Stephen reviewed The Cable by Gillian Cookson
Review of 'The Cable' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Small, printed-on-demand book that almost entirely scratched my itch about how this telegraph cable came about. Looking back now just seems bonkers that people thought "well we managed a 20mi one, what about a 2000mi one?".
The answer is massive investor hype and hubris. There's some amazing quotes about how there will be dozens of lines around the world, and war will never happen again. Then it turns out that it's hard. Originally I thought there was a bit too much information about how the investment was raised, but then it turns out that in 1865 or so most of the investors and nearly all the inventors got stabbed in the back to raise the last £100k or so. Wild stuff.
More technical information on the cable would be nice, the author refers to "improved duplex signalling" and I can't work out what that is, although I suspect it's using …
Small, printed-on-demand book that almost entirely scratched my itch about how this telegraph cable came about. Looking back now just seems bonkers that people thought "well we managed a 20mi one, what about a 2000mi one?".
The answer is massive investor hype and hubris. There's some amazing quotes about how there will be dozens of lines around the world, and war will never happen again. Then it turns out that it's hard. Originally I thought there was a bit too much information about how the investment was raised, but then it turns out that in 1865 or so most of the investors and nearly all the inventors got stabbed in the back to raise the last £100k or so. Wild stuff.
More technical information on the cable would be nice, the author refers to "improved duplex signalling" and I can't work out what that is, although I suspect it's using the second cable (after the third one).