsolved all those, but he still opted to pay back those debts with interest. So, yeah, he paid back like almost a million dollars by 1800s times. That's a crap ton of money. Yeah, that's a load of money, and because it took so long to pay him back, he paid interest on it. So, like, fields like you know, once you get that reputation of being a businessman, that's one thing, but once you get that reputation of being like an honest guy, business will just gravitate towards you, and that's exactly what happened. By the uh mid-1850s to the 1860s, he was one of the wealthiest guys in England, and so he's like, Okay, I got all this money, he's sitting on about $250,000 in cash, which I don't know how much that would be by today's standards.

Kara 43:19

I have no idea.

Ed 43:20

What is uh $250,000? So, yeah, apparently in 1850, if you had $250,000 cash just sitting there not doing anything, that would be worth over ten million dollars by today. So that would be a three thousand nine hundred and thirty-five percent increase.

Kara 43:43

Handy.

Ed 43:44

I really want to go back in time and invest in some of these companies. Oh, couldn't don't we all though? Like, what was it? If I I remember reading somewhere like uh when Microsoft started off, uh, if you invested like $10,000 back then, you would be worth like $150 million today.

Kara 44:06

That's crazy.

Ed 44:08

Like, cool. That's that's wonderful. My grandfather never invested in. He's like, guys, just a computer. It's not gonna go anywhere. And uh it's you know, it's just some little basement level uh software company. Like, I'm not investing in something that's just gonna go away in a year. Um, and when he died, he's like, Yeah, that was my biggest regret. I thought marriage was gonna be my biggest regret. Uh-uh. That is nothing compared to not investing into Microsoft by that chance. So, so yeah, uh Field, he I guess you could say he had a field day. Uh yeah, he was sitting on an easy $10 million, which I mean, I get yes, that's a lot of money, but but today's standards that's not a lot of money because now there are dozens and dozens and dozens of these cables that span between America and Europe, and each one of those cables is in like the hundreds of millions of dollars to put up. So, but hey, you know, 1800s, you got that kind of money, you think you can make it work, let's go. And he was really, really intrigued with this whole idea of getting a telegraph wire from America to Britain, and well, vice versa. So, um, he was contacted by British inventor Frederick Newton Gisborn. Gisborne? Gisborne? I don't like Gisborne. Gisborn. Yeah. Gisborne's good. Gisborn's good. Yeah, it isborn just uh it just doesn't have it, doesn't roll off the tongue, right? No. I can I can see the gears are turning in our heads of like, if we weren't recording a family podcast, this could go this could go sideways so fast. So Gisborn um about the telegraph idea. Uh, Gisborne wanted to make a telegraph line that spanned from St. John, Newfoundland, uh, to New York City. Ultimately, the venture failed, uh, but not without the formation of what became known as the cable cabinet. That's a very formal thing here. Uh, the St. John to New York telegraph line failed due to the lack of uh investor support. But by uh 1854, Peter Cooper, Abrams Hewitt, uh, Moses Taylor, and a slightly older, a little wiser Samuel Morse uh field, as the bankroller formed a group of entrepreneurs became known as the cable cabinet. And it's really funny because like the cable cabinet consisted of obviously investors, but they all had you know like their own special skill set that they could put into it, you know, like Samuel Morse, obviously, the guy who created Morse code and all that kind of stuff, and it was kind of funny because I remember what is it? Uh was it Batman versus Superman, where Batman goes up to Barry and like points out that hey, you're the fastest man in the world, and then it recruits him to go fight Superman, um, or something like that. And then Barry is like, so uh what what's your superpower, Bruce? And he's like, I'm rich.

Kara 47:40

Oh, yeah, that was in the trailer.

Ed 47:42

Was it in the trailer, but it wasn't in the movie?

Kara 47:44

I don't I didn't watch the movie.

Ed 47:46

Yeah, it's been a while since I've seen it. I feel like that's kind of what Field was like. He's like, Hey, I bring no knowledge to this. Like, I can I can supply all the paper you guys need for it, but um, I don't know anything about this, so you guys do your thing and I'll just pay for it. Like, okay. Uh, but nice, yeah, yeah, it's a not a bad way to go, I guess. If you can't contribute anything else, just donate a lot of money. Yeah, by 1855, the cabinet formed uh their New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company. I feel like that's a very specific company name.

Kara 48:24

It is. Though during during this time, you don't really need like a catchy snazzy name.

Ed 48:28

You just kind of say what it is, but yeah, but so like once you develop a New York to Newfoundland to London telegraph line, then what? Then you gotta add more locations to it. Yeah, of course.

Kara 48:44

It'll just be list.

Ed 48:46

So uh yeah, uh to me it's a very specific name, but it it does make sense. It really tells you exactly what this company is is about. So um after Field convinced the cabinet to eventually lay a line from Newfoundland to Ireland, the name changed to the Atlantic Telegraph Company, which that makes sense, and they started by buying up a lot of the telegraph lines in the northeast. So they the they kind of wanted a monopoly monopoly, they wanted they wanted to own all that stuff, right? Monopolize, yeah, monopolize it. There we go. Yeah, they wanted to monopolize all that so that they could really generate the money uh needed for it, but then they didn't also it cuts through a lot of red tape. When you physically own this thing that would be feeding into this line, that makes life a lot easier, and that keeps it's like trying to make a uh a railroad track back then. Oh boy, like you would have to go and contract rail prices through like 50 different rail owners, and it was a holy nightmare to work all that stuff out. So, by owning everything, you know, that makes it easier. So the ultimate goal was to get the federal and the parliamentary funding to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic. However, Field had zero sailing or telegraph experience. Thankfully, when you have a lot of money, you can be in charge and you don't have to know what you're doing. You just got to be able to pay the people around you and surround yourself with people who do know what they're doing, and that's exactly what Field did. So basically, Field's superpower was generating money. He was very charismatic. Uh, he had a lot of again, he had a really good reputation of being like an honest businessman, and he was able to go and utilize his reputation and people just give him money. Yeah, he had that uh charisma about him that encouraged people to give him money for something that didn't even exist yet, like a company to lay the cable. So he actually went to these people and like, hey, I got this grand idea. Um, I want to need millions of dollars from you, but I'm gonna lay a uh telegraph cable in between America and Britain. And he's like, Yeah, we've got everything lined up. All we need to do is just bankroll and we're good to go. Knowing that he didn't even have a company that could make the cable yet. I I love it. It's the same thing. Like, um, if you look at the history of Microsoft and you go back to like DOS or the disk operating system, uh, Microsoft, well, I think it was either Xerox or IBM, like Steve Bolner, Bill Gates, and and all them, they went to I I I think it was Xerox, and they're like, Hey, we've got this idea, it's called a disk operating system that will run everything on your computer. And Xerox was like, Cool, this is awesome, we'll take it. And then they're like, Cool, we'll get it right to you. They had nothing. They literally didn't have a it was Xerox. Yeah, yeah, they didn't have they didn't have anything, and so they ran to a pawn shop in town where there was like this uh pawn shop owner who just dealt with old technology and found out this guy had actually written a basic system and like, hey, we'll give you a hundred dollars for it. Okay. So they ran back to Xerox and like, here you go, here's your disk operating system, and that's what Windows would be based on. Uh, for those of you out there, uh, if you like you younger generations out there who've never used DOS, if you go into uh your uh like Windows search bar at the bottom, and you just type in command prompt, it will open up a window, and uh that window is DOS. And you can, in theory, run your entire computer from that screen. Uh, it's really cool, but be careful because you can do a lot of damage to your computer. But yeah, uh that has nothing to do with Telegraph Line, other than Field had promised this really cool cable to go across the ocean, and he didn't even have a company lined up that could make it. So there is a company out there um that he found called the Gouda Percha Company. And the gouda percha company, if you've if you've ever had a root canal, you have gouda percha in your mouth.

Kara 53:34

Not like cheese, right?

Ed 53:36

No, no, that'd be the gouda. This is the gota.

Kara 53:41

Got it.

Ed 53:42

So, yeah, gouda percha is a type of rubber that doesn't react with hardly anything. So if you ever get a root canal, they drill out the roots of your tooth and whatnot, and then they fill it full of that rubber because your body doesn't recognize it, otherwise it would get infected and then you have a problem. Uh, but that's what gouda percha is. And this company, they make rubber. Well, now they're gonna make a cable, and and so they ordered 2,500 miles of telegraph cable from Guda Percha in 1855, and they're like, cool, what's a telegraph cable? And so they had to figure that out real fast. So the Atlantic Telegraph Company didn't even exist until 1856. So, like, Field was really jumping the gun here. He was getting the cable ordered, he was getting investors lined up, he was getting everything going for something that didn't even exist yet. So, yeah, perfect. The uh ATC, as I like to call it for the Atlantic Telegraph Company, would be the entity that would be responsible for laying the cable. Cool. Yeah, a lot of pieces in motion here. So, what could possibly go wrong? Right? This is that that one of the first boxes that get checked here, like, okay, we've got this grand idea, and you know, this is how we're gonna fund it, this is how we're gonna make it, this is how we're gonna lay it, this is all that kind of stuff. Not realizing that, yeah. I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure West at this time wasn't like, man, I really hope I don't end up on a podcast about things failing in the 2020s, like that would suck. But if he did, that'd be kind of cool. I don't think he knew what a podcast was, but yeah, yeah, there wasn't any I don't even think the word pod or cast was ever used in the same sentence.

Kara 55:35

No, not even radio.

Ed 55:38

That's true, yeah. Cause that didn't come around for like another 60, 70 years. That's that's crazy. Um so let's look at this cable composition, just because I I find it kind of fascinating. And one for the structural engineers out there, you will probably identify a huge problem pretty quickly here. So the data handling cable uh consisted of seven copper wires woven together. Uh, this would have been about a quarter of an inch in diameter, and then they would put down three coats of this Guda Percha rubber. So now it's like a rubberized copper cable, and then they wound it in hemp covered in tar. So that's how they're gonna keep the water out of it, and then they encased that in a sheath of 18 strands of iron wires. So that was gonna give it its so-called strength. And that iron wire that was like when it was all said and done, it was about the diameter of a garden hose, and they obviously coated in more rubber and and all that kind of stuff. Let's just say one of the problems that they're they're gonna run into, and I'm just gonna kind of hint at it, is that one nautical mile of this cable weighed 1.1 tons, and I can already hear the structural engineers out there screaming like, what about the tensile strength? 1.1 tons going into water. What about the tensile strength? Where's the Kevlar? If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you will hear uh very early on in the first attempt to lay the cable. Keep in mind the word first, so you can already tell this isn't gonna end while the first go around. So, yeah, this thing was about the diameter of a garden hose, and the British government gave Field a subsidy of a whopping £1,400 per year or 170,000 pounds by uh today's standards. So that's not a lot of allowance to work off of, but okay. And they were also given some ships to help lay the cable. That's probably the biggest thing is Britain at this time was still the world's superpower when it came to a navy, and uh, so yeah, like, hey, we got some ships lying around, go for it. Uh, the U.S. Senate only passed a subsidy by one vote, and the so that was in the Senate, and then the House passed a similar margin, and then it was signed by uh President Franklin Pierce. So they gave a little bit of money, and I think they they loaned them one ship. So nice, not a lot to go off of here. As you could see, Field was bankrolling most of this, as well as his investors, where governments were kind of hesitant, and that that makes sense. Let's say we wanted to lay a wire from like an internet cable from here to Mars. Um that go for it, yeah. Like I I could totally see, like, if I want if I walked into Congress or Parliament and proposed, hey, I need you know, hundreds of billions of dollars to produce a cable that could go from here to Mars so that our Mars astronauts have internet when they get there, um, they're gonna be like, uh yeah, no, no, that just there's so much about that that doesn't sound right. Uh that's kind of like on par with what was being asked here of both governments. So, attempt number one. The cable-laying vessels were converted warships. So the British had the HMS Agamemnon, which it goes back to the uh uh what war was it? The Trojan War.

Kara 59:38

Yeah, I think so.

Ed 59:40

Agamemnon was one of the generals that one of the attacking generals, and then the USS and Niagara. The two ships were needed. You had to have two ships because no one ship could hold all 2,500 miles of cable. Think about it. Uh 2,500 times 1.1 tons. That's a lot of tons to be storing. Yeah. Above water. Yeah. So, like, that's just a lot of weight to have above water, and it's too heavy to put at the bottom of the boat as a ballast. So you yeah, so you had to split that up into two ships, and these ships were like sailing vessels, too. So that's a lot of weight that those sails have to get moving. Uh August 5th, 1857. The cable was planted at what is it, Bally Carberry Castle in Southwest Ireland. So they were trying to find the two pieces of land that would be as close together as possible, both on the American side and on the British side. So they're like, okay, we have a cable that goes from Ireland to Britain, so we don't need to worry about that. And then we have a cable that goes from Newfoundland down to New York. Cool. Well, we'll we'll keep those in place, and then let's just try to stretch this cable over the shortest possible distance in the Atlantic Ocean, which is still, you know, thousands of miles. Yeah. So they started laying the cable, right? They basically anchored into a freaking castle because they just assumed that the castle won't go anywhere. And they started sailing off into the horizon, and then the cable broke. Yay. And for the adults listening to this, do not play a drinking game where you take a hit or take a shot every time you hear the word break.

Kara 1:01:34

Yeah, I feel like that's gonna be a lot.

Ed 1:01:36

Yeah, yeah, you will not make it through the episode. It it's uh yeah, it's pretty uh it's good, it's gonna, it's gonna pile up here. So, yep, the first day, the cable broke. Like they didn't even make it to the horizon. They just see like the people at the castle just looking out, and then they see a bunch of men cussing and swearing on the boat, and then they see like the end of the cable just right into the ocean. And you know those key the people in the castle are like, oh, this is going to be this is this is gonna this is gonna be a process. So the broken cable was grappled and repaired. So again, we're gonna hear that word a lot, repaired. 300 plus miles later, the cable snapped again. But this time it dropped into a part of the ocean that was over 10,000 feet deep.

Kara 1:02:31

Sweet.

Ed 1:02:32

So if you do the math on that, uh, the hypotenuse of that, because don't forget, you have that cable, part of it's on the bottom of the ocean, and then you're having to lay down, going all the way down to that depth, and then it doesn't lay straight down, it angles. So all that weight, so if that thing is an over the course of five miles, right, that's 5.5 tons being pulled on the weakest part of that cable, which is the part that is coming right off the spool.

Kara 1:03:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ed 1:03:06

So that makes sense. I like that's where the uh the materials engineers out there, the structural engineers are just freaking out at this original design. It's that iron doesn't have a lot of tensile strength. It you it doesn't have a lot of strength when you pull on it. Uh, you can harden it and do all sorts of cool stuff with it, but in terms of tensile strength, it just doesn't have that much strength to it. If they had Kevlar back then, life would have been infinitely easier. But obviously, they didn't have that because, well, it's the 1800s of it all. So when that cable broke at 10,500 feet deep, they had lost 700 miles of cable.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:48

Oh my gosh.

Ed 1:03:49

Yeah, and there's no recovering that, there's no sending a uh a net or a hook over to try to find it. Uh yeah, no. So even though there is plenty of cable left to finish the job, a lot of investors wanted to pull out. They're like, this is not this is not going well. So a lot of the investors wanted to pull out, and this is where Field had to implement his expertise. He's like, I don't know anything about laying cables, but I've got to fight to uh keep everything together to keep this program going. Because he's like, guys, there are going to be things that go wrong. That's all there is to it. It's an engineering project.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:27

Yeah.

Ed 1:04:28

Yeah, it's gonna blow up. Like, that's normal.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:31

Yeah.

Ed 1:04:32

So a fight broke up between Field and Morse. So Morse wanted to kind of like shut everything down. He felt like because he was kind of wealthy too, and he was investing into this. Uh, Morse felt like this is a money pit, this is a bad idea, and Morse's attitude was kind of bringing everything down. So Field kicked him out. Okay. Bye-bye, Morse. He is no longer in the scene. I bet Morse, when this was all said and done, I bet he wished he had stuck around to the end a little bit, but hey, it's okay. Here he played his part. But because of this, though, and by the time when this broke, you know, you have winter rolling in, the North Atlantic isn't the most peaceful place in the world during the winter, and they're like, okay, let's just shut it down for the year. Okay, let's just try it again next year. So during this calendar year, uh, they did some investigation to try to figure out why the cable was snapping all the time. And they think it was really tied to the cable tensioning system. So you would have this giant spool that was like 20 feet in diameter with tons of cable on there, and when that spool would speed up, right? As the more cable you lay, the more weight you put on it, the more the cable is going to want to spin. So you have to. Break it. You have to have something in there to slow that spool down. Otherwise, it's just gonna go wee, and then next thing you know, you've got everything in the bottom of the ocean. The problem was the brakes weren't strong enough to slow the roll, literally, and that was one of the reasons why the cables were snapping. They spent that year fixing the braking system, fair enough. But a year later, the two ships uh tried again. And they messed up royally. For the year that they took off to sort out the uh the braking issue on the spool, they just let the cable sit outside, right?

Kara 1:06:41

That's always good for everything.

Ed 1:06:43

Yeah, yeah. Well, and and I can honestly, I could kind of see their logic behind it, but when you look back at it, it's a silly mistake. They're figuring, like, guys, there's nothing more hostile out there than the ocean. So I get that. Like, we can just let it sit outside where it's not being eaten by sharks and all sorts of crap. Uh, but that gouda percha is kind of susceptible to sunlight, and but even still, it's like this is Britain. Nobody in Britain has seen sunlight in thousands of years. It's just how it is. So, even still, you know, it it when you factor into salty air, the wind, the little bit of sunlight it does get, um, it's going to really deteriorate the coatings on that that cable. Many of the men who handled the cable on the second outing reported that it had gone to absolute crap. And that is kind of a word-for-word thing that they said. Uh, some of them used other words, stronger words. Yeah, that kind of sounds like shiitake mushrooms. Right, right, right. So, but obviously, what do they know? Like, yeah, they don't. They're just some deck hands, like, they don't know anything about this to these engineers. So, but these handlers were getting very frustrated with this. So, when they were trying to go about this, the second go run, they had more breakages, and I have to say, they got really good at fixing these things because as you'll find out, it's a bit of a process.

Kara 1:08:21

Yeah.

Ed 1:08:22

So, this time though, they did have a brighter idea. Instead of setting bow ships out in England and then just head them out at the same time, they met in the middle. So, like they kind of met in the middle, and they would connect the two cables, and then they would start sailing back to the respective coastlines. That's a pretty good idea because that means you don't have to have as much cable on one ship, and each ship isn't going as far. The only problem is that is also going to mean twice as many breaks than normal that you have to figure out. That's true. On June 10th, 1858, the ship set sail, and the cable broke after three nautical miles.

Kara 1:09:05

Okay.

Ed 1:09:06

So they haven't even made it over the horizon. Like, like, wait, the cable broke. You know, like they could yell at each other, I think, at that point.

Kara 1:09:15

Yeah.

Ed 1:09:16

But it gets worse. Then, after they repaired it, it broke after 54 miles.

Kara 1:09:21

Good.

Ed 1:09:22

And then it broke again after 200 miles. Oh, that's what we want to hear. So then it gets better. There was a massive storm that nearly sank the ships.

Kara 1:09:36

Oh, okay.

Ed 1:09:37

Yeah, and if you factor in that these ships were extremely top-heavy because you have they're sailing ships, right? Yeah, they're sailing ships at this point.

Kara 1:09:47

So you have the the sails on top of the cable that's on top of it. Yeah, yeah, that's a lot.

Ed 1:09:55

And when you're sailing, you have to have what's known as a ballast. You have to have a certain amount of weight on the bottom of your ship to keep it from wanting to tip over. But these spools were so heavy that they couldn't add enough ballast to the bottom of it without the whole thing wanting to sink.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:12

Yeah.

Ed 1:10:13

So these ships were very, very top heavy, and you get into the middle of a giant storm. Um, yeah, it's not going yeah, it's not gonna go well.

Kara 1:10:23

Yeah, that's that's bad.

Ed 1:10:25

So the storm was pretty bad. Uh, nobody got killed, but 45 men got seriously injured uh because they were falling and hitting their heads. Uh so yeah, they had to stop there. After this fiasco, directors and investors wanted to just scrap the whole project. They're like, this is this is a this is a dumpster fire. Yeah. Well, at that time, this is a nightmare. They had what what do Britons call their trash cans? Uh bins. This is a bin fire.

Kara 1:10:56

Right, right, right.

Ed 1:10:57

Yes. If you are our listener in England, uh feel free to write in and correct me if I'm not speaking English properly. Because there's American English and then there's England English, and um they don't line up, and then Australian English is woo! It's even more interesting. So again, Field had to come in with his superpower and add a like he he I just envision him like running to the doors and it's like putting his arms out, like, everybody stop, go back to your seats, you're not going anywhere. We're gonna figure this out. Uh wait, stop, don't go. Uh, it's almost like the uh third Oceans 11 movie, Oceans 13, where they try to replicate that earthquake in the casino, and then like everybody's just pouring out of the casino. That's what I that's kind of how I visualize it. Um, on July 17th, 1858, the two ships, so yeah, now yeah, we're now sometime later, the two ships set out to meet in the middle and hope for the best. So the idea was like, okay, let's do this for a third time, let's meet in the middle, let's try this again, but this time, no storms. Yay, and I'm not too sure how they engineered that.

Kara 1:12:21

Like maybe it was just lucky.

Ed 1:12:24

Yeah, I think they were just hoping, like, maybe the third time is a charm kind of a thing.

Kara 1:12:28

Yeah.

Ed 1:12:29

So I think the probably the biggest factor that made the third time work was that they had a modified braking mechanism on bow ships, and then the technicians uh heavily skilled now. Like these people are really good at fixing uh fixing this cable. So instead of having nothing break, they were just like, hey, let's get really good at fixing the brakes along the way. So that makes sense. Yeah, it it it I guess. I I would have liked to, if I was an investor, I'd be like, okay, yes, I get that you have a better braking system, and your technicians are really good at fixing brakes. And I know you guys are planning for no storms, but that still leaves a lot to chance. But hey, in this case, it worked out on August 4th, 1858. The Niagara uh landed in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, and the Agamemnon arrived in Valencia or Valentia Island on August 5th, 1858. So uh the British side landed about a day later, and there we go. It worked.

Kara 1:13:35

Did it?

Ed 1:13:35

Yeah, they they there finally existed a telegraph cable between America and England. Man, so that was a lot of breaking. There, yeah, a lot of breaking, but because of all this, both Britain and England celebrated hard. This was one of the greatest engineering feats in human history, uh, like since the pyramids. Like, like this was a massive, massive endeavor. And the first message that was sent over, um, it took about a week to uh get everything working. Um, one of the biggest issues was the electricity needed, right? The longer the wire, the thicker the wire, the more impurities the wire will have, which means more resistance, which means that more resistance is gonna make for a lot weaker signal.

Kara 1:14:32

So you need more electricity.

Ed 1:14:33

So, yeah, they and and you we will discover that that was kind of a mess in its own right because they had to calibrate the machines and everything. So, like, let's just dump a ton of electricity into it, as we will see that won't go over well. So, after about a week of fiddling with things, they finally got a message that said, directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, Great Britain to the directors in America, Europe and America are united by telegraph, glory to God and the highest on earth, peace, goodwill towards men. Sounds like a Christmas song.

Kara 1:15:09

I guess.

Ed 1:15:10

Yeah.

Kara 1:15:10

And this is also the same time period that Charles Dickens was writing his good old Christmas story.

Ed 1:15:19

Yeah, that's true. So it makes sense. So, yes, everybody still had Christmas Carol uh running through their minds. Um that's right.

Kara 1:15:29

We we're all in the spirit.

Ed 1:15:30

Yeah, there we go. In August.

Kara 1:15:34

Yes.

Ed 1:15:35

So Queen Victoria sent over a message expressing hope that the additional link between the nations whose friendly or whose friendship is founded on their common interests and reciprocal esteem. So that was Queen Victoria. Uh Queen Victoria was not known for her elaborate speeches, she was a very direct woman. And that's just how she was. You when you see pictures of her, you can immediately gauge her personality.

Kara 1:16:01

Yeah. She's a very no-nonsense lady.

Ed 1:16:05

Yeah.

Kara 1:16:05

Very no-nonsense. She knows what she wants, she knows how she wants to do it. And if you don't like that, then you can go pound sand.

Ed 1:16:12

Um, that or you come up with a really, really good reason um why it should be done differently. And if you did that, you did you were okay. But for the most part, she's like, no, this is what we're doing. And um, so yeah.

Kara 1:16:28

Yeah. Yeah, that's not to say that she wasn't open, like like you said, but yeah, she wasn't like a dictator or anything like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She wasn't crazy, she was just a very she was a strong woman. Let's just go with that.

Ed 1:16:42

Yeah, and she wasn't one of many words. So correct. Um, I'm trying to find now the response that America had.

Kara 1:16:55

Oh, from Buchanan.

Ed 1:16:57

Yeah, okay. So President Buchanan replied, uh, now one thing I want to keep in mind here is that uh the messages had to be decoded into Morse code or coded into Morse code. Uh Morse code, you don't just sound out every single letter. Like you actually use a lot of abbreviations. It's almost like old school texting language. Uh, so you do a lot of abbreviations and all that stuff, and then you have to transmit it, and then you have to receive it, and then you kind of have to like guess. Like then you had to decode it. Yeah, you had to decode it, but you also had to kind of guess like what they abbreviated and and whatnot. And it wasn't like America had and America and Britain didn't have like a unified system, so they would have to kind of guess what the abbreviations were, and it could take hours to decode even a simple message. So, like I think Victoria's message took like 16 hours to transmit and decode and read. Hey, that is still like as you were saying before we started recording. Better than like that is way better than weeks.

Kara 1:18:06

Two weeks or yeah. Like, so it's it's improvement. It's definitely improvement.

Ed 1:18:12

Yeah.

Kara 1:18:12

16 hours is better than a couple of weeks, especially when you're communicating amongst two different countries that are allies with each other.

Ed 1:18:21

Yeah, and in a world where a war could break out and you need these two countries to be literally on the same page.

Kara 1:18:29

Yeah, remember, this is the time period where everybody's expecting war to come.

Ed 1:18:34

Yeah.

Kara 1:18:35

And it does in like 50, 60 years.

Ed 1:18:40

So President Buchanan replies, so that's why I wanted to bring up how long it took to send a message. President Buchanan replies, it is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind than was ever won by a conqueror on the field of battle. May the Atlantic telegraph under the blessings of heaven prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument dis an instrument destined by divine providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world.

Kara 1:19:22

Wow. It's very romantic.

Ed 1:19:24

Yeah, yeah. Buchanan really wanted to kind of upstage England a little bit. So, yeah, Victoria's message ultimately was 98 words, and it took 16 hours to send. Buchanan's was like over 150, and it took like two days to send. I feel bad for like these British transcribers, like, oh my gosh, when is this guy gonna stop? They're just trying to just keep going. Like, oh, this guy is just won't shut up. So, but needless to say, like, even two days was insanely fast. And uh, America and Britain, they were throwing parties, uh, they had parades that ran for days. Um, and in America, in England, as uh both telegrams, like both sides telegrams were just rolling in. And what's funny is that on September 1st, a parade with fireworks took place. Um, I can't remember what city it was, but the uh town hall caught on fire and burned down. It's like that's such a drunk American way of doing things.

Kara 1:20:39

I was I was gonna say leave it to the Americans to do something like that.

Ed 1:20:44

Fire your muskets in the air. However, the celebration was short-lived in early September. So this had only just been a few weeks. Uh, in early September, the telegraph cable went silent. Naturally, the media went nuts about portraying the cable as an absolute failure. So, somewhere along the line, it died. And the media was they just switched gears and like, okay, let's roast uh this whole endeavor. It's a complete waste of time and money and all that stuff.

Kara 1:21:15

A sensational story. That's how they made their money.

Ed 1:21:18

Yeah, yeah, there wasn't much integrity. Um, it was just a uh, oh wait, people are buying newspapers because this is a huge success. Now people found, oh crap, the wire just broke, and now let's sell more newspapers talking about how this was such a disaster.

Kara 1:21:34

Yep, facts.

Ed 1:21:35

Uh, some outlets went so far to state that the whole thing was actually a media stunt and a hoax. Like the cable never even existed, the messages never existed. So we're talking like QAnon stuff here, just like conspiracy theory. Um lovely. Yeah, they like we never landed on the moon. Um, so now we are going to be introduced to Wildman White House. So Wildman White House versus William Thompson. Uh, while there were issues at sea trying to lay the stupid cable, there were heated conflicts between White House and Thompson. Whitehouse was the chief electrical engineer for the project. The guy had zero engineering or physics background. Uh, he was a medical doctor, turned telegraph enthusiast, and he was the chief scientist during the laying of this first cable. He also wasn't very liked by the board. He kind of had a really standoffish personality that people didn't like, and many kind of just treated him as a fraud. But hey, he was friends with the the right people. Um, White House had many theories as to why the signal in the initial line was so weak and slow, and all of them were wrong. So the cable broke. Thompson was the guy who later became known as Lord Kelvin. Uh, he was the guy that created the Kelvin system of measurement and all that kind of stuff for temperature.

Kara 1:23:18

So not to say that doctors aren't scientists, just a different type of scientist.

Ed 1:23:23

Yeah, like I think Kelvin or Thompson, even he went so far as to say, like, hey, I'm not a medical doctor. I I'm uh I have a PhD in physics, yeah, but I'm not gonna operate on somebody the same way that I would hope a surgeon isn't coming in here to tell me how to do my job with you know physics, right? Everybody's got their place. Whitehouse's theory was that, and and this was where it he was really wrong. Um, the the theory was that okay, the reason why the signal was so weak was because there wasn't enough electricity.

Kara 1:24:05

Okay.

Ed 1:24:05

So he wanted to send up to 2,000 volts into the line because he thought, okay, it's thousands of miles long. Right.

Kara 1:24:15

We'll just pump electricity into it.

Ed 1:24:18

Yeah. Yeah, like the the American way. Let's just put more power into it. This was a disaster. That much current messed with the insulation and caused leaks.

Kara 1:24:30

Okay.

Ed 1:24:31

So now you've got a lot of electricity and a lot of salt water. That much current mixed with the calcium and the iron and salt water will cause the exposed metal to corrode violently. You can do this at home. You can take uh like a nine-volt battery, put one wire on the negative end, and put the positive wire on you know on the other contact, put both ends into a cup of salt water, and you will see little bubbles coming off, and that is the electricity is separating the hydrogen from the oxygen, and it releases the gas, but you're also corroding the wire, like you're sacrificing the wire to it's a uh yeah, it when you and that more electricity runs through it, the faster it corrodes. Thompson, who became Lord Kelvin, was an actual physicist and a scientist, but was uh he was forced to work under uh White House. Thompson said that the weak signal and what was this guy's first name? What I uh Sir William Thompson. I just I just know him as Lord Kelvin. Um, but yeah, William Thompson, an actual physicist. Uh Thompson uh became Lord Kelvin, was an actual physicist and a scientist who had to work for White House. Like White House is one of these guys that just like he just knew the right people and he was put in charge. Thompson said the weak signal is due to a process called electrical retardation, where the signals get weakened by impurities in the copper, and that sending a higher voltage will only make things worse. So, to correct the problem, Thompson built what became known as the mirror galvanometer. It's basically a signal amplifier. Um, so it could accept a weak signal and it would increase, like it would amplify it. So instead of amplifying it before it gets to the wire across the ocean, it would amplify right there uh upon receiving it. Therefore, you don't need to run thousands of current thousands of volts of current through it. Uh White House refused to go on trips. So, like, white you'd be thinking like the guy who's in charge should be out in the ocean on one of these ships. Trying to figure it out, you know, keeping an eye on things, but White House, yeah. Uh let's just say he liked the comfortable side of life.

Kara 1:27:03

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Ed 1:27:05

Yeah, he wasn't really big into like leaving his house or anything like that. He had money and he liked to be comfortable. So White House refused to go on the trips on the American side as he always had an excuse. He was the kind of guy that always had something come up. But Thompson was on these ships, especially on the British side, and he was on his own on the British side, which he was fine with because the two just fought constantly.

Kara 1:27:36

Yeah, probably be not productive anyway.

Ed 1:27:39

Uh yeah, especially if they were on the same boat.

Kara 1:27:41

Yeah.

Ed 1:27:42

Uh White House was adamant that Thompson was wrong. And while Thompson was around, White or yeah, while Thompson was around, White House would cram. So, sorry, when Thompson wasn't around, White House would basically crank up the electricity and run. 2,000 plus volts into the line without Thompson knowing about it.

Kara 1:28:05

Sweet.

Ed 1:28:06

When Victoria announced her message, uh, White House said he never got it because his signal was too weak. He said it would take four to five weeks to adjust things. However, he said he got uh got it on 817, so August 17th, but never told anyone. So he received the message and he told everybody, yeah, it's gonna take weeks to get this out. But what he didn't say was that he was actually using Thompson's mural galvanometer.

Kara 1:28:39

Yeah.

Ed 1:28:39

He was using that on the side, not telling anybody.

Kara 1:28:43

Yeah, he was too proud.

Ed 1:28:44

Uh yeah. Yep. And he actually retransmitted Victoria's message to his own equipment to make it look like he got it.

Kara 1:28:54

Nice.

Ed 1:28:55

So, yeah, so he just didn't want to be wrong.

Kara 1:28:59

He didn't want to admit Thomas was right.

Ed 1:29:01

Exactly. And he went to great lengths to make it so that he was right. And don't forget, Thompson's machine needed a person to translate the message. Yeah. And White House's device, he wanted to use the ticker, like the piece of paper and the pencil marking it, uh, dots and dashes and stuff like that. Uh-huh. So what White House did is he received it and then he quickly transmitted it to his own device where it had the dots and dashes, and that's how he was able to prove that, oh, it was my machine that received the signal. So really, really shady. Uh with the cable completely dead, and Thompson proving he was right with actual science. So uh Thompson kind of prevailed here on parts of the cable dredged up. So this is kind of how they caught it. Parts of the cable that were dredged up, it was evident that 2,000 volts of electricity damaged the cable beyond all recognition. Like it was yeah, like tore it up. Yeah, he brought it into like the board and he plopped down this cable that was fried. And like, yeah, and this is the reason why we don't use 2,000 volts through this because mixed with salt water, bad deal. So, needless to say, White House was immediately fired. Yeah, so that was the reason why that cable, that initial cable failed uh so so horribly, even though it lasted for like a couple of weeks. So after this fiasco, any notion of a transatlantic cable or a telegraph cable was put on the back burner. Um, in America, uh 1860s, early 1860s, the priority wasn't a transatlantic cable.

Kara 1:30:53

Uh there was considering there was a civil war going on, that makes sense.

Ed 1:30:58

Yeah, yeah, there was that there was that slight issue with slavery, and states were leaving the union left and right, uh, a little war broke out. So from 18 the late 1850s to 1864, back burner, like yeah, America was not going to spend any money on this.

Kara 1:31:22

I mean, that's fair.

Ed 1:31:23

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I I I could see, like, hey, let's address this, and then yeah, we'll get back to it. Yeah, we'll get back to it when it's all over. So now we fast forward to 1864, and Field was back at it uh with another attempt. Um, he somehow got some more people, either they were really, really generous or they were very gullible. But Field kind of like changed the company to uh the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, or Telcon for short. And that is such a uh that is such a title for like like a uh telecommunications company name for the 1800s.

Kara 1:32:08

Yeah, it's not bad.

Ed 1:32:09

Like Telcon is something that I would see in you know Silicon Valley.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:15

Mm-hmm.

Ed 1:32:16

So yeah, I thought that was kind of like a little ahead of its time. So now we enter Cromwell Fleetwood Varley.

Kara 1:32:24

Also a good name.

Ed 1:32:26

Yes, yes. I did I kind of wish his last name was Mac.

Kara 1:32:29

Right.

Ed 1:32:29

Cromwell Fleetwood Mac.

Kara 1:32:31

That would really make it all full circle.

Ed 1:32:33

That would be amazing. Uh, after the canning of White House, Varley was made the chief electrical engineer. Um, he made a name for himself in England as the guy who developed tools for detecting faults in the 1850s attempts, as well as other telegraph lines in Europe. So this guy knew the telegraph lines, he knew how to identify problems and fix them. He developed a device that could actually tell you where the fault was, which is huge if you think about it.

Kara 1:33:01

Yeah, that's nice.

Ed 1:33:02

Like those old Christmas trees before LED. If you had a Christmas light go out in your tree, your tree would be dead, and you would have to investigate all like every one of them, every single little light bulb to figure out which one went out.

Kara 1:33:16

Pop the new one on, oh, nope, pop it out, pop the new one on.

Ed 1:33:19

Yeah, but now you can go buy a device that you can just basically connect it to the wire and it will tell you exactly where the brake is, which is really, really impressive. So he also worked very well with uh Mr. Thompson, who is now Lord Kelvin, to research and improve telegraph lines. So Varley worked with the Glass, Elliott, and Guda percha companies to make a new cable, but this thing was on steroids. Instead of a core of seven copper wires, uh weight of 107 pounds per uh nautical mile, the new one was seven cables of ultra pure copper at 300 pounds per mile.

Kara 1:34:00

Nice.

Ed 1:34:00

Instead of a coating, uh coating the core with just Guda Percha, the new core would be coated with Chatterton's compound, which is a three parts Guda Percha, one part uh rosin, and one part Stockholm tar. So I don't I'm not too sure what all that stuff is, but I don't either.

Kara 1:34:19

That's gibberish to me, but it's fine. If it works, it works.

Ed 1:34:22

Yeah, rosin I know is like tree sap.

Kara 1:34:24

Got it.

Ed 1:34:25

So it's a really sticky tree sap, but Stockholm tar.

Kara 1:34:29

I'm just gonna go with tar.

Ed 1:34:31

Yes. Yeah, we'll just go with tar. Yeah. After the tar, four coats of Guda Percha would be would be applied in alternating layers, resulting in an insulator that weighed 400 pounds per mile. The core cable was then coated in layers of hemp soaked in a strong preservative. I'm not sure what that was, but cool. Uh, instead of being surrounded by seven, actually supposed to be 18 iron wires, the new cable was encased in 18 high tensile strength steel wire. So this is wire that has been hardened to actually have tensile strength, so you can't pull it and break it. Each steel wire was coated in manila yarn steeped in preservatives. So the old wire cable weighed about 2,000 pounds per mile, the new cable weighed about 4,000 pounds per mile. Sick. And it was like, I think it was like the diameter of like a fire hose.

Kara 1:35:36

Nice.

Ed 1:35:36

So this thing meant business. Uh 26,000 nautical miles was produced in like 11 months with 250 workers working on this 24-7. So no brakes or anything. To really drive the point home, they're like, okay, we need a boat. And boy, did boats come a little ways before, during, and after the Civil War. Uh, enter the gargantuan SS SSS, the SS Great Eastern to lay the cable. Total length was 642 feet with a tonnage capacity of 19,000 tons, uh, a displacement of 32,000 tons. So this thing, even like this thing could handle like another 14,000 tons if needed. Uh, the propulsion, now we are into uh four steam engines to power the paddles. So it looked like those giant steam paddle, not giant, but those like going up and down the Mississippi River, those those steam-powered paddle boats that would go up and down, that's kind of what it looked like. And then it had an additional engine for the propeller totaling 8,000 horsepower. So yeah, that's a lot, but for 1800s, that is wild. Yeah, and this thing could at max speed of 14 to 16 or 14 knots or 16 miles per hour. It could have a personnel capacity of 4,000 passengers with nine complement of yeah, with five complement and an additional 418 crew. Uh, even though it was a passenger ship, it was heavily modified to lay this beast of a cable. So on July 15th, 1865, the great Eastern set out from London, England to land in a loved one I I could actually live here. Hearts content Newfoundland. Cute. Yeah, I feel like there's like epic high school dances there. Just like or Valentine's Day must be just exquisite. And I also feel like the people there would be really nice.

Kara 1:37:49

Yeah.

Ed 1:37:50

So um set up from London, mind you, not Ireland, set up from London, England, and they landed in Hearts Content, Newfoundland on August 2nd, after 1,062 miles, the cable snapped.

Kara 1:38:07

Of course. It's so close.

Ed 1:38:10

Like so, and I bet when that thing snapped, given how big that cable was, that must have been devastating. I don't know if you've ever seen videos of like whenever those anchor chains break on those like aircraft carriers, and then that chain comes whipping back like that is terrifying. So they're like, Well, crap, back to England, they went. So Field put together another company. This guy is just like, hey, if everything that fails is new company and new name. Yeah. Um my guess is it probably had to do with like insurance stuff and whatnot. But uh Field put together the Anglo-American company with even more investors to not only lay the initial cable, but to come back and fix splice the broken one that was snapped before to create two functioning cables. July 13th, 1866, the great eastern sent out to Hearts Content, where it landed uh about two weeks later on July 27th, 1866. Uh severe weather did plague the trip, but the captain and the crew were just like at this point, it was a matter of principle.

Kara 1:39:34

Yeah, we were just all right, we have to do this because now I'm just annoyed.

Ed 1:39:39

Yeah, like we we we don't care if the boat sinks. We are getting this thing laid no matter what. Lane? Lane? Lead. Lade. Okay. Uh Daniel Gooch, another epic name, who was a chief engineer for the telecom, uh for telecom, announced while on the Great Eastern that a perfect connection had been made. So what they were doing this time was they're using that mirror galvanometer doohickey, as well as that other thing that that other guy came up with, the uh other chief engineer, what was his name? I don't remember uh Varley.

Kara 1:40:21

Oh yeah.

Ed 1:40:22

They were constantly checking this like multiple times a day to make sure that nothing was broken. And if something did break, they could just go back and fix it, rather than getting 300 miles down and then having to go 300 miles back to fix it and then go back three. Yeah, here they could just fix it on the fly, which was ingenious. Daniel Gooch, who was a chief engineer, telcon, announced while on the Great Eastern that a perfect connection had been made. So, victory.

Kara 1:40:54

Yay.

Ed 1:40:55

So they took a little bit of time off, it took like a couple weeks off. Um, in August, the Great Eastern and a fleet of ships sent out from the American side and to find and fix the uh the broken cable from a year prior. On the 10th of August, one of the ships in the fleet snagged the broken cable, believe it was the uh um, I think it was the Albany. The Albany was the first one to find it. They snagged the broken cable, and literally this was like a one in a million chance.

Kara 1:41:32

Nice.

Ed 1:41:33

Like they would what they would do is they would sail like east and west, and they would just drag a uh treble hook behind it and hope hope they grab it, hope for the best. Yeah, and the albony was like picked it up really, really fast. The problem was is that um the albony was too small to be able to bring the cable up and repair it, so they like they got it, and then they dropped it again because the boat was too small, but by this time they marked it and yeah, they great Eastern then came over and um basically yeah, fixed it after two days of searching. The cable was found, and after 26 hours, it was repaired. On September 7th, 1866, the Great Eastern landed in Heart's content with a new cable. Um, now the world had two very powerful transatlantic cables. Uh, the two cables remained functional for decades, and in the early 1900s, technology improved, so the transmission speed went from 0.1 word per minute uh in 1858 to 120 words per minute.

Kara 1:42:47

Nice.

Ed 1:42:48

Now we're talking like actual. Yeah, now you can send like news articles back and forth and stuff like that. Uh by the end of the 19th century, four more transatlantic cables were laid, linking America to Britain, France, Germany, and Europe as a whole. And by today's standards, I think there are like almost hundreds of cables that go back and forth.

Kara 1:43:15

Yeah. So crazy what you don't see, everything that's down there.

Ed 1:43:20

Yeah, it would be kind of interesting to drain the oceans and to see all the all the crap that's on the ocean floor. Yeah. And that is the dumpster fire. Um, that is the transatlantic telegraph wire.

Kara 1:43:33

There it is.

Ed 1:43:34

And as you can see, it checks all the boxes.

Kara 1:43:38

It sure does. Yeah. I do like the happy ending, though. That's nice.

Ed 1:43:41

Yeah, yeah. They have the it was good to see that this ultimately worked, and it was good to also see that as things were going wrong on the first three attempts, they're like, okay.

Kara 1:43:54

They fixed the problems that they saw, and then they tried it again, then they fixed it, then they tried it again. Yeah.

Ed 1:43:58

Yep. And they were willing to fire people that were like actively holding the process back. Yeah, yeah, it worked out. White House. So yeah, it was cool that they ultimately got it working in the end. It was I I think a lot was learned from this whole thing. Uh nowadays, if you look at one of these cables, they're like 18 inches in diameter. Yeah, they are massive, and you can actually buy cross-sections of them, like for like demonstration purposes. Uh, I that they're like hundreds of dollars uh for like a six-inch diameter one, but it's like cable within cable within cable within cable. And there's uh I'm sure you could find pictures of them. Oh, yeah, you can find pictures of it. I I would still love to get one and kind of like frame it because the engineering that goes into that is just wild. Um, but yeah, no, it was it was cool to see that there was a lot learned from it. Um, I'm pretty sure that there's people that are laying these cables today probably researched or read textbooks back from the 1850s. Like, okay, what do we need to be aware of? And also probably helps too that these ships can carry all that cable and uh they're not affected by by weather.

Kara 1:45:17

Yeah.

Ed 1:45:18

Because they're so massive.

Kara 1:45:20

Well, yeah, it's fine. So figuring it out.

Ed 1:45:23

Yeah, let's take care of some house cleaning stuff.

Kara 1:45:28

Yeah. So if you want to suggest an episode or a topic that you want us to go over, you can reach us on our Instagram. We have a website that you can reach us at, or you can email us at thedaysumpserfire at gmail.com. We also have, I don't know if has released it yet, but we have a QR code that will send you right to our website so it makes it faster on your phone.

Ed 1:45:52

Yeah, so like the what the idea is that we want to grow our audience, and the one way to do it is you guys. So what I created was a QR code that you can just keep on your phone, like on your digital wallet or whatever, and you are capable of just showing that to somebody. It's really cool. Like, and it doesn't matter if it's an iPhone or an Android or whatever, you just show them that picture. It has our old logo on it because we actually changed it, but it still works. Uh, they can scan that QR code and it takes it, takes that person straight to our website where they can subscribe to the podcast as well as look at all of our back catalog of stuff, um, including Kara's artwork. So um, if you look at our artwork now on like Spotify and YouTube and all that stuff, uh we changed the logo from like our eight-bit little dumpster fire thing to a masterpiece that Kara drew for it. Um it's really kind of cool looking. Yeah, it's pretty neat. We yeah, so make sure you go out and tell people about this. Like, I find that the easiest thing to do is you bring it up, even to your dentist. Like, just bring it up everywhere you go. And because it's like, hey, you know some podcasters, right? We are super big time famous. Yeah.

Kara 1:47:23

Yeah.

Ed 1:47:24

We're huge.

Kara 1:47:25

Oh us. Yeah, we're doing great.

Ed 1:47:27

Yeah, we're like the number one dumpster fire related podcast in like New Zealand or something like that.

Kara 1:47:34

Yeah, so share the QR code. Yep. And uh, we would greatly appreciate it. If you want to leave us a review, that would be really cool too, because that does help us out as well. Um, and any anything that you listen to. I know Apple is super big on reviews, so that'd be cool.

Ed 1:47:49

Yeah, and we got that, uh, we've also got that text messaging thing. So we have a link on it um in our show notes as well as on our website. But if you actually wanted to send us a text message, uh, you can send something. We've already had one, so shout out to Nathaniel for reaching out to us. He wanted to know how much we like democracy. I'm a fan of it. So yep, ready to go, Nathaniel. So yeah, you could send a text message. Uh, it's not something that we can easily reply to, it's not designed for that. It's just something that, hey, you send us a text message, and we will we will shout out to you during an episode which will make you ultra super famous, sort of.

Kara 1:48:32

Yeah, so yeah, that's kind of cool. But um, those are the ways that you can get a hold of us, and we'll we'll uh keep talking to you guys about fires.

Ed 1:48:41

Yeah, so I guess and in the meantime, keep it a hot mess. Bye. Bye.