The Sun.
London, England, 1858-09-29 00:00:00

THE ATLANTIC TELEGRAPH.

(From the Mechanics' Magazine.)
Mr. Whitehouse, the late electrician to the At-
lantic Telegraph Company, considers that he has a
grievance against the directors, on account of his
services having been dispensed with. It is an un-
fortunate affair that any bickering should arise at
such a critical period, though of very little interest,
except so far as the great object in view—the re-
pairing of the present cable, or the successful lay-
ing and working of another—is concerned ;he has
evidently been, to say the least, .very imprudent.
Mr. Whitehouse has also taken occasion to pen a
long history of the under taking, which would be
very interesting and valuable but for the vanity,
jealousy, and animus against his colleagues, who
have been more successfil than himself, pervading
the whole statement, which places him in a very
unenviable light in the eyes of all who consider
candour and sincerity to be necessary attributes of
a. really scientific man.
It is clear froth-the lienitaient Alit"
he wishes to ignore the wi.rk of those with whom
he co-operated in the projection of the Atlantic line
as much as possible, and his narrative of the first
establishment of the company, and the experiments
which preceded it, can only .be accepted with some
deductions from his own share, and from the import-
ance of his labours as chronicled by himself, and
some additional prominence to the exertions of others
who contributed in reality far more to the inaugura-
tion and carrying out of the project.
Mr. Brett, Sir Charles Bright, and Mr. Field,
who were co-promoters with him of the original
company, are put aside as much as possible, and it
appears that everything that was done rightly was
done by himself or at his suggestion, while it is
equally manifest that he had no part in anything
that is open to censure. We are to believe, for
instance, that he thought the experiments which
took place at the Magnetic Telegraph-office in
Old Broad-street, in 1856, insufficient that
the results were incontinently published_
and that, if he had carried out his own wishes,
they would have been repeated again and
again before he would have regarded them as a
guide in so great an operation. Yet Mr. White-
house, in a letter published in the .iithenmunz, Oct.
11, 1856, speaks of this experiment as " the most
triumphant success," as a " matter of fact proof,"
and considers it a sufficient test to put an end to all
doubt as to the . validity of his previous theories,
which Professor W. Thompson had doubted ; he
was also a party as a promoter of the company to
letters written at the time by Professor Morse, and
published with the prospectus, which had as their
basis the experiment in question.
We should not have felt called upon to offer so
severe a comment upon Mr. Whitehouse's mani-
festo but for the ungenerous and invidious attack,
of which lie has made it the cloak upon the engi-
neering department, the dangers and discomforts of
which he has avoided, and of which his own nar-
rative shows him to be entirely ignorant.
Nothing has been done there according to his
taste, although the result of the engineer's work
has been that the cable has been laid, and signals
stronger than those passed through it when on
shore at Kevham received at Valentia from New-
foundland, while he has in his own department met
with little success in turning those signals to ac-
count.

He criticises the machinery which was made
with the advice and co-operation -of some of the
first engineers of the day, by one of the most
celebrated mechanical firms in London, and which
has done its work most satisfactorily, accord-
ing to the testimony of the engineers on board
both ships. lie is apparently forgetful, or un-
able to believe that those eminent men whose lives
have been devoted to the study-and-practice of en-
gineering arc more likely to know how a machine
should be constructed for a given purpose than him-
self, who, two years since, was gaining his liveli-
hood as a surgeon in a provincial town, who appears
since that time to have disappointed everybody
with whom he has been engaged, and finally to
have become bitterly disappointed himself.
Another source of cavilling against the engineer
of the company is, that the rough weather
made the ship go faster than it otherwise would
hare been allowed to do, and that this greatly re-
lieved the strain upon the cable, and made it.unne-
cessary to use so much break power as would have
otherwise been called for, and hence that some of
the credit ascribed to the engineer is not his due,
but the result of the good fortune which he en-
countered in meeting with bad weather. Can
there ever have been before so childish an ex-
hibition of petty spite and jealousy as this ? It
is as little worthy of serious Criticism as other
parts of the document which are couched in a simi-
lar strain ; but it is right to recall remembrance to
the fact that Sir Charles Bright's calculations as
regard speed appear to have been pretty nearly
carried out, for in a pamphlet published by the
directors of the company in July, 1857, before the
departure of the expedition of last year, his antici-
pation of the rate at which it was desirable the pay-
ing-out vessels should move is fixed at from
four to five miles per hour, and the actual run by
the Agamemnon this year of 815 miles was made
as nearly as possible at the average rate of five
miles per hour, the rate of the Niagara being very
nearly the same.
Mr. Whitehouse also endeavours, in an indi-
rect manner, to disparage the benefits which he
gained from becoming associated with one of his
partners who had much experience in the con-
struction and working of telegraphs, at a time
when his own knowledge was altogether confined
to theory ; but, in an article which he communi-
cated to the Engine3r of Jan. 23, 1857, and after-
wards reprinted himself, he tells a very different
tale. Ile there says ;—" In these experiments I

The report of Mr. Varley, the (electrician to the
Electric Telegraph Company (who has recently
been consulted by the Atlantic Company, together
with Professor Thompson, Mr. Edward Bright,
Mr. Henley, and others practically versed in tele-
graphic matters), places the fault at about 270
statute miles distant in the cable, from which must
be deducted 22 per cent. for slack, to give the dis-
tance to be run by a steamer in reaching it.
He also states, from the data of testing prior to
the departure of the expedition to lay the cable,
that there was then a serious fault in it (which
Nust have escaped the notice of the late electrician
or the company, in whose department the proper
electrical condition and insulation of the conductor
was), in addition to the defect
,alyn-c-mentioned,
which has since supervened.'
He further condemns the employment of such
intense currents as have been passed into the cable
since its subineigence by 'Mr. Whitehouse's appa-
ratus, which he considers may not improbably have
injured its insulation. "
If these opinions are correct (and we believe that
the power of the currents used is held by those
who have the greatest experience in the testing
and working of telegraphic wires in this country
to be sufficient to account for the impaired insula-
tion of the line), it is of the utmost importance that
the greatest possible care should be exerted with all
future undertakings of the kind to seek for and ob-
tain the best possible advice of a practical kind from
the very outset of their operations.