It seems to the writer that much of the inconvenience may be obviated, and without greatly increasing the expense, by adopting the following plan: From each telephone exchange, electric-lighting station, or other center of electric wires, run overhead cables out to a considerable number of points about the city, some one of which would be quite near to each subscriber. From each of these points to the various subscribers run short stretches of ordinary house-top wire. As the two lines constructed in Boston are short, only about one quarter of a mile each, it was deemed best to use single-line circuits, hoping that the induction and retardation on so short lines would not be serious. From here are con- trolled the workings of all the dynamos and other apparatus, also all outside lines. I think these facts have sufficiently demonstrated that for long lines of telegraph, stretching from city to city, here in America, pole lines, which can be cheaply built, easily repaired, and where the wires can be removed from the retarding influence of the earth and the inductive influences on each other, are decidedly superior to underground lines.
I think even here we need to carefully consider the problem as well. Following the August 2003 blackout, which left 50 million people from the Midwest to the East Coast in the dark, multiple Congressional hearings and a Federal investigation were conducted to examine the problem and propose solutions. We have read dreadful descriptions, it is true, of a precipice in the bed of the sea off the west coast of Ireland; but the survey of the ground lately made by Captain Hoskin in Her Majesty’s ship Porcupine has dispelled this dismal statement. A presentiment of success may have inspired him; but he was ignorant alike of submarine cables and the deep sea. It must be remembered that submarine telegraphy has arrived at a perfection which is almost marvellous, considering the little time that has elapsed since the first was laid-not more than eleven years since. AEP built the first high-voltage transmission line, between Muncie and Marion in Indiana in 1911, the first long-distance line, transmitting electricity from a coal mine mouth plant, and the first commercial nuclear power plant on Lake Michigan, at the two-unit Donald Cook station, in the early 1970s. The wheeling of power, which is the transfer of electricity from one supplier over the transmission lines of another system, to where it was needed by a third customer, was used by regulated utilities to increase the reliability of regional grids, in case of an unscheduled shutdown of large generating units, such as from storms or other acts of nature.
So much for the defective manipulation of the first Atlantic cable. In this way hundreds of single wires would be gathered into small and inoffensive cables, and the enormous wooden structures would be replaced by small cable supports of brick or iron. The marvellous development of telegraphy within the last generation has called into existence a great variety of receiving instruments, each admirable in its way. Such a device is called a "metallic circuit." Any outside disturbing circuit tends to induce, in the two wires of the metallic circuit, equal and opposite currents, which neutralize and disappear. We have seen that in Paris the retardation and induction are both obviated by the use of double and twisted wires in metallic circuit. Moreover, wires fixed to house-tops are subject to removal at the whim of the owner, and they have to be continually removed from building to building as the good-will of each owner is exhausted. The science of dead matter, which has been the principal subject of my thoughts during my life, is, I may say, strenuous on this point, that the age of the earth is definite. At the time of its manufacture, the working of the new material, gutta percha, was, so to say, a new art, and the material in itself so bad in quality, owing to the tricks played by the native gatherers, that it was far from being so perfect an insulator as it has since become; moreover, the method of laying it on the conducting wire was so defective that every now and then air-holes or bubbles, so minute as to escape observation, occurred.
It is not, however, a matter of entire regret that this cable failed, inasmuch as from its method of construction, so far as the conducting wire was concerned, it is very doubtful whether it would have been such a success as to have satisfied the shareholders. Those cables laid directly in the earth soon failed, but those in iron pipes and the sewers continued to work, and from this grew the system now used in Paris. This prohibits further extension of the single-wire system under-ground, what are electric cables for technical reasons. The cost per conductor thus increases enormously as the number of conductors diminishes, so that it would be clearly impossible to follow out the wires of an exchange system in all of their bifurcations. If telephones were required in every house, as are gas and water, such a system might be practicable, but at present that is not likely to be the case.
Once a Week (Magazine)/Series 1/Volume 8/The Atlantic Telegraph
by Madge Moncrieff (2024-08-27)
It seems to the writer that much of the inconvenience may be obviated, and without greatly increasing the expense, by adopting the following plan: From each telephone exchange, electric-lighting station, or other center of electric wires, run overhead cables out to a considerable number of points about the city, some one of which would be quite near to each subscriber. From each of these points to the various subscribers run short stretches of ordinary house-top wire. As the two lines constructed in Boston are short, only about one quarter of a mile each, it was deemed best to use single-line circuits, hoping that the induction and retardation on so short lines would not be serious. From here are con- trolled the workings of all the dynamos and other apparatus, also all outside lines. I think these facts have sufficiently demonstrated that for long lines of telegraph, stretching from city to city, here in America, pole lines, which can be cheaply built, easily repaired, and where the wires can be removed from the retarding influence of the earth and the inductive influences on each other, are decidedly superior to underground lines.
I think even here we need to carefully consider the problem as well. Following the August 2003 blackout, which left 50 million people from the Midwest to the East Coast in the dark, multiple Congressional hearings and a Federal investigation were conducted to examine the problem and propose solutions. We have read dreadful descriptions, it is true, of a precipice in the bed of the sea off the west coast of Ireland; but the survey of the ground lately made by Captain Hoskin in Her Majesty’s ship Porcupine has dispelled this dismal statement. A presentiment of success may have inspired him; but he was ignorant alike of submarine cables and the deep sea. It must be remembered that submarine telegraphy has arrived at a perfection which is almost marvellous, considering the little time that has elapsed since the first was laid-not more than eleven years since. AEP built the first high-voltage transmission line, between Muncie and Marion in Indiana in 1911, the first long-distance line, transmitting electricity from a coal mine mouth plant, and the first commercial nuclear power plant on Lake Michigan, at the two-unit Donald Cook station, in the early 1970s. The wheeling of power, which is the transfer of electricity from one supplier over the transmission lines of another system, to where it was needed by a third customer, was used by regulated utilities to increase the reliability of regional grids, in case of an unscheduled shutdown of large generating units, such as from storms or other acts of nature.
So much for the defective manipulation of the first Atlantic cable. In this way hundreds of single wires would be gathered into small and inoffensive cables, and the enormous wooden structures would be replaced by small cable supports of brick or iron. The marvellous development of telegraphy within the last generation has called into existence a great variety of receiving instruments, each admirable in its way. Such a device is called a "metallic circuit." Any outside disturbing circuit tends to induce, in the two wires of the metallic circuit, equal and opposite currents, which neutralize and disappear. We have seen that in Paris the retardation and induction are both obviated by the use of double and twisted wires in metallic circuit. Moreover, wires fixed to house-tops are subject to removal at the whim of the owner, and they have to be continually removed from building to building as the good-will of each owner is exhausted. The science of dead matter, which has been the principal subject of my thoughts during my life, is, I may say, strenuous on this point, that the age of the earth is definite. At the time of its manufacture, the working of the new material, gutta percha, was, so to say, a new art, and the material in itself so bad in quality, owing to the tricks played by the native gatherers, that it was far from being so perfect an insulator as it has since become; moreover, the method of laying it on the conducting wire was so defective that every now and then air-holes or bubbles, so minute as to escape observation, occurred.
It is not, however, a matter of entire regret that this cable failed, inasmuch as from its method of construction, so far as the conducting wire was concerned, it is very doubtful whether it would have been such a success as to have satisfied the shareholders. Those cables laid directly in the earth soon failed, but those in iron pipes and the sewers continued to work, and from this grew the system now used in Paris. This prohibits further extension of the single-wire system under-ground, what are electric cables for technical reasons. The cost per conductor thus increases enormously as the number of conductors diminishes, so that it would be clearly impossible to follow out the wires of an exchange system in all of their bifurcations. If telephones were required in every house, as are gas and water, such a system might be practicable, but at present that is not likely to be the case.