Heroes of the Telegraph

In the beginning of 1859 he made the acquaintance of Sir William Thomson, his future friend and partner. Mr. Lewis Gordon, of Messrs. R. S. Newall & Co., afterwards the earliest professor of engineering in a British University, was then in Glasgow seeing Sir William's instruments for testing and signalling on the first Atlantic cable during the six weeks of its working. Mr. Gordon said he should like to show them to 'a young man of remarkable ability,' engaged at their Birkenhead Works, and Jenkin, being telegraphed for, arrived next morning, and spent a week in Glasgow, mostly in Sir William's class-room and laboratory at the old college. Sir William tells us that he was struck not only with Jenkin's brightness and ability, but with his resolution to understand everything spoken of; to see, if possible, thoroughly into every difficult question, and to slur over nothing. 'I soon found,' he remarks, 'that thoroughness of honesty was as strongly engrained in the scientific as in the moral side of his character.' Their talk was chiefly on the electric telegraph; but Jenkin was eager, too, on the subject of physics. After staying a week he returned to the factory; but he began experiments, and corresponded briskly with Sir William about cable work. That great electrician, indeed, seems to have infected his visitor during their brief contact with the magnetic force of his personality and enthusiasm.