3-017-159 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The breaking of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable on board the Great Eastern, 1865. Engraving from a sketch by Robert Dudley. '...the galvanometer detected a flaw of electricity which indicated a serious fault...a grating noise was audible as the cable flew over the coil...After the ship had been stopped, and the remainder of the flake in which the fault was supposed to have occurred had been paid out, a piece of wire was seen projecting out of the cable in the fluke, and, on one of the men taking it in his fingers and trying to bend it down, the wire broke short off. It was nearly 3 in. long, and evidently of hard, ill-tempered metal, which had flown out through the strands of the cable in the tank. The fault in the cable which had gone overboard might obviously have been caused by such a piece of wire, and there could be no doubt that the wire of the outer covering of the cable was capable of inflicting injury on the gutta-percha it was intended to protect. The discovery was in some measure a relief to men's minds, because it showed that one certainly, and the second possibly, of the previous faults might have been the results of similar accident...It was enough to move one to tears'. From "Illustrated London News", 1865.