- 5 weeks ago
In Part 1, we saw the proto-Internet of the 1840s expand throughout North America and Europe in the form of telegraph networks. Now, in the 1850s, the geniuses and dummies in charge of these networks shift their ambitions toward one of the most spectacular engineering feats in human history. Additionally, Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor glues his head to a board.
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00:00The internet of the 1800s wasn't easy to repair, but it was easy to troubleshoot.
00:07The wire was pretty much always the problem.
00:10The telegraph devices just sat indoors all day and did their thing.
00:13You'd need to replace the ink or the paper or the battery once in a while, but the devices
00:17themselves mechanically failing was relatively rare.
00:20The wire, meanwhile, was often a completely uninsulated, bare copper wire, typically strung
00:25along a series of poles.
00:27It was exposed to the weather and the sun and spots who would have to contend with low
00:30tree branches.
00:32Some telegraph lines navigated the wilderness.
00:34They might be cut down by thieves or saboteurs or bored kids with nothing else to do.
00:39During the Civil War, cutting the enemy's lines was a tried-and-true military tactic.
00:43With a sprawl of dozens of thousands of miles, it was just too much to keep track of, too
00:49many places where it could go wrong.
00:51Nearly 150 years later, I had a job doing over-the-phone tech support for an internet service provider.
00:57Maybe you called in and talked to me.
00:58Who knows?
00:59I found that a lot of people who called in were still under the impression that the wire,
01:03the cable, was the problem.
01:06It certainly could be, but it's not that common.
01:09In my experience, it was most likely your router.
01:12This is something that understandably required me to do some convincing.
01:15You didn't usually believe me.
01:18The cable's out there being rained on and getting chopped up by weed whackers.
01:22The router's just been sitting there.
01:24You haven't been messing with it at all.
01:26How could it be the router?
01:27These days, your provider will often issue you a modem-router combo that usually works
01:31pretty well.
01:32But in 2006, it was far more common to have two separate devices, the modem and the router.
01:38The cable modem was the Al Borland of this relationship.
01:41It would read signals from what was typically RG6 cable, a WWII-era holdover that was previously
01:46intended to transmit analog cable TV before there was an internet and before anyone knew
01:51there would be an internet as we know it today.
01:54But it was the type of cable that was already there, uncoiling through neighborhoods and snaking
01:58through your walls, and the modem was what made it all possible.
02:03This modem would perform the heroic work of pulling analog signals out of this ancient
02:08cable, translating it to digital signal, and passing it along to your computer or network.
02:13And of course, it would do the reverse when you sent data upstream.
02:16This is incredibly impressive work, and it did so moment to moment, day after day, without
02:21ever missing a beat.
02:22You often only needed to power cycle it, in other words, unplug it and plug it back in,
02:26maybe a couple times a year.
02:28It was the greatest.
02:31Once the modem did all the truly hard work, it passed out its fresh-out-of-the-oven digital
02:35signal to your router.
02:37The router was the TIM.
02:39Unreliable.
02:40Forgetful.
02:41Negligent.
02:42All it had to do was shoot the data a few more feet, but despite having the easy job,
02:47it might stop working and need a power cycle every few days, even every few hours.
02:51I still don't know what its deal was, but like TIM, who tried to offset his ineptitude
02:55with grunts and one-liners and retrofitted monstrosities, these things sure did
03:00try to compensate.
03:02While the modem was always a completely unassuming black box that looked like it could have been
03:05manufactured in 1986, the router often sprouted these big, blocky antennas that made it look
03:11like a dead, belly-up robotic insect.
03:14As if the transmission strength was ever the issue.
03:16As if what we were really missing here was more power.
03:21One day I got a call that perfectly intersected this dynamic with the new wave of home improvement
03:25in America experience in the 90s and aughts.
03:27One that I believe was juiced in some limited respect by shows like This Old House and,
03:32yeah, home improvement.
03:33This guy was pretty friendly, which, despite everything you hear, most callers were.
03:37His internet wasn't working, so I checked the upstream and downstream readings on the
03:40line, asked him to tell me what the lights on the modem were doing, helped him check his
03:44IP address, all the basic stuff, until, as usual, I was convinced this was a router problem.
03:50So I asked him to unplug his router and plug it back in and he said, I can't.
03:54Oh, I gotcha.
03:55No problem.
03:56Do you happen to have somebody nearby who can help?
03:58No, he said, I literally can't.
04:04Turns out, during a recent fit at home improvement, he'd put up new drywall in his living room
04:08and he had decided to place his modem and wireless router between the studs and wall it
04:14off behind the drywall, powering them via an electrical socket that was also behind the drywall.
04:19He treated his network like it was plumbing, never imagining he'd ever have to look at
04:23it again.
04:24We had a good laugh about it, he probably had a fun day hacking up his new wall with
04:28a hammer, but I understand where the instinct comes from.
04:32We think of these devices and these wires as unsightly and we hide them from our sight
04:37whenever possible.
04:38We even use those goofy wireless phone chargers that don't even eliminate the wire from the
04:42charger to the wall socket, they just keep us from having to touch the wire.
04:46We want everything to be wireless, invisible magic.
04:50But you know, the thing we are walling off is our most expansive masterwork.
04:55It is the greatest superstructure humankind has ever created.
04:59Quite literally the only global superstructure and one that is nearly 200 years old.
05:06We're about to meet an Al Borland, if there ever was one, a man named Frederick Gisborne,
05:11who in 1851 is hacking his way through the wilderness of Newfoundland.
05:16And what I would like to argue is that the line he is preparing to crudely string across
05:21this island in the year 1851 and the cables sticking out of your living room wall right
05:27now are the same thing.
05:29I don't mean that they're similar or that they're different versions of the same thing.
05:33I mean that they are the same thing.
05:37Fiber optic cable is increasingly becoming the norm for our big, huge telecommunication
05:41superstructure, but obviously it's not replaced all at once.
05:45It's gradual and piecemeal.
05:46And along the way, fiber optic cables regularly communicate with older RG cable.
05:51When cable internet was the cutting edge, those cables regularly communicated with phone
05:55lines that supplied dial-up internet, and before that, exclusively phone calls.
06:01On the turn of the century, as the telephone began to replace the telegraph, old telegraph
06:05lines were kept in place and repurposed as telephone lines, sharing the very same physically
06:11connected network with the telegraph.
06:14The entire time, this network has remained physically intact.
06:20This means that our global telecommunications network is a ship of Theseus, a thing that
06:26certainly retains none of the physical materials that it was made of when they began building
06:30it in the 1840s and 50s, but has nonetheless been augmented so gradually that it has never
06:37stopped being, at its core, the same thing.
06:41So when you hear about Frederick Gisborne and his First Nation companions working on the line
06:46in 1851, know that they are among the people who are working on your line.
06:53Their estimated arrival time is 1850 through 1866, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.
07:00Thank you for your patience.
07:01I'll be honest with you.
07:13I began my researcher Frederick Gisborne thinking how funny it would be if he actually wore flannel.
07:18Not at all expecting to find evidence of that.
07:21And then, on page 26 of his journal, what do you know?
07:25He's a flannel man.
07:27Gisborne is a classic Al Borland.
07:30Visually he's a dead ringer, big, bearded, strapping.
07:33Although he's in his 20s, he commands the respect of a much older man.
07:37No.
07:38Our previous Al saw his inventions stolen by his tin.
07:41Name one creative thing I ever did on Tool Time.
07:44Um, what?
07:45Gadget Corner?
07:46That was your idea?
07:47No, I just took credit for it.
07:48Al, like the rest of the supporting cast of Home Improvement, was almost never allowed to
07:52have his own thing going on.
07:54This season 5 episode might be the first time we ever get to see him strike out on his own
07:58without Tim.
07:59What about that Tool Time game you designed?
08:01Yeah.
08:02Everybody else loved my Tool Time board game.
08:05Al's been dreaming about that project for years.
08:07To this point, pretty much everything bad that's ever happened to him could be explained by the
08:11presence of Tim, so you want to think that Tim was always the problem, was always the
08:16one holding Al back.
08:17Well, we know better than that because again, the show's point of view is Tim's point of view.
08:22This is Tim's world, one in which Al is often fated to suffer.
08:26Al is going to make a fortune on this.
08:30In order to mass produce the game, Al hired contractors whose shoddy wiring causes every
08:35copy of the game to set itself on fire.
08:37The problem isn't that he's Al, it's that nobody else is Al.
08:41This Al is having contractor troubles of his own.
08:44Frederick Gisborne is leading an expedition to survey a path for a new telegraph line through
08:48Newfoundland on the evening of October 17, 1851, somewhere around this patch of land.
08:54While his hired men set up camp and kick off their boots for the day, Al ventures off just
08:58a bit to find some higher terrain and have a look around.
09:01This is one of the least inviting pieces of land on the planet, whether you're a human,
09:05an animal, or even a plant.
09:07The island was totally covered in an ice sheet until about 10,000 years ago, and being an island,
09:12many species of flora and fauna couldn't migrate to it when the ice age ended.
09:15No raccoons, no snakes, no lots of stuff you'd think you'd see.
09:19There is St. John's, a somewhat small port city on the eastern coast, and some small populations
09:24of First Nations people who mostly stick to the coast as well.
09:28Inland, it can be kind of a nightmare.
09:30Bleak is the word he uses.
09:32He's worried that his men, who aren't as seasoned and experienced in the wildernesses of the world
09:36as he is, might die out here.
09:38So he cuts them loose and hires some men from the Mi'kmaq tribe who know the land and are
09:42far better suited for this expedition.
09:44They become fast friends, teaching each other dances, doing gymnastic exercises, laughing,
09:49joking, arguing over where thunder comes from, you know, dude stuff.
09:53Gisborne learns that they've found silver on the island, and knowing that his journal
09:56will probably be widely circulated one day, he makes sure to log in detail that the Mi'kmaq
10:01people should reap its benefits.
10:03One Mi'kmaq companion is impressed with his resilience throughout this journey, bestowing upon him
10:07the esteemed title of Crazy White Boy.
10:10Friendship is all they got.
10:11This expedition is a nightmare.
10:14Gisborne uses the word miserable a half dozen times in his 35 page journal.
10:19He quickly realizes the maps made of Newfoundland are all wrong and offers the following advice.
10:24Don't come here.
10:25You'll probably die.
10:27Throughout nearly the entire month of October, torrential rain drops all over.
10:32At night, the tent floods so they have to cut a hole in the bottom so they don't sleep
10:35soaking in a pool of cold water.
10:37Gisborne's boots are perpetually waterlogged, and his clothes are so soaked around the
10:41clock that they're chafing his skin and he's bleeding all over his body.
10:45It's impossible to keep anything less than soaking wet so the bread they're carrying turns
10:48into mush.
10:49They try to keep their food and clothes dry as well as they can, but it takes 90 minutes
10:53to start a fire, then several more hours for the fire to dry everything out.
10:57By that time, they've spent almost all their daylight.
10:59So sometimes they resolve to just march through the pouring rain and, at least in one case,
11:04a hailstorm.
11:06Once they've marched like that to the point of exhaustion, they sleep under a blanket
11:09that obviously is soaking wet.
11:11They do this night after night.
11:13Sometimes it snows so hard that the tops of their sleeping bodies are flushed with the
11:17surface of the snow, and then it rains.
11:20Once it becomes clear that the rain will not end, their souls are defeated.
11:25Gisborne asks his companions if they want to give up.
11:28A couple do take him up on it.
11:30One of them, who goes by the name Joe, tells him, I can't do it.
11:34I can't go down in history as the guy who gave up before the white guy.
11:42Both Joe and Gisborne manage to survive the journey.
11:45It's been reported that another Mi'kmaq man died along the way.
11:48If he did, of course, rest in peace, but I suspect this might have been a misinterpretation.
11:53Gisborne's journal was so personal and detailed and communicated such strong kinship with his
11:57companions that the death of one of them absolutely would have been written about at length in
12:01his journal.
12:02But there's nothing.
12:03All I found was this entry from October 21st in which he says Matthew Brazil drank too
12:07much rum and, quote, rolled over dead drunk.
12:10They left him there, which I take to mean he just had a really bad hangover and never bothered
12:13to join back up with the group.
12:15Anyway, by the time they double back and return to St. John's, Gisborne does so with a known
12:20route through which a telegraph line can be run through Newfoundland.
12:24He's planned on doing so with the help of some investment partners, but two of those partners
12:28start fighting.
12:29Both of them quit and take their money with them and all of a sudden Gisborne is left
12:33holding the bag.
12:35He's arrested for debt and briefly thrown in jail, although he's so universally well-liked
12:39and respected in the Maritimes that he soon sprung loose.
12:42Still, though, Frederick Gisborne almost died out there.
12:46He endured months of sleeping in the rain, nearly starving, nearly freezing to death.
12:51He's lost all his money, he's been locked up, and for what?
12:56If laying telegraph line is his trade, there are plenty of better, safer places to do that,
13:00where roadways and civilization actually exist.
13:03Newfoundland is not exactly a major industrial or commercial hub.
13:08It's one real city, St. John's is not exactly a big city, and it's nowhere near any other
13:13major cities.
13:14And Gisborne, who was born in England and has lived all over the world, isn't even from
13:18Newfoundland.
13:19Why a telegraph line?
13:20Why here?
13:21What exactly is the point?
13:25That's right.
13:33They've been very clear about this.
13:46They've told Frederick Gisborne this is impossible.
13:49When he gets back from Newfoundland, he proposes it again, and they tell him it's impossible
13:53again.
13:55You cannot pull a telegraph wire across the Atlantic Ocean.
13:59If you did, you would establish proof of concept that a truly worldwide telecommunications network
14:04can be built in the 1850s, but you can't.
14:08Gisborne remains determined.
14:10He surveyed this track to the eastern coast of Newfoundland so that a transatlantic underwater
14:15telegraph line can be laid on the ocean floor between here and the southwestern coast of Ireland.
14:21You're probably already imagining all the reasons this is impossible at this point in history,
14:26but for one, Newfoundland hasn't even been wired to the North American mainland yet.
14:30Can it be?
14:31Can an underwater telegraph line work?
14:35Well there's some conditional good news to report there.
14:37Obviously you can't just run bare copper wire across the ocean floor so it'll need insulation,
14:42and it's at this point that we need to stop calling it a wire and start calling it a cable.
14:47At this point, the technology to develop synthetic insulation materials doesn't yet exist.
14:53There is one, and only one, known substance on Earth that can act as an effective insulator.
14:59It's called gutta-percha, and it's a sort of tar-like substance that's highly moldable
15:03in hot water but becomes really tough and resilient once it's cooled down.
15:07In the 19th century, its applications are many.
15:09This bottle is made of gutta-percha.
15:12These golf balls are made of gutta-percha.
15:14This cane that Preston Brooks is using to beat Charles Sumner is made of gutta-percha.
15:18One of greatest interest to telegraphers, though, is that it presents a very high dielectric strength,
15:22meaning it can withstand a reasonable amount of electric current without breaking down or leaking that current.
15:27Gutta-percha is the only known material on the planet that offers these properties in this measure,
15:33and wouldn't you know it, the one place on Earth it can be found falls within the confines of the British Empire,
15:38which immediately starts doing what empires do.
15:41In Malaysia, gutta-percha trees produce a considerable amount of the substance,
15:45but the vast majority of it is too difficult to actually extract.
15:48In a paper published in 2009, John Tully explains that when they cut down a fully grown 60-foot tall tree,
15:54they could only actually harvest an average of about 11 ounces from it.
15:59In other words, crack open a can of soda and take a swig.
16:01However much you have left is how much they get out of a 60-foot tree.
16:06There is, of course, way more gutta-percha than that in the tree, but they can't figure out how to get it out.
16:11So after chopping it down, they just leave it there and move on to the next tree,
16:15with such a crude way of going about it that it eventually took on the term slaughter-tapping.
16:19Tully estimates that by the end of the 19th century, they had to knock down about 88 million trees
16:25to get all the insulation they needed for underwater cables around the world,
16:29most of which came from ecologically invaluable rainforests.
16:32The gutta-percha tree almost went extinct entirely,
16:34because all the while, very few people involved even raised the question of sustainability.
16:39But this is one of those times a chapter of history ends like sitcoms do.
16:43It's crucial to the long-term prospects of a sitcom that its characters never learn anything,
16:48because their quirks and shortcomings are what make them funny.
16:51It's why you see the Tool Man make the same mistakes in his marriage over and over and over again.
16:56Every new episode, he relives some variant of the same day and presents the same failings, but doesn't matter.
17:02In a very similar fashion, the captains of industry that nearly drove the gutta-percha tree out of existence
17:08were bailed out by pure happenstance.
17:11It wasn't until the turn of the 20th century that they started to come to terms with the fact
17:15that they were completely running out.
17:17In 1902, it was reported that gutta-percha trees could barely even be found in the wild anymore.
17:21Can you guess what happened a couple months prior to that?
17:23Uh-huh, Marconi had achieved transatlantic wireless radio transmission,
17:28which would dramatically lessen the demand for gutta-percha.
17:31It was a classic deus ex machina, a new technology that just happened to arrive
17:36just in time to bail us out, leaving us free to repeat the same episode and devastate rainforests
17:42over and over again.
17:44Somehow, season after season, our great shared human sitcom remains on the air.
17:49But back to the 1850s, when people are decades away from caring about any of that,
17:54a lot of important lessons are being learned in the field of undersea telegraphy after some very
17:58Tool Time-esque series of trials and errors.
18:01The idea they've landed on is to coil up a ton of cable in the hold of a ship and
18:05throw it out of the stern as it sails along.
18:07This is a very intricate process.
18:09For one, the ship can't go too fast, a grievous error committed by Tim later in the show's run
18:14when he accidentally flips on the thrusters of an F-14 Tomcat engine and sends the USS
18:19Constellation supercarrier flying across the ocean at 900 knots or whatever.
18:23I'm not much of a fan of Home Improvement's late-era stunts, where they kept trying to
18:26up the ante like this.
18:27I'm a much bigger fan of the simple slapstick Home Improvement offered, which it really should
18:33be commended for.
18:34Here, a glaringly obvious Tim Allen stunt double demonstrates the other lesson that
18:38telegraph pioneers are now learning.
18:40You gotta remember to let go.
18:45While trying to lay a cable from Scotland to Ireland, the steam paddler Britannia learned both
18:49these lessons the hard way.
18:51It went too fast for a man to be able to put any slack on the line and it didn't let go,
18:56yanking all the expensive instruments and equipment out of the telegraph station,
18:59clanking across the beach and into the sea.
19:02The bad news is that once they actually do lay the cable and bring it to the other end,
19:06the problems are only beginning.
19:08In 1850, a cable is dropped across the English Channel, the first time this has ever been pulled off.
19:13Those on the French end of the wire excitedly hook it up to their instruments to receive morse code
19:17signals from the British only to find out that they're completely jumbled up and unintelligible.
19:23Same deal for those in England trying to pick up signals from the French.
19:26Both sides suspect the other of over-celebrating and getting so drunk off their asses that they
19:30can't type straight.
19:31During these years, telegraph companies all over the world are running into this same
19:36problem.
19:36Despite the gut of percha insulation, signals just don't behave the same way under water
19:41as they do above ground. The further a signal travels down the line, the more it slows down
19:46and nobody knows why. In 1855, for example, an underwater cable is laid across a stretch of the Black Sea.
19:53It's the longest undersea cable ever attempted at this point, and despite all its insulation,
19:58they have to slow down transmission to just five words per minute in order to keep it the least
20:02bit intelligible. For example's sake, all the words I've spoken over the last 10 minutes would take
20:08more than six hours to transmit over this line. And that's for a line stretching about 300 miles.
20:13A transatlantic cable would span close to 2,000 miles. How much worse is this gonna get on a cable
20:20six or seven times as long? Do we have an answer for that? Doesn't matter. People have caught the bug.
20:26We've gotten a taste of the experience of instantly receiving a thousand-word message sent from over
20:31a thousand miles away, and we cannot get enough. We're talking about belting the globe. We're
20:36talking about time and distance utterly annihilated. We're imagining a future in which we can extend
20:41telegraph lines to other planets, which to me is a really funny illustration of how limited our
20:46imaginations were prior to the advent of wireless radio. But for now, we've got telegraph fever,
20:51and we don't really have time for questions like why is underwater cable behaving differently?
20:56What we need now is a man untethered by the concerns of science,
21:00a man liberated from the oppressive confines of knowledge. We need a Tim.
21:11In January of 1854, Frederick Gisborne is introduced to business magnate Cyrus W. Field.
21:17Field is slight of frame, especially standing next to Gisborne. His defining characteristic, which
21:22sometimes actually can be more of a virtue than a vice, is his minute-to-minute restlessness.
21:28Always scheming, planning, making moves. He does not, and cannot, chill. An instructive piece of Tool
21:35Time lore is that while Al Borland did a lot of construction work during his time in the Navy and
21:39operated a crane as a union man, Tim started out as a salesman for Benford Tools, Tool Time sponsor, which
21:45might explain the otherwise odd choice to wear a necktie on a home improvement show. Cyrus Field has come up as a
21:51businessman as well, having gotten rich in the paper business without more than a passing interest at
21:56best in the field of telegraphy. In a biography of Field written by his daughter, there is almost no
22:01mention of the word telegraph until the part that describes this meeting between him and Gisborne.
22:06And it's here that I'm gonna make another break with the commonly accepted historical record,
22:10not because proposing alternate histories is fun, which it is, but because this just does not add up.
22:16The story you're still most likely to hear is this one. Gisborne walked into Field's office not to
22:22propose a transatlantic cable, but to propose connecting Newfoundland to mainland North America
22:27so that messages could be telegraphed to St. John's, written down, loaded on a ship, and sailed to Europe,
22:32thereby getting there maybe a day or two faster than if they were sent from a place like New York City.
22:36The story goes that Field wasn't all that interested in this idea, but after Gisborne left,
22:41he looked at a globe he kept in his office. And what we're supposed to believe is that Field,
22:46upon examining the globe, experienced a fit of genius, an epiphany he arrived at completely
22:52independently that a cable should be laid straight across the Atlantic Ocean instead.
22:57I don't buy this for a couple of reasons. One is that several sources plainly state that Gisborne
23:02came to Nova Scotia politician Joseph Howe with the transatlantic proposal years earlier in 1850.
23:07Howe is the guy who shot him down multiple times in the first place. However, Howe is also the guy
23:12who later wrote a letter to Gisborne in which he said, listen, you were the first person who I ever
23:17heard propose the idea of a transatlantic cable. It was your idea. You have a much greater place in
23:22history than everyone thinks you do, and you should let everybody know it. Even beyond that though,
23:27are we really supposed to believe this? And nobody ever seriously considered the idea of a transatlantic
23:32cable until this random rich guy looked at a globe? It's amazing to me that something this silly is
23:37actually stuck. Any five-year-old could look at a globe, point at the blue stuff, and say make that
23:41part go beep beep. And listen, while I do think Frederick Gisborne might have been the first person
23:46to throw significant time and capital into the quest to build a transatlantic cable, neither he nor
23:51Field were the first to come up with the idea. Morse had floated the idea as far back as 1843,
23:56and I don't even think he was the first. Myth-making is undeniably fun, but I gotta ask that we try a
24:01little bit harder than this. Speaking of trying hard, Field was all in on everything he ever did,
24:07including, I think, the perpetuation of this myth. This is one of several photos of him posing with a globe.
24:14We've heard the globe story, man. We get it. We all get it.
24:17For a time, this incarnation of Tim and Al actually does get along pretty well. Shortly after their
24:29meeting, Cyrus Field forms what will eventually be known as the Atlantic Telegraph Company. In
24:34other words, our Binford Tools. This company ponies up the funds to get cable laid across Newfoundland
24:39and to lay an underwater cable connecting Newfoundland to Nova Scotia. Frederick Gisborne,
24:44the master architect of this plan, immediately goes on a long vacation, which is understandable
24:48given everything he's been through. In his absence, the project totally goes belly up and is on the
24:53verge of failure. In 1856, Field and company finally convince him to come back, and Gisborne, being
24:59Gisborne, completely turns things around and gets both cables laid down successfully. And then,
25:05Gisborne leaves again, this time for good. One account says his relationship with Field and the other
25:11sours, and other claims that Field is starting to go around making and promoting plans without him.
25:15A third source seems to corroborate that. Further details seem to have been lost to history. Although
25:20Gisborne is no stranger to the world of business, these are two very different personalities. Field,
25:26all the way up to this point, has been exclusively a talker, not a doer, a role Gisborne seems to have
25:32little respect for. Al, this show's part of entertainment. It takes a lot of skill to entertain
25:36the audience while we do our projects. Anyone can do what you do. This moment from the first season,
25:42in which Al declares he's fed up with Tim's nonstop yakety yak, is about as close as he ever gets to
25:47quitting. Again, since it's a sitcom, he can't ever be allowed to, but Frederick Gisborne does quit,
25:52and he allows us to see what happens when an Al and a Tim go their separate ways. Cyrus Field still has a
25:59major part to play in our story here in the 1850s. Looking far ahead though, he's gonna come out of
26:05the telegraphy business a very rich man. But this is a man who is a mover and a doer, and unlike Gisborne,
26:11his idea of moving and doing is mostly defined by moving money from one column to the next.
26:17He'll invest in everything from railroads to newspapers, and will end up being associated with
26:21the robber barons of the late 19th century, a group of aspiring monopolists intent on buying
26:26politicians, driving down wages, and generally immiserating the working class. There's debate
26:31over how involved Field actually was in any of those practices, but he is vilified for it.
26:36By the end of his life, he's mostly seen in the papers as a caricature, a crony dividing up America's
26:41wealth between him and his millionaire buddies. One of those buddies, Jay Gould, turns heel on Field,
26:45targeting him specifically and manipulating stock prices to squeeze him out of almost all his fortune.
26:50Well, says this unsympathetic writer, that's what you get. I think Field could have avoided
26:57dying next to broke if he'd done what Frederick Gisborne had done. Despite the falling out with
27:01the Atlantic Telegraph Company, he returned to Newfoundland a hero, and continued adventuring
27:05around there until a gunshot from god knows who put an end to that chapter of his life. Then he
27:10started leveraging his practical experience to become a scientist, renowned inventor, and eventually
27:15the superintendent of the Canadian Telegraph Service. Gisborne spent the rest of his life
27:19celebrated as the signature pioneer of the transatlantic telegraph in Newfoundland and the Maritimes,
27:24territories that were and are sparsely populated and typically ignored by the rest of Canada,
27:29let alone the world. His fame never extended far past there, but he doesn't seem to have ever cared,
27:34nor did he ever have the impulse to play around in the stock market and juice his wealth to
27:38incomprehensible levels. He was perfectly content to just sit his ass down somewhere and do what he liked
27:44to do. There don't seem to be any statues of either Field or Gisborne. There's a plaque dedicated to
27:49Field on a building in Manhattan next to Gramercy Park, the former site of his mansion. As far as
27:55commemorations you can actually go and visit, I think that's about all he ever got. And I think the
27:59only thing Gisborne ever got was a lake. Gisborne Lake, and man is it a lake. It's very close to the
28:07spot where he cut the rest of the surveying team loose in 1851. I have no idea who named it after him,
28:12or when they did. Almost nothing around here has changed in the nearly 175 years since. Newfoundland
28:18remains sparsely populated, especially outside St. John's, and especially once you leave the
28:23coastlines. It's miles away from even the nearest dirt road. Virtually no one ever goes here, and
28:29outside of a short-lived proposal about 25 years ago to pump water out of this lake and sell it,
28:33virtually no one ever mentions it. I looked through social channels and found a couple of people who
28:38said they went fishing there once, and that's it. I don't have any license photos I can show you,
28:43there are barely any photos at all, but accounts from the few who have been there suggest that this
28:48satellite image absolutely does not do it justice. It's described as almost artificially beautiful,
28:54a pure and unique spectacle with water so clear and still that it sometimes almost seems invisible.
29:01But that's Al, and that was Frederick Gisborne.
29:05Have you ever had a new job nightmare? Do you even know what I'm talking about? Well,
29:18a new job nightmare can happen if you take on a new project of some kind that puts you way over
29:22your skis, but they're probably most common within the first few weeks or months after starting a new
29:26job. They come during a time when you're so disoriented by your new job that you not only
29:31not know how to do it, you have no idea how to even begin to be less bad at it.
29:36You're either overthinking it by 100 miles or underthinking it by 100 miles, and you have no
29:42idea which. These anxieties manifest as nightmares in which the job is cartoonishly dumb and over
29:47complicated. For example, instead of emailing a report to your boss, you have to print out 53 copies
29:52and hand deliver them by unicycle to every member of the 2009 San Diego Chargers. This is that kind of
29:58nightmare made manifest in the real world. Your job is to design and manufacture a cable capable of
30:05protecting a copper wire underwater. Let's start with this sample length of 400 feet. It's the 1850s,
30:11and the technology for applying gutta percha installation is still pretty new. That gutta percha
30:16must be applied evenly. You need to be careful about how you store it. If it sits in the same way for too
30:21long, the copper wire might begin to sit off center. If it sits in the sun too long, the gutta percha could
30:26heat up and lose its shape. Now, take this 400 foot length and extend it to an entire mile.
30:33What if there's a kink somewhere? If there is, are the materials strong enough to withstand it?
30:38This is not a game of percentages. You cannot compensate for one bad foot with a thousand good
30:43ones. An electrical charge does not care about that. It will not heroically leap across an impure
30:48stretch of cable just because you tried your best. One weak spot, if weak enough, is capable of
30:53single-handedly turning this entire cable into expensive garbage. Are you going to be able to
30:59maintain this quality throughout every last foot of this mile? You might say so, but do you know so?
31:06You'd better be absolutely sure because these are not like the above ground telegraph wires we're used
31:11to that we can go and repair whenever we want. This goes to the bottom of the ocean and once it's down
31:15there, there's no repairing it. You will never see it again. Additionally, this mile of cable is going
31:21to get heavy. Really heavy. In water, this mile of cable will weigh about 1,300 pounds. Above the water,
31:27it'll weigh an entire ton. Will you be able to safely load it onto a ship? Will that ship's equipment
31:32allow you to spool it out smoothly without straining or squeezing it? You're talking about an entire mile
31:38of cable weighing an entire ton? Make that 2,500 tons because you will require 2,500 miles of cable.
31:52How are you going to manufacture all this? Where? Who? With whose money? How will you ensure that every
31:58foot of these thousands of miles is free of defects? What ship on earth is capable of carrying all these
32:042,500 tons? Will you have to use multiple ships? How will that work? Will you splice lengths of this
32:09cable together out there in the middle of the ocean? How are you going to safely unload this much cable
32:15bearing this much weight out of the ship and onto the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, a surface that you
32:20cannot see and that no one has ever seen? And you can be sure that this is a nightmare because you cannot
32:27win a nightmare. Even if you do somehow successfully navigate all of this, you remain at the
32:34mercy of the signal slowdown problem that has plagued every underwater cable ever laid that was even
32:39one-tenth this long, rendering them borderline worthless. We don't even understand how to fix
32:44those. To try a cable 10 times longer that will greatly magnify a problem that we still do not
32:50understand. This is lunacy. This is delusional, which in fact is the key here. Undertaking this project
33:00requires pure, bullheaded ignorance to the point of delusion. And suddenly, maybe a man like Cyrus
33:08Field is now a little bit easier to understand, even appreciate. His impulsiveness is capable of
33:14overriding all doubts and fears and compelling him to shove all his chips to the middle of the table.
33:19This is the only sort of attitude, the only sort of person who could lead a project like this one.
33:30There are, in fact, different variants of Tim. Sometimes they're oddly necessary. Like any Tim,
33:36Cyrus Field will require a supporting cast to refine his good ideas and mitigate the impact of his bad
33:42ideas. In this era, the characters you'll find within these lines of work fall into one of two
33:46categories of men. They say men here, naturally, as projects like this one can often be explained by
33:52the outright disqualification of more than half of all human beings, and that in turn can play some
33:56part in explaining why both Tool Time and the Atlantic Telegraph Company are the way they are.
34:00Anywho, the commonly understood types here are the man of science and the practical man. Field,
34:07a total newcomer to the field of telegraphy, is neither one. A perfect example of a practical
34:12man can be found in company stakeholder Charles Breit. Breit is the boy wonder who laid the first
34:18undersea cable between Scotland and Ireland when he was just 21 years old. He has no formal
34:22scientific education, but has made up a lot of the difference through hands-on, real-world experience
34:27that has taught him a lot of things that a university could not. Another practical man on board is fellow
34:32stakeholder John Watkins Brett, known as the founder of the submarine telegraph who oversaw the first
34:37successful cable laid across the English Channel. The man of science label is reserved for someone
34:42who tends to lack hands-on experience but is well versed in the theories and principles at play.
34:48This perfectly describes William Thompson, who, in 1856, at age 31, becomes an unpaid advisor and
34:54member of the board of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. From this point forward, Thompson will serve as our
35:00transformational Al. He is a genius, and in our time, he will be recognized as such. He won't be
35:07right about everything. For example, about a year and a half before the Wright brothers' first heavier
35:11than air flight, he'll predict that heavier than air flight will never be possible. But he's among the
35:16most gifted scientists of his time and will prove to be one of the most influential scientists of all time.
35:22To tell just one story of many, at one point he'll be asked to write a series of magazine articles
35:26explaining how a Mariner's Compass works. He writes one article, gets annoyed over how badly designed
35:31it is, says, forget it, I'll just make a better one, and designs a way, way better one that immediately
35:37becomes the standard for decades and makes every other Mariner's Compass on Earth obsolete. And that's
35:42what Thompson is bringing to the table here. He has such a thorough command of scientific knowledge
35:47and is such a voracious learner that he can become one of the foremost experts in an industry he joined
35:51last month. He has this special gift for knowing where to dive deep, which questions to answer,
35:57what the problem actually is. Consequently, as John Steele Gordon notes in his book A Threat Across
36:02the Ocean, his work here will produce a domino effect that helps eventually lead to the advent of
36:07wireless radio and television. Even here and now, Thompson's findings are, yeah, transformational.
36:13He drills down on the problem that's stumping telegraphers everywhere. Why do signals come through
36:17clean on above-ground cables but get all jumbled up when sent through underwater cables? You might
36:22guess, well, water leaks through the gut of Hercha and screws up the signal, which it can if the cable
36:26is of poor quality, but that's not actually the fundamental issue at play here. After a time,
36:31Thompson introduces what he calls the law of squares. Above-ground wires aren't even cables,
36:37right? They're usually just bare wires. If you shoot a current down a copper wire, that wire is basically
36:41only slowed down by the resistance of the wire itself. The amount of resistance depends on the quality
36:47and purity of the wire, but it's basically more or less linear. After X amount of time, it goes Y distance.
36:54So let's say you want to send the letter A, which in Morse code is a dot and a dash. You type the dot
36:59into the telegraph key, and an instant later you type the dash. Since the resistance remains more or
37:04less linear throughout, they retain a comfortable cushion from one another. The person receiving him
37:09at the other end is actually gonna be able to perceive this brief span of silence between the two.
37:14This span is everything. In Morse code, it's what makes the letter A the letter A. It's what makes
37:20sending literally anything possible. But under C cable requires gutta-percha insulation. While this
37:27insulation does protect it from the water, it also acts as a capacitor that itself absorbs electricity. So
37:34the current is up against two things. Not only the resistance of the wire, but also the capacitance of
37:40the surrounding insulator. This double teaming is not one plus one. It doesn't stack. It's not additive.
37:47It's exponential, hence the name Law of Squares. So let's run this experiment again.
37:52Send in the letter A, tap in a dot, and then a dash an instant later. As they travel up the line,
37:57they both slow down so much that the gap between the dot and the dash gets smaller and smaller,
38:02and by the time they actually get to you on the far end, that gap is long gone. And the dot and dash
38:08are totally smashed into each other. It's basically just a big long dash. You'd have no way in knowing
38:13that this was actually supposed to be the letter A. So how are you supposed to get around this? Well,
38:18you could send the dot and then wait a lot longer and then send the dash. That would give the person
38:25on the other end the gap they need. But depending on how long your cable is, that wait could be a solid
38:30couple of seconds. And that's just for the letter A, which only has one gap. A lot of letters require
38:36two or three gaps, plus extra longer gaps before and after the letter itself to differentiate one letter
38:42from the next. So just imagine trying to type entire sentences or paragraphs like this. Agonizing.
38:49You can probably understand now why that cable at the bottom of the Black Sea has a max transmission
38:53rate of five words a minute. And again, that's only 300 miles. This transatlantic cable is going to need
38:59to stretch about 1700 nautical miles, more than five times as long. And the further this goes,
39:06the more this line is going to flatten out, meaning you'll wish the problem was only five times
39:12as bad. Stack all the other potential problems on top of this and I mean, even if you do manage to
39:18drop a cable across the Atlantic Ocean and it still works by the time you're done with it,
39:22it might be so horrifically slow that if you want to send anything longer than a couple of sentences,
39:27you're better off just walking on a ship and sailing your ass over there to tell them yourself.
39:30Is there a fix for this? Well, there's good news. Sorta. Thompson has found that yeah,
39:42there are ways to offset the law of squares to the extent that it won't be all that much of a problem
39:47for us. It will be expensive though, because the universe never guaranteed that this would be cheap
39:52or easy. Thompson studies a recently manufactured length of cable that looks a lot like this. This is
39:58not necessarily identical to other undersea cables that have been laid to this point, but it's pretty
40:03close. You can go ahead and ignore this outer ring here, which is only seen at the ends of segments.
40:07The exterior of nearly this entire cable was made up of these iron wires, which as you can see,
40:12are twisted tightly to make the cable stronger. This ring here is composed of a delicious casserole
40:17of tar, pitch, linseed oil, and wax. Inside of that is this thick coating of gutta percha and finally,
40:23in the middle, the copper wire. So here's a fun question for you. How thick do you think this
40:29cable is? I first learned about this cable when I was a kid, and on a purely emotional level,
40:33I just assumed it was huge, like an oil pipeline or something. I mean, it feels like it should be,
40:38right? A cable apparatus this historically transformational that stretches this long
40:43should be so gigantic that you couldn't even come close to wrapping your arms around it.
40:47Well, it is about this thick. About as thick as a Roosevelt dime, about five-eighths of an inch.
40:55Actually, the cable was just barely thinner than this. A transatlantic cable, again, one that's going
41:01to run 1,700 or so nautical miles. I think the word we're searching for is raggedy. Yeah, it's a big,
41:11huge, transcontinental jerry-rig, which it has to be because even this cable is going to be
41:16outrageously expensive to produce a couple thousand miles of. After a considerable amount
41:21of study and experimentation, William Thompson concludes that, sorry, even this is not good
41:26enough. He makes two recommendations. First, make the copper core a lot larger so that it can offset
41:32the capacitance of the surrounding gutta percha. Second, make sure the copper itself is of way higher
41:38quality than this cut-rate stuff they've been trying to get away with. Thompson's findings
41:42are devastating. Not only will this be way more expensive to produce than it already is,
41:46the cable he recommends will be about four times as heavy, which would make the already confounding
41:51logistics of loading it up on god knows how many ships a lot more complicated. It splits the Atlantic
41:57Telegraph Company in two. Its chief electrician, a team to be named later, who you will soon meet,
42:03is adamant that a thinner, cheaper cable like the one they used in the Black Sea is going to work just fine,
42:07and promises they'll be able to find some other workaround to make do with it. He's backed up by
42:12Samuel F. B. Morse, who, despite not being a key stakeholder, is still in the mix. I'm realizing
42:18that I didn't slot in enough room for Morse here, so I guess I'll stick him right over here. Morse uses
42:24his considerable name recognition and star power to assure the board that they can do this on the cheap.
42:29Meanwhile, Thompson is backed up by Charles Bright, who trusts Thompson's findings and agrees that going
42:34forward with this cheap cable is going to present a major liability, so major that it might single-handedly
42:40scuttle this entire project. Cyrus Field listens carefully to both arguments and then he says,
42:46uh, sorry, we kind of ordered all the cable already.
42:57That's dumb enough. It's about to get a lot dumber. Let's look again at this cable. These protective
43:05iron wires are twisted in a particular direction. It follows then that every single segment of this cable
43:11needs to have its iron twisted in that same direction. If not, if this segment were twisted
43:17in the opposite direction, it would all unravel and come loose, right? Anyway, since this is a rush
43:23job for the ages and manufacturing the 2,500 miles the cable field has ordered figures to take a really
43:28long time, he's fast-tracking production by contracting two different manufacturers. Half the cable is
43:34manufactured in Greenwich, the other half is manufactured hundreds of miles away up in Birkenhead.
43:38You know, some of my favorite tool time goofs were the ones you were supposed to see coming from way,
43:43way off. You hear a setup like this. Benford's new Miracle Glue. Tim, you might want to remind our
43:50viewers to be careful when using this glue because it will bond instantly to your skin. And you know,
43:55for sure, what's going to happen. You want to set your laminate securely on your shimmies front and back.
44:00Just like you saw this coming, the two lengths of cable manufactured by these companies were twisted
44:12in opposite directions, which not a single person seemed to notice until they were both finished.
44:20Whoops. This is a project of enormous scale, fraught with peril and uncertainty at every turn,
44:26one that will send everybody from the board of directors to the anonymous deckhand biting their
44:30nails off in pure anxiety over all the infinite number of things that could and probably will go
44:36wrong. All the daunting problems that will require every ounce of ingenuity they can find within
44:41themselves. Making sure the wires were twisted in the same direction was the free space on the bingo
44:47card. The easy part. The only easy part. And Cyrus Westfield had so many ants in his pants that he
44:55fucked it up. And now, like Tim throughout half the remainder of the episode, he's gotta wear it.
45:02Field at least gets to wear it in a less literal fashion. In order to jerry-rig these two incompatible
45:07cables together, people way smarter than him end up having to devise this monstrosity of a coupler that's
45:1312 feet long and weighs 300 pounds. Luckily, this will turn out to work just fine so it won't be an
45:19issue going forward. But this cable cost a total of 225,000 pounds. Cyrus Field just came way too
45:27close to throwing half of that. 112,000 pounds, which would be about 12 million pounds or 15 million
45:33US dollars in today's money for the dumbest possible reason. In so doing, in case there was any doubt,
45:39he has firmly established the Atlantic Telegraph Company as our Benford Tools, the penny-pinching
45:45overlord that foists shoddy products on our protagonists and regularly threatens to bring
45:49down the entire thing through mismanagement and malfeasance. On one occasion, they tried to make
45:54Tim and Al promote a saw on Tool Time that Tim quickly realized was a dropship piece of junk shoved
45:59off on him by a clueless executive. How can he not know this is a bad tool? He's been sitting behind a
46:04desk for 10 years. Cyrus Field has been sitting behind a desk for 10 years. Although he'd made his own
46:09way up the ladder, he's far removed from hands-on experience and has none in the business of
46:14telegraphy. He's not a practical man. He's not a man of science. Having alienated Frederick Gisborne,
46:19his Al, he is no longer even Tim. Because a Tim cannot exist without his Al. Instead, Cyrus Field has
46:27himself become Benford Tools, poised to set up successive Tims for failure. And just like Benford,
46:33which is constantly trying to offload its enormous surplus of crap, the Atlantic Telegraph Company
46:38is now the proud owner of 2,500 nautical miles worth of glorified vacuum cleaner power core that
46:44it now expects to form a bridge to a new age of humankind. They want a sensibly priced miracle.
46:49They want to fly balsa wood to the moon.
46:56All hope is not lost. There are still some in the room who are geniuses. Unfortunately,
47:01there are others who are not. You see, Cyrus Field loves himself some confirmation bias,
47:08which again is probably why he waited for William Thompson's input on the cable until it was too late.
47:13Instead, he's made a new friend, one who faithfully told him every single thing he wanted to hear.
47:20This friend's name is Wild Man Whitehouse, who serves in the Atlantic Telegraph Company in the role
47:26of chief electrician. He is a man who does whatever he wants for any reason he feels like,
47:31so I will too. Pronouncing his name from this point forward as Wild Man, even though it's
47:35probably pronounced Wildman. Wild Man Whitehouse is the most powerful and destructive Tim humankind
47:42has ever known. In the years ahead, he will commit errors that are equal parts history-altering,
47:47catastrophic, and outright cartoonish, a combination no other person, alive or dead,
47:53has ever achieved. By the time you're finished reliving his story, you might well come to the
47:58conclusion that he is the dumbest man you have ever heard of in your entire life.
48:04You're gonna love him. I sure do.
48:28I know.
48:30Oh!
48:31Oh!
48:35Transcription by CastingWords
49:05CastingWords
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