The Telegraphic Life: Maintenance of the System 1850-1914

Hitherto, historians have assumed that after a submarine telegraph cable had been laid, it provided 50 to 70 years of reliable service. As one who has practical experience of engineering in a professional capacity, I found this order of reliability difficult to accept. I therefore set out to try to determine how reliable or otherwise this new technology was and how it was maintained. These questions had not been asked before and proved more difficult to answer than anyone predicted because much of the information was concealed, deliberately or otherwise, by the cable operating companies. However there were key clues such as the number of cable repair ships afloat and multiple textbooks on cable maintenance. Having unearthed useful data from archives of the Eastern Telegraph Company and of the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, I conclude that the submarine telegraph cables during the period from the first experimental attempts in 1850 up until the Great War were not as reliable as assumed. On average a voyage to repair these cables was required once per annum per 500 nautical miles of cable and this remained constant from 1873, when the company was formed, up until 1914, then end of my period of research. During this period the system which was composed of a submarine cable connecting two telegraph stations appeared increasingly reliable and efficient because of improvements in the technology at the cable stations and the duplication of many cables which allowed rerouting of communications when malfunctions occurred. I also conclude that data was concealed by the operating companies for commercial reasons. If this concealment had been less, then the genesis of the discipline of reliability engineering in the 1940s may have been developed 50 years earlier.