History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications
from the first submarine cable of 1850 to the worldwide fiber optic network

The Electric Telegraph Company of Ireland
by Steven Roberts

The Electric Telegraph Company of Ireland was promoted in December 1851 with a capital of £500,000 for an underground road-side line from Dumfries in Scotland, where a connection was to be made with the mainland circuits, westwards to an underwater cable between Scotland and Ulster, and by another road-side subterranean line “thence to Belfast, Dublin and other places in Ireland”. The chairman of the company was Rear Admiral Sir William Henry Dillon, RN, KCH, of Arundel Street, London, and Hanwell, Middlesex, with a board that included the Hon George Massey of Limerick and Walthamstow in London, Lt Col Leonard Morse Cooper of Wargrave, Berkshire, George Featherstone Griffin CE of Tillington, Staffordshire, and John Newman Tweedy of Montagu Square, London, who might be best described as speculators. The Secretary was Sandiforth Featherstone Griffin, the son of one of the directors. The Company intended to apply for a Royal Charter during 1852. However, money was apparently tight and it soon reduced its anticipated capital needs to just £40,000.

By May 1852, the Ireland company had started entrenching a two-core gutta-percha insulated but otherwise unprotected underground land line along the road from Dumfries to Port Patrick, intending to have it complete by June 31, but delays occurred as torrential rain damaged the narrow trenches.

On July 18, 1852 the Reliance under Captain Edward Hawes RN, the Admiralty’s general superintendent at Port Patrick harbour, set out from the English coast with George Massey, the Company’s managing director, S F Griffin, now styled engineer, W L Gilpin, the contractor, G Dering, the electrician, and J Fletcher, the company’s superintendent of works, on board. In addition the vessel carried, as observers, Dr Joseph Christoph Hamel of the St Petersburg Academy of Science, John Baker of London; Samuel Glyde, London, Mr Forster, London, Lackington Bunn, of the Gutta-Percha Company of Lambeth, the cable manufacturers; and Captain Stoddard of the Donaghadee Coast Guard, acting as pilot.

The Reliance, accompanied by a steam tug from Belfast, carried twenty-five miles of underwater cable; it successfully laid and electrically-tested seven miles of wire out from Port Patrick. Captain Hawes then decided that strong sea currents were setting in and continuing cable-laying could only proceed after the spring tides were over. The line was marked by buoys.

On the Saturday morning of July 24, the Reliance returned to grapple the cable-end, which the crew did with immense difficulty. The ends were joined and the vessel continued towards Donaghadee at three miles per hour, succeeding in laying a further fifteen miles. It reached Ireland at ten o’clock at night in heavy gales. The cable was tested, found electrically sound and, then as it was not possible to land it, buoyed-off in the sea.

The principal length of the Ireland company’s first underwater cable was described as being of two copper wire cores insulated with gutta-percha protected by a covering of hemp rope. The cores were manufactured by Christopher Nickels & Company, of Lambeth, who had also made the Company’s land-lines. For the shore-ends at Port Patrick and Donaghadee, which were subject to wave action and abrasion, W Küper & Company, wire-rope makers, of Camberwell, London, were to make two short armoured cables but money for these apparently ran out. A short-lived, temporary shore connection was made and worked, but eventually the long hemp cable had to be sealed and buoyed-off in the sea at both ends.

The Ireland company’s contractor for its armoured cables, Küper & Company, was soon to become Glass, Elliot & Co., who themselves eventually became the Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Co., creators of the successful Atlantic cable of 1866.

The Magnetic Telegraph Company was also active with cable works over the same short stretch of water to Ireland during May and June.

There was a hiatus in the Company’s initial rush of activity during the following months. It was not until August 1852 that William Lawrence Gilpin of Bayswater, London, a civil engineer and partner in a wire mill at Aston, near Birmingham, agreed with the Board to complete its entire works in Scotland and Ireland for £27,000.

On December 27, 1852 the Board of Directors reported that the 69 miles of two-core underground cable in Scotland were completed and they were working the 42 miles from Dumfries to Newton Stewart; clerks were training for the rest of the lines there. It also reported, according to Captain Hawes of the Royal Navy, that the isolated six-month-old underwater cable was still in good condition. With 16,000 out of 40,000 shares already applied for, it had decided to apply to Parliament for a Special Act to authorise its works, rather than obtain a Royal Charter as originally planned.

The Electric Telegraph Company of Ireland obtained a Special Act of Parliament to authorise its formation, its cable and its circuits in Scotland and Ireland on August 4, 1853, with a modest capital of £40,000 in shares of £1 and £8,000 in debenture debt that could be incurred once all of its share capital was called-up. However only 27,000 of its 40,000 £1 shares were taken up, and not all of the shareholders could be got to pay their calls into its account with the Royal British Bank in London. It was not associated with its English namesake, the original Electric Telegraph Company of 1845, and, as it was limited by its Act to circuits in Ireland and Scotland, it apparently intended to connect onward from Dumfries by transcribing messages to the circuits of the British Telegraph Company, which then operated in the major cities in Scotland and the north of England.

Although reported sound the first underwater cable, without its armoured shore-ends, was not to be put in circuit and was abandoned.

The Ireland company used George Edward Dering’s single-needle telegraph, patented in 1851, in all of its circuits and was to adopt his curious theories regarding insulation in 1853 for a replacement cable between Ireland and Scotland.

Dering described his theory on underwater cables in his patent of 1853 as follows “I have discovered that a metallic circuit formed of wires, either wholly un-insulated or partially so, may be employed for an electric telegraph, provided that the two parts of the circuit are at such a distance apart that the electric current will not all pass direct from one wire to the other by the water or earth, but that a portion will follow the wire to the distant end.” He apparently successfully demonstrated this discovery across the river Mimram on his estate in Hertfordshire, England, for the Company’s board of directors. In 1853 G E Dering was 22 years of age.

According to a letter written by Dering in 1899 the new bare wire cable was shipped to Belfast on September 23, 1853, it was a single No 1 gauge galvanised iron wire instead of a twisted strand wire which he had recommended. It was, he said, poorly made with many bad welds, but it was tested and the weak parts removed. It was then tarred for its whole length and loaded into the contractor’s vessel, the Albert. The cable was to be laid on November 21, 1853 from Ballycopeland Bay near
Donaghadee to Port of Spittal Bay south of Port Patrick by the Albert, escorted by HMS Asp, the survey vessel stationed at Pembroke. A half-mile shore-end wire was laid, then on November 22, in foul weather, the 28 miles of main wire was joined and a further 3½ miles laid before it broke. On November 26 another attempt was made by the Albert, this time 12 miles were laid before the wire broke again in 82 fathoms of water. After several attempts to grapple the underwater wire by the Albert it was abandoned.

The Ireland company made a brave face at the Irish Industrial Exhibition in Dublin between May and October 1853, working traffic from the halls to its office on Eden Quay and north towards Belfast with 120 miles of roadside subterranean line. Its much larger competitor, the English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company, which already had a submarine line to Britain, completed in May 1853, did not even have a stand. During 1853 the Ireland company was also supplying news to papers in Dublin and Belfast.

After laying 192 miles of underground line with 400 miles of wire in Scotland and Ireland, but being without the intermediate cable, the Ireland company was in severely difficult financial circumstances, having raised and expended £26,255 in share capital and, despite not having Parliamentary authority to do so, having raised £16,560 in loans; whilst still owing money to its contractor, W L Gilpin, to Nickels’ Gutta Percha Company of Lambeth for its land-lines, and having judgements for others debts made against it. Gilpin agreed to forgo all of his claims against the Company and surrender the works and materials still in his possession in July 1854 in return for a final payment of £600 and the writing-off of a debt of his of £2,000 to the Royal British Bank used to buy materials. The Ireland company’s new secretary, James Troup, and three directors had to find the money among themselves to settle his claim.

The Company closed its offices on July 31, 1854 after working at a continuous loss. The shareholders finally resolved to wind-up the Company on May 7, 1856 and its assets and rights were sold-off for their benefit. This was followed by a mass of litigation in an attempt to recover money to repay the illegal debts.
 
As a final nail in the Ireland company’s coffin, its bankers, the Royal British Bank, collapsed in criminal disgrace in September 1856. Richard Hartley Kennedy, formerly a director of the competitive English & Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company and a neighbour of the contractor, Gilpin, in Bayswater, was Deputy Governor of the bank.

The British Telegraph Company, having lost its anticipated connection when the Ireland company’s cable failed in November 1853, promoted its own underwater cable from Scotland to Ireland which was successfully completed on July 9, 1854. It had to lay its own underground circuits from the coast to Stranraer, Ayr and Dumfries in Scotland which were completed in mid-1855, and from Belfast to Dublin, finished during 1856.  

To read Steve Roberts' story of the Electric Telegraph Company of Ireland in context with other British telegraph companies of the time, see his Distant Writing website.

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