![]() ![]() ![]() The sap, called gutta percha, is a naturally occurring structural isomer of polyisoprene, also known as “natural rubber” or isoprene rubber, with enough flexibility to bend with a wire when heated and retain its shape when cooled. Hope arrived in the form of the milk-colored sap of a Malaysian Palaquium gutta tree. Yet Britain, a commercial empire, faced a seemingly insurmountable problem: as an island it could not electrically connect itself to the continent.Įarly attempts at insulating wire against water with tarred hemp or India rubber failed. After William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone built the first railway telegraph in Britain in 1837, the new technology (modified by Samuel Morse) spread quickly throughout Britain, France, Germany, and the eastern United States. But within 20 years of Alessandro Volta’s invention of the battery in 1800, speculation flowed on how to use electric current to communicate over distances by stopping and starting current in a wire. In the early 19th century several ways existed to communicate over large distances: homing pigeons, messengers on foot or horse, and even signals using flags or lights. This physical network, along with less benign attempts at empire building, owed its existence to the coagulated latex of a tree native to Southeast Asia. It was the first major link in what was to be a 19th-century ocean-spanning global communications network that Victorians predicted would prevent misunderstandings between nations, banishing war forever. ![]() Unlike the fictional submarine, the Nautilus, the cable actually existed in the nonfictional world. Late in the book the main protagonist, Pierre Aronnax, rhapsodizes over a particular undersea marvel-an electric cable lying on the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean. In his 1869 futuristic novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Jules Verne imagined a marvelous electric-powered submarine that explored the mysterious underwater world and its inhabitants. ![]()
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