The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph

While this scene is going on on board ship, we may turn to the other end of the line. It may be well supposed that the result of this attempt was watched with deep interest at Valentia. How they looked for the first signal from the deep, and how the tidings came, is thus told in the London Spectator: "Night and day, for a whole year, an electrician has always been on duty, watching the tiny ray of light through which signals are given, and twice every day the whole length of wire--one thousand two hundred and forty miles--has been tested for conductivity and insulation.... The object of observing the ray of light was of course not any expectation of a message, but simply to keep an accurate record of the condition of the wire. Sometimes, indeed, wild, incoherent messages from the deep did come, but these were merely the results of magnetic storms and earth-currents, which deflected the galvanometer rapidly, and spelt the most extraordinary words, and sometimes even sentences of nonsense. Suddenly, last Sunday morning, at a quarter to six o'clock, while the light was being watched by Mr. May,[B] he observed a peculiar indication about it, which showed at once to his experienced eye that a message was at hand. In a few minutes afterward the unsteady flickering was changed to coherency, if we may use such a term, and at once the cable began to speak, to transmit, that is, at regular intervals, the appointed signals which indicated human purpose and method at the other end, instead of the hurried signs, broken speech, and inarticulate cries of the illiterate Atlantic. After the long interval in which it had brought us nothing but the moody and often delirious mutterings of the sea, stammering over its alphabet in vain, the words 'Canning to Glass' must have seemed like the first rational word uttered by a high-fevered patient, when the ravings have ceased and his consciousness returns."