After
leaving Penn's he worked at railway engineering for a time under Messrs.
Liddell and Gordon; and, in 1857, became engineer to Messrs. R. S.
Newall & Co., of Gateshead, who shared the work of making the first
Atlantic cable with Messrs. Glass, Elliott & Co., of Greenwich. Jenkin
was busy designing and fitting up machinery for cableships, and making
electrical experiments. 'I am half crazy with work,' he wrote to his
betrothed; 'I like it though: it's like a good ball, the excitement
carries you through.' Again he wrote, 'My profession gives me all the
excitement and interest I ever hope for.'... 'I am at the works till
ten, and sometimes till eleven. But I have a nice office to sit in,
with a fire to myself, and bright brass scientific instruments all round
me, and books to read, and experiments to make, and enjoy myself
amazingly. I find the study of electricity so entertaining that I am
apt to neglect my other work.'... 'What shall I compare them to,' he
writes of some electrical experiments, 'a new song? or a Greek play?' In
the spring of 1855 he was fitting out the s.s. Elba, at Birkenhead, for
his first telegraph cruise. It appears that in 1855 Mr. Henry Brett
attempted to lay a cable across the Mediterranean between Cape
Spartivento, in the south of Sardinia, and a point near Bona, on the
coast of Algeria.
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