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from the industry

Engineering laid bare

The 150th anniversary of the first communication cables to be laid across the Atlantic Ocean, connecting Europe with the US, is being celebrated between now and 22 January 2017 in a free exhibition entitled ‘Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy’ at the City of London Corporation’s Guildhall Art Gallery. Special curator talks on the exhibition will take place on 15 December 2016 and 19 January 2017 . This exciting collaboration between Guildhall Art Gallery, King’s College London, The Courtauld Institute of Art and the Institute of Making at University College London explores how the first telegraph cables connecting the continents transformed communications with rare artefacts relating to their use and manufacture. This exhibition features four themed rooms (Distance, Resistance, Transmission and Coding) featuring samples of Victorian transatlantic cables, one-of-a-kind prototype transmitters and devices developed by Victorian telegraphy pioneer, Charles Wheatstone. ‘The Great Grammatizor’, a special messaging machine to encourage the public to take part in the exhibition, and paintings by prominent Victorian artists will also be on display. The exhibition showcases samples of cables used in early British and French transatlantic telegraphs. These worked by sending electric signals down a copper core formed of seven wires

It took nine years, four attempts and three cables until the Victorians successfully installed two transatlantic telegraphs from Valentia Island in Ireland to Newfoundland in Canada on 27 July 1866 and 7 September 1866 . The ability to send messages across continents in minutes (approximately one minute for every eight words) for the first time was a ‘moon landing moment’ for communications and telegraphic engineering, and (similar to the internet in recent decades) it sparked opportunities for businesses, governments, military forces and the public that were previously unimaginable. “The cores of early submarine cables were too thin and produced electrical effects that interfered with the sending of signals. Charles Wheatstone and other scientists therefore developed devices that amplified weak signals and improved our understanding of how electricity behaves. On display at the Guildhall Art Gallery is Wheatstone's own prototype of the famous Wheatstone Bridge, a device used to discover an unknown resistance from known ones, and a Resistance Box that allowed engineers to create 'dummy' circuits of any length and resistance for experimenting with and testing equipment,” said the City of London Corporation.

For further details, see www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/victoriansdecoded

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Vol. 38 No. 4 - November 2016 Issue