Latimer Clark’s Cable-laying Plough 1855

Hauled by soldiers, guided by Sappers & Miners, the device drew off the gutta percha-insulated copper wire from the drum and inserted it underground by means of a hollow or mole-plough

With regard to the practicalities of construction: the plough intended to lay the field cable often failed in heavy, water-logged earth before the city of Sebastopol and the eighteen inch deep trenches then had to be dug and filled by hand. Come Spring the telegraph was opened from Headquarters to Kadikoi, three miles distant, on March 7, 1855 and speedily extended to the siege lines. The gutta-percha insulated line was frequently broken; by troops digging for roots, by traffic, by burials, by shot and shell, by soldiers looking to use the gutta-percha to create tobacco pipe mouthpieces and, in one instance, by a family of mice.

In August 1855 Sidney Alfred Varley, on loan from the Electric Telegraph Company and younger brother of the company’s senior electrician, C F Varley, was appointed civil superintendent of the field telegraph and, with ten civil clerks, sent out to work the equipment under Captain du Cane. It was intended to have one sapper and one civilian clerk to each field telegraph station. This proved unnecessary as the sappers worked the line perfectly well, without complaint, and the remaining civilians were soon posted to work the new submarine circuit on the other side of the Black Sea between Varna and Constantinople.

The British outfitted the Turkish Contingent Force in 1856 with another telegraph detachment. Unlike its own unit this was provided with ten miles of very light No 10 gauge galvanised wire and lightweight porcelain insulators for attaching to trees and fencing, with only a few miles of gutta-percha insulated underground cable.

The neighbouring French Army relied on a version of the Chappe télégraphe aérien or semaphore for its field signalling between the Sebastopol front and its base at Kameisch throughout the war.

Sebastopol fell to the French, British, Sardinian and Turkish forces on September 9, 1855. The war formally ended in 1856.

The Crimea Cable - The Telegraph Detachment initially also managed the Crimean shore-end of a temporary 310 mile long submarine cable laid from the Monastery signal station near to British headquarters in Balaklava to Varna in Turkish Bulgaria. This connected to the European circuits via a French Army-built land line to existing Austrian circuits at Bucharest, hence to London and Paris in autumn 1855. Politicians were thus enabled to interfere with all manner of military tasks.

The Black Sea cable was constructed by R S Newall & Co., who had laid the first successful submarine telegraph across the English Channel. Newall made his unsolicited proposal to lay a cable at cost to the War Department in London on December 9, 1854. It was accepted on December 12. By January 16, 1855 four hundred miles of cable had been insulated by the Gutta Percha Company in London and shipped to Newall’s Gateshead works for finishing, a construction gang of sixty men assembled and a new transport ship chartered! But things then went wrong; the new ship proved unseaworthy and the winter weather was terrible. The cable and equipment had to be transferred to a stronger vessel and only left England on February 25.

Newall’s steamer, Argus, carrying his business partner Charles Liddell, his engineer Henry Woodhouse and the Army’s Captain E F du Cane, as well as the cable, arrived at Varna on March 30, to be joined shortly by its navy escorts, HMS Spitfire and HMS Terrible.

It was decided to lay the cable from Cape Kaliakria, thirty miles north of Varna to Monastery Bay at Crimea. The little fleet set out on April 1 and completed laying the first war cable on April 13, 1855. The connection at the mainland end was meant to be by a line of overhead wire from Kaliakria to Varna but there was enough cable left for a submarine circuit instead. The Crimean cable made its first message from Balaklava to London on April 28, 1855.

Some years later Samuel Alfred Varley was to write, “The cable consisted, throughout the greater portion of its length, simply of one No. 16 copper wire, served with gutta-percha a little less thick than the core of the 1858 Atlantic cable, and wholly unprotected. The shore ends had an iron sheathing, extending to a distance of 10 miles from the Varna shore, and of 6 miles from the Crimean coast. Its insulation was very perfect; and it remained in that condition for nearly twelve months, during the period of the Russian war, notwithstanding the many violent storms to which it was exposed in the Black Sea, until during a storm of more than usual severity, it was broken on the 5th December, 1855.”

R S Newall also laid a cable for the British government from Varna direct to Constantinople, the Turkish capital, where another land circuit existed to Vienna and the European capitals. The cables were all worked with the American telegraph to enable compatibility with the continental circuits.

As with Morton Peto and the Crimean Railway, the speedy prosecution and success of the Crimean Cable was to be the pinnacle of R S Newall’s career.

After the Crimea – The Corps of Sappers & Miners, that had effectively worked the electric telegraph in the Crimea in addition to its main function of creating the siege works about Sebastopol, was re-titled the “Royal Engineers” in October 1856, merging with the officer-only corps of that name.

The Army began to adopt the electric telegraph for internal communication in its fortresses; firstly at Malta and then at Gibraltar, to be soon joined by those at Portsmouth, Gosport, Chatham and Plymouth in the late 1850s.

The Royal Engineers despatched telegraph detachments, similar to those assembled for the Crimea, for the military adventures to China in 1859 and Hazara in Afghanistan during 1868. The field telegraph in China followed the headquarters of the advancing expedition many miles inland from the port of Canton.

 Henley’s Portable Military Telegraph

A galvanic single-needle telegraph and galvanometer combined

W T Henley manufactured a simple portable military telegraph that was adopted for field service by the British Army during the 1860s. It was a miniature single-needle galvanic telegraph instrument in a box-like mahogany case. The needle was calibrated so that it could also be used as a galvanometer; and it had two button keys let into the base. It was easily put into circuit with small butterfly nuts on either side of the case, and was carried by a brass ring on its flat top.

This very neat instrument, unlike Henley’s magneto-telegraphs widely used in public circuits in Britain, required portable batteries; it could be worked with just two sulphate cells, and used either light iron wire or a resin-insulated field cable for its operation.

The French Empire had learned from observing their allies in the British Army during the Crimea war. For their brief and bloody campaign in northern Italy against Austria between May 31 and July 6, 1859 they organised a “service télégraphiques”. This was formed of civilian staff engaged to follow the army in two “brigades” of ten waggons. It successfully laid 400 kilometres of line and created thirty-five telegraph stations along the advance, using light 2mm gauge wire on 6 meter poles, to keep the army in touch with metropolitan France. Each station was equipped with a portable American telegraph and Marie-Davy sulphate batteries.

In addition there was a clandestine “flying telegraph”, a field telegraph worked by the military rather than civilians, by which the Emperor Napoleon III’s mobile headquarters was put in circuit with field stations at each corps and division of the army across the twelve mile front. This was accomplished by horsemen unrolling a lightweight gutta-percha insulated cable as they rode between the units, their operation “planned in Paris, and a supply of gutta-percha-covered metal thread forwarded with secrecy and dispatch”. The cable was manufactured by the Gutta-Percha Company in London and the instruments used were Wheatstone’s recently patented Universal magneto-electric dial telegraph that transmitted the roman alphabet.

It was claimed that at the decisive battle of Solferino on June 24, 1859 “the movement of the whole army was known and regulated like clockwork” by telegraph.

Between October 1859 and April 1860 Spain was at war with Morocco, with an army under General Leopoldo O’Donnell, extending its interests into Africa from its ancient enclave of Ceuta. The Royal government in Madrid commissioned a war telegraph of W T Henley in London. The largest element was a 25 mile lightweight underwater cable, with a single No 14 gauge copper core, linking the mainland at Tarifa, near Algeciras, across the Mediterranean Sea to Ceuta on the Moroccan coast. It was laid by the steamer Tweedside, which had brought the cable from London, during the midday hours of December 21, 1859; on which same day Ceuta was connected electrically with Madrid and the rest of Europe.

To accompany the troops of the Spanish expedition W T Henley also provided a complete field telegraph; including transport waggons, his magneto-dial telegraph instruments and a specially-designed field cable made with a copper core, gutta percha insulation and lightweight iron wire armouring. The telegraph train followed General O’Donnell’s staff out from Ceuta.

In 1863 the British Army had standardised its field telegraph equipment. It was still using a portable twelve-cell Wollaston battery, weighing 24 pounds, devised in 1813, although more modern Daniell sulphate cells were also available. For long military lines it used lightweight seven-strand No 22 BWG iron wire tied to earthenware insulators with No 18 gauge iron wire, stapled on to larch poles, 25 to 30 feet in length. For field service it had underground cable of No 16 BWG copper wire insulated with two coats of gutta percha up to No 2 gauge thickness, coated with an anti-rot compound and a cotton serving steeped in tar. The wire and cable was wound on to portable wooden spindles on hand-barrows for easy unreeling.

This light and portable equipment was developed from the Army’s experience in using the telegraph in field operations in the Crimean campaign in 1854-6. A dedicated telegraph construction and operating unit was only established in the 1870s – telegraphy was, until then, handled by the sappers of the Royal Engineers as part of their general duties.

During the 1860s there was a continuing dispute between the Royal Engineers and the Quartermaster-General as to which department should operate the field and fortress telegraphs for the Army.

Bolton’s Portable Field Telegraph 1863

The battery in a bag on the cross belt, the receiver in the drum on the left shoulder, the sending key on the cross belt front 

During 1863 Captain Frank Bolton, an Infantry officer, introduced his Portable Field Telegraph. This was based in principle on the American sounder or acoustic telegraph, but “carried by one man, in the form of a set of accoutrements, the indicator on the shoulder, close to the left ear, the battery in his pouch, and the finger-key, or contact maker, attached conveniently to the waist belt. With a proper supply of covered wire, each man would represent a complete telegraphic station in himself, being able either to send or receive.” It was, being so compact and mobile, a wired ‘walkie-talkie’.

The British Army had tested Henley’s magneto-electric dial telegraph, developed in 1855 and previously used by the Spanish Army in Morocco in 1860, but found that although less complicated than the competitive dial instruments Henley’s was more “liable to error from unskilful manipulation”.

Wheatstone’s Universal telegraph 1868

Portable or Military Version

At the same time several sets of Wheatstone’s Universal telegraph, also a magneto-electric dial device not requiring any batteries, were purchased by the Army. This device was fitted in a small portable case. The Universal telegraph was that first tried on the battlefield by the Imperial French Army in 1859 during their invasion of Italy.

The Royal Engineers retained a Field Telegraph train at home in 1866 for rapid deployment abroad. It consisted of two wire waggons, two office waggons and four miles of wire on half-mile drums.

The sappers of the Royal Engineers before 1868 were trained on a range of instruments: the single needle and two needle telegraphs, the American recorder and the American sounder and the Universal telegraph. On these instruments they sent and received the “European Alphabet”, except with the two-needle device which had its own code, and the Universal telegraph which worked the common roman alphabet.

To wind up the story...

a military telegraph cable-drum for subterranean circuits