How the First Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable Was Laid
On 16 August 1858, the first telegraphic message crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Travelling along a recently laid cable, the message from Britain’s Queen Victoria to US President James Buchanan took just 16 hours. Prior to this, communication across the Atlantic would have been by ship—and taken around 10 days.
People had been communicating via overland telegraph since 1844, and messages had been passing between Britain and France since 1850, when the first submarine cable was laid in the English Channel. But the attempt to span the Atlantic Ocean was the most daring attempt yet—and was the talk of the age, the 19th-century equivalent of the Apollo space mission. The idea that one could seemingly cheat time and space was inspiring, and it changed the way people thought about the world and their place in it.
The driving force behind the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was an American businessman called Cyrus Field. In 1856, he and the Englishmen John Watkins Brett and Charles Tilson Bright formed the Atlantic Telegraph Company. They raised £350,000, mostly from businessmen in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. They also secured £14,000 annually from the British government, plus the loan of ships, and a similar amount from the US government.
Getting the cable made proved difficult. The distance between the west coast of Ireland and Newfoundland is over 3,700 kilometres, and Field was unable to find a company that was capable of supplying the required cable in the desired time frame. As a result, two companies were engaged to fulfil the order. The cable had a core of seven copper wires down which the signal would pass. These were insulated with several layers of gutta-percha, a natural plastic made from tree sap, and then armoured with iron wire. When it was complete, the weight of the cable proved too great for any single ship. It was therefore loaded onto two: the British ship HMS Agamemnon and the American ship USS Niagara.
The first attempt to lay the cable began on 5 August 1857, with both ships departing from the west coast of Ireland, near Ballycarbery Castle. The venture did not go according to plan. The cable snapped on the first day, but was recovered from the bottom and repaired. A few days later, in mid-Atlantic, the cable snapped again, this time in water three kilometres deep. It was lost, and the expedition was abandoned.
The next summer, in 1858, they tried again. On this expedition, the two great ships met in mid-Atlantic, each carrying half the cable. The two ends were joined together and the ships sailed away from each other. The cable broke three times, and each time they were forced to start again. On 29 July, with little hope of success, the cable was joined for the fourth time and the ships sailed for home. This time they succeeded. The cable was landed in Newfoundland on 4 August and in Ireland the following day. A week or so later, Queen Victoria sent that first trans-Atlantic message to President Buchanan.
The celebrations were tremendous. One US newspaper proclaimed: ‘New York has seldom seen a more complete holiday than that on 1 September 1858, in celebration of the successful laying of the Atlantic cable. The enthusiasm of an entire nation was expressed in this jubilee of its metropolis, and the era of a closer connection with Europe was well ushered in by a day of genuine rejoicing and gaiety.’
Celebrations were, however, short-lived: the cable performed badly and failed after just three weeks. The project was put on hold, but the concept had been proved possible. By 1865, further research had been carried out into the problems which had plagued the earlier cables. In addition, cables had been successfully laid in the Mediterranean and in the Persian Gulf. The cables that were used were better engineered, with thicker cores and better insulation, allowing faster transmission speeds.
In 1865, Field incorporated a second company to raise enough funds to try again. He chartered the largest ship in the world at the time, the SS Great Eastern, which could carry the entire Atlantic cable. Huge salt-water tanks and other state-of-the-art machinery were fitted to ensure it remained in mint condition during its journey. All went well until, in heavy winds 1,000 kilometres off the coast of Newfoundland, the cable rubbed on the side of the ship, snapped and plunged to the deep ocean floor.
Not one to quit, Field vowed to return the following year. This final 1866 expedition proved successful, and the cable was put into commercial service on 28 July. One month later, the 1865 cable was brought to the surface and repaired, providing a second Atlantic telegraph link.
The service had an obvious and immediate impact. People in government were able to respond more swiftly to evolving situations. News travelled more quickly, which boosted trade on both sides of the Atlantic. It also had a profound effect on things such as family life and cultural ties. For example, it was no longer so difficult for immigrants in America to keep in touch with their families back home.
The roller-coaster of cable-laying highs and lows between 1857 and 1866 caught the imagination of a generation in the way the space race did in the 20th century. There was immense public interest in the endeavour and in telegraphy more generally. At the time, telegraphic science was reported widely in the newspapers, and the fortunes of the telegraph companies were followed closely. Discussions of the pitfalls and solutions to spanning the Atlantic with cable became everyday topics of conversation, and endless articles in the newspapers ensured that the project stayed in people’s thoughts.
Australian Parrots and Their Adaptation to Habitat Change
A Parrots are found across the tropics and on all southern-hemisphere continents except Antarctica, but nowhere do they display such richness of diversity and form as in Australia. One-sixth of the world’s 345 parrot species are found there, and Australia has long been renowned for the number and variety of its parrots.
B In the 16th century, the German cartographer Mercator made a world map that included a place, somewhere near present-day Australia, that he named Terra Psittacorum—the Land of Parrots—and the first European settlers in Australia often referred to the country as Parrot Land. In 1865, the celebrated British naturalist and wildlife artist John Gould said: ‘No group of birds gives Australia so tropical and benign an air as the numerous species of this great family by which it is tenanted.’
C Parrots are descendants of an ancient line. Due to their great diversity, and since most species inhabit Africa, Australia and South America, it seems almost certain that parrots originated millions of years ago on the ancient southern continent of Gondwana, before it broke up into the separate southern-hemisphere continents we know today. Much of Gondwana comprised vast rainforests intersected by huge, slow-flowing rivers and expansive lakes, but by eight million years ago, great changes were under way. The centre of the continent of Australia had begun to dry out, and the rainforests that once covered it gradually contracted to the continental margins, where, to a limited extent, they still exist today.
D The creatures that remained in those shrinking rainforests had to adapt to the drier conditions or face extinction. Reacting to these desperate circumstances, the parrot family, typically found in jungles in other parts of the world, populated some of Australia’s harshest environments. The parrots spread from ancestral forests through eucalypt woodlands to colonies in the central deserts of Australia, and as a consequence they diversified into a wide range of species, with adaptations that reflect the many changes animals and plants had to make to survive in these areas.
E These evolutionary pressures helped mould keratin—the substance from which beaks are made—into a range of tools capable of gathering the new food types favoured by different parrot species. The size of a parrot’s short, blunt beak and the length of that beak’s curved upper section are related to the type of food each species eats. Some have comparatively long beaks that are perfect for extracting seeds from fruit; others have broader and stronger beaks designed for cracking hard seeds.
F Differently shaped beaks are not the only adaptations that have been made during the developing relationship between parrots and their food plants. Like all of Australia’s many honey-eating birds, the rainbow-coloured lorikeets and the flowers on which they feed have long co-evolved, with features such as the shape and colour of the flowers adapted to the birds’ particular needs. Red is the most attractive colour to birds, and thus flowers that depend on birds for pollination are more often red; lorikeets’ tongues have bristles that help them collect as much pollen as possible.
G Today, most of Australia’s parrots inhabit woodland and open forest, and their numbers decline towards both deserts and wetter areas. The majority are nomadic to some degree, moving around to take advantage of feeding and breeding places. Two of the dry-country parrots, the pink and grey galah and the pink, white and yellow corella, have expanded their ranges in recent years. They are among the species that have adapted well to the changes brought about by European settlement, forest clearing and the creation of grasslands where galahs and corellas thrive.
H But other parrot species did not fare so well when their environments were altered. The clearing of large areas of rainforest is probably responsible for the disappearance of the double-eyed fig parrot, and numbers of ground parrots declined when a great part of their habitat was destroyed by the draining of coastal swamps. Some parrot species that benefited from forest clearing at first are now confronted by a shortage of nesting sites due to further human-made changes.
I New conditions also sometimes favour an incoming species over one that originally inhabited the area. For example, after farmers cleared large areas of forest on Kangaroo Island, off the coast of South Australia, the island was colonised by galahs. They were soon going down holes and destroying black cockatoo eggs in order to take the holes for their own use. Their success precipitated a partial collapse in the black cockatoo population when the latter lost the struggle for scarce nesting hollows.
J There may be no final answer to ensuring an equitable balance between parrot species. Nest-box programmes help ease the shortage of nesting sites in some places, but there are not enough of them, they are expensive, and they are not an adequate substitute for large, old trees. They cannot replace the habitat those trees represent or the nectar, pollen and seeds they provide. Competition between parrots for nest sites is a result of the changes we humans have made to the Earth. We are the most widespread and dangerous competitors that parrots have ever had to face, but we also have the knowledge and skill to maintain the wonderfully rich diversity of Australia’s parrots. All we need is the will to do so.
Yawning
The question of how and why we yawn still presents problems for researchers in a field that has only recently been opened up to scientific study.
When Robert R. Provine began studying yawning in the 1960s, it was difficult for him to convince research students of the merits of ‘yawning science’. Although it may appear quirky to some, Provine’s decision to study yawning was a logical extension of his research in developmental neuroscience.
The verb ‘to yawn’ is derived from the Old English ganien or ginian, meaning to gape or open wide. But in addition to gaping jaws, yawning has significant features that are easy to observe and analyse. Provine ‘collected’ yawns to study by using a variation of the contagion response. He asked people to ‘think about yawning’ and, once they began to yawn, to depress a button that would record from the start of the yawn to the exhalation at its end.
Provine’s early discoveries can be summarised as follows: the yawn is highly stereotyped but not invariant in its duration and form. It is an excellent example of the instinctive ‘fixed action pattern’ of classical animal-behaviour study, or ethology. It is not a reflex—a short-duration, rapid, proportional response to a simple stimulus—but, once started, a yawn progresses with the inevitability of a sneeze. The standard yawn runs its course over about six seconds on average, but its duration can range from about three seconds to much longer than the average. There are no half-yawns: this is an example of the typical intensity of fixed action patterns and a reason why you cannot stifle yawns. Just like a cough, yawns can come in bouts with a highly variable inter-yawn interval, which is generally about 68 seconds but rarely more than 70. There is no relation between yawn frequency and duration: producers of short or long yawns do not compensate by yawning more or less often. Furthermore, Provine’s hypotheses about the form and function of yawning can be tested by three informative yawn variants which can be used to look at the roles of the nose, the mouth and the jaws.
i) The closed-nose yawn Subjects are asked to pinch their nose closed when they feel themselves start to yawn. Most subjects report being able to perform perfectly normal closed-nose yawns. This indicates that the inhalation at the onset of a yawn, and the exhalation at its end, need not involve the nostrils—the mouth provides a sufficient airway.
ii) The clenched-teeth yawn Subjects are asked to clench their teeth when they feel themselves start to yawn, but allow themselves to inhale normally through their open lips and clenched teeth. This variant gives one the sensation of being stuck in mid-yawn. This shows that gaping of the jaws is an essential component of the fixed action pattern of the yawn, and unless it is accomplished, the programme, or pattern, will not run to completion. The yawn is also shown to be more than a deep breath because, unlike normal breathing, inhalation and exhalation cannot be performed as well through clenched teeth as through the nose.
iii) The nose yawn This variant tests the adequacy of the nasal airway to sustain a yawn. Unlike normal breathing, which can be performed equally well through the mouth or nose, yawning is impossible via nasal inhalation alone. As with the clenched-teeth yawn, the nose yawn provides the unfulfilling sensation of being stuck in mid-yawn. Exhalation, on the other hand, can be accomplished equally well through the nose or mouth. Through this methodology, Provine demonstrated that inhalation through the oral airway and the gaping of the jaws are necessary for normal yawns. The motor programme for yawning will not run to completion without feedback that these parts of the programme have been accomplished.
But yawning is a powerful, generalised movement that involves much more than airway manoeuvres and jaw-gaping. When yawning, you also stretch your facial muscles, tilt your head back, narrow or close your eyes, produce tears, salivate, open the Eustachian tubes of your middle ear and perform many other, yet unspecified, cardiovascular and respiratory acts. Perhaps the yawn shares components with other behaviour. For example, is the yawn a kind of ‘slow sneeze’, or is the sneeze a ‘fast yawn’? Both share common respiratory and other features, including jaw-gaping, eye-closing and head-tilting.
Yawning and stretching share properties and may be performed together as parts of a global motor complex. Studies by J. I. P. de Vries and colleagues in the early 1980s, charting movement in the developing foetus using ultrasound, observed a link between yawning and stretching. The most extraordinary demonstration of the yawn–stretch linkage occurs in many people paralysed on one side of their body because of brain damage caused by a stroke. The prominent British neurologist Sir Francis Walshe noted in 1923 that when these people yawn, they are startled and mystified to observe that their otherwise paralysed arm rises and flexes automatically in what neurologists term an ‘associated response’. Yawning apparently activates undamaged, unconsciously controlled connections between the brain and the motor system, causing the paralysed limb to move. It is not known whether the associated response is a positive prognosis for recovery, nor whether yawning is therapeutic for the prevention of muscular deterioration.
Provine speculated that, in general, yawning may have many functions, and selecting a single function from the available options may be an unrealistic goal. Yawning appears to be associated with a change of behavioural state, switching from one activity to another. Yawning is also a reminder that ancient and unconscious behaviour linking us to the animal world lurks beneath the veneer of culture, rationality and language.