It was due to the brilliant promise he displayed, as much as
to the influence of his father, that at the age of twenty-two he found
himself wearing the gown of a learned professor in one of the oldest
Universities in the country, and lecturing to the class of which he was
a freshman but a few years before.
Thomson became a man of public note in connection with the laying of
the first Atlantic cable. After Cooke and Wheatstone had introduced
their working telegraph in 1839; the idea of a submarine line across the
Atlantic Ocean began to dawn on the minds of men as a possible triumph
of the future. Morse proclaimed his faith in it as early as the year
1840, and in 1842 he submerged a wire, insulated with tarred hemp and
india-rubber, in the water of New York harbour, and telegraphed through
it. The following autumn Wheatstone performed a similar experiment in
the Bay of Swansea. A good insulator to cover the wire and prevent the
electricity from leaking into the water was requisite for the success of
a long submarine line. India-rubber had been tried by Jacobi, the
Russian electrician, as far back as 1811. He laid a wire insulated with
rubber across the Neva at St. Petersburg, and succeeded in firing a mine
by an electric spark sent through it; but india-rubber, although it is
now used to a considerable extent, was not easy to manipulate in those
days.
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