Banking

• "In the middle of the 19th century, Britain had the world's largest economy, the pound sterling was the dominant currency of intl. trade, and the Bank of England was effectively the world's central bank."
• After 1821, the Bank of England would buy unlimited gold for around the same rate of 3 pounds. (This is the genesis of the gold standard that more or less endured till 1971). Because of this backing, pound notes were accepted almost everywhere.
• The US Dollar had been valued at $20.66 to the ounce of gold from 1834-1836, but then the US central bank closed its door when Andrew Jackson vetoed renewal of its charter.
• The US Treasury minted gold and silver coins (as a courtesy and convenience more than anything?) but thousands of state-chartered banks issued US paper currency prior to the Civil War at many varied rates, redeemable in coin. American paper money had no currency abroad.
• As Civil War started, the US Treasury issued greenbacks, which were not gold-redeemable, correlated inversely with fortunes of the Union Army.
• By 1857 the USA did not have a fundamental institution of a modern economy, a central bank, which provides a sound monetary system and guards the natl. economy against excesses in the business cycle by disciplining other banks as needed.
• In 1863, the Natl Banking Act ended issuance of state bank notes and chartered national banks which could issue uniform, strictly regulated notes. By 1879, the US had its first stable, fully convertible paper money system ever.

Science and Math

• on a sphere, a great circle is any circle on the surface whose center is the same as the center of the sphere (e.g., the equator, lines of longitude). Important in navigation because the shortest distance between any 2 points on the surface of a sphere is the arc of a great circle.

Engineering and Development (nothing is new!)

• the team realized that the best cable design would come from experimentation, but time pressure did not allow for much. The directors, most of whom had no competence in EE, made decisions bast mostly on speed and cost. MattWalsh: There were several more iterations of cable design. Tragic as it was, learning about the failure at sea was the ultimate way to experiment.
• Edward Whitehouse's overzealous attitude got in the way of doing the right thing (primadona engineer?)
• Thomas Newcomen developed the first steam engine in 1712 to efficiently pump water out of tin mines. James Watt radically improved Newcomen's design and started the Industrial Revolution.
• Isambard Brunel: perhaps greatest engineering genius of 19th century. He developed the pedestrian tunnel under the Thames river, built the Great Western ship, and then the Great Eastern, the ship that carried the first transatlantic cable across. Said ship was incredibly enormous and could buffet the huge waves without effort. He realized that while the power needed to propel the boat went up by the square of the boat's size, the fuel storage went up by the cube. Hence, with a big enough boat one could solve the big shipping problem - how to do long distances shipping without a refueling infrastructure. This reminded me of the innovation of how the domesticated camel in Solomon's time revolutionized tavel compared to mules that needed much more refueling.
• the American Civil War was unprecedented in that it was the first war fought in the industrial era. This revolutionized the amount of war materiel and command/control methods (e.g. steamboats & railroads, telegraph connected Washington and Richmond in real time). It must have seemed like a high-tech war at the time.
• In New York, I saw this Frescoe: Now this wasn't the same Telegraph company started by Cyrus Field described in this book, but probably a contemporary competitor.

Politics

• The British govt, unlike the US, speaks with one voice as the PM and cabinet are in full control of both the executive departments and Parliamnets (still today?)
• There was still an undercurrent of Anglophobia in the American psyche since the Revolutionary War, that would not entirely disappear until we allied with Britain in WWI.

Philosophy

• Henry David Thoreau, on the wire "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but, perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."
• Edward Everett, the greatest orator of his day, the man who spoke for 2 hours before Lincoln's much more famous 2 minute speech, on a piece of wire of the first (and failed) attempt: "I hold in my hand a portion of the identical electric cable, given me by my friend Mr. [George] Peabody, which is now in progress of manufacture to connect America with Europe. Does it seem all but incredible to you that intelligence should travel for two thousand miles, along those slender copper wires, far down in the all-but-fathomless Atlantic, never before penetrated by aught pertaining to humanity, save when some foundering vessel has plunged with he helpless company to the eternal silence and darkness of the abyss? Does it seem, I say, all but a miracle of art, that the thoughts of living men - the thoughts that we think up here on the earth's surface, in the cheerful light of day - about the markets and the exchanges, and the seasons, and the elections, and the treaties, and the wars and all the fond nothings of daily life, should clothe themselves with elemental sparks, and shoot with fiery speed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere, far down among the uncouth monsters that wallow in the nether seas, along the wreck-paved floor, through the oozy dungeons of the rayless deep..."

Passage from Europe to US

• Mayflower took just under 2 months, a very good time (from Plymouth on Sept 16th to Cape Cod on Nov 9th) even 200 years later
• In bad weather, it was not uncommon to take 4 months to complete passage.
• The length, cost and peril of the trip precluded most American immigrants from ever returning home. You said goodbye to your homeland forever.
• This was tremendous isolation, hard to imagine today
• This also meant information traveled across at the same speed!
• Mayflower was paid for by a joint-stock company - who weren't pleased when they returned without sellable goods

Ships

• Ships get a personal pronoun in English, because each is built one at a time with partly or completely new designs, each as idiosyncratic as a person. They also in action each experience their own distinctive adventures as people do.
• They brought livestock onto the Great Eastern for food because refrigeration had not matured. Famous reporter and passenger William Howard Russell stated "such a frieght had not been seen since Noah's Ark was stranded on Mount Arafat"

Money

• in 1854, the Federal Govt's total expenditure was around $58 million
• a successful person made $300 a year
• $1000 per year enough for a family to live a modest middle-income life
• < 24 men in all of NYC (which then had pop of 700,000) had > $1,000,000 (wonder how many today?)
• $100,000 was a sizeable sum
• $1.5 million originally budgeted for transatlantic cable
• Double entry bookkeeping made large corporations possible
• Junk bonds not a new term?
• A market exist beyond the area where instant communication can occur. So until the mid 19th century every city had it's own financial market. London and Wallstreet became dominant with land-based telegraphy. The Atlantic cable let these two markets work together.

Fun Trivia

• Golf ball dimple technology discovered when gutta percha balls got dents and flew farther with use
• Basque fisherman had been to Newfoundland decades before Columbus 'discovered' America
• Distance between the Earth's poles: 8000 miles.
• In 1914 the British severed Germany's telegraph cables, and had to use Gugliemo Marconi's new radio system to communicate. But the British were able to intercept and decode them. One such message, proferred an alliance with Mexico in return for restoring her 'lost provinces', persuaded reluctant Woodrow Wilson to ask Congress to declare war.

Transatlantic Development over Time

• First cable cost the equivalent of $100 million
• Telegraph signals had to make it all the way across the wire, so very delicate instruments using a tiny mirror that rotated in a coil were used.
• First transatlantic phone call was in 1926, for $25 / minute (!). Done by radio - the old technique did not work - signal far too weak.
• AT&T solved problem with regenerator. First phone transatlantic cable laid in 1956, and could carry 32 calls at once
• 1950 - 1 million overseas calls from US
• 1970 - 23.4 million
• 1980 - 200 million
• 1997 - 4.2 billion
• 1988 - 10,000 simultaneous calls handled
• 1996 - 320,000 simultaneous calls handled
• 80 GB/s carries 4 million calls at once, or 18,000 encyclopedia volumes / sec
• Today's call to London costs less than a call from NYC to Philadelphia

Things to look into

• Thomas Malthus' wrong prediction on food prices and population - partly thanks to William H. Perkins' ability to make dyes without using agricultural land
• There was a magazine called 'Engineer' in the 1900's (Isambard Brunel was written up in it)

-- MattWalsh - 30 Oct 2003