Free The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

message, transcribed at the receiving office, obviously hadn't
     come from him.
    a S TELEGRAPH NETWORKS sprung up in different countries, the benefits of joining them soon became apparent. The first interconnection
     treaty was signed on October 3, 1849, between Prussia and Austria, so that messages could be sent from Vienna to Berlin. It
     was an inefficient system; rather than running a wire across the border, a special joint telegraph office was constructed,
     staffed by representatives of each country's telegraph company, who were connected to their respective national networks.
     When a message needed to be passed from one country to another, it was transcribed by the clerks at one end of the office,
     who then physically handed it over to their opposite numbers at the other end of the office for retransmission.
    Similar agreements were soon in place between Prussia and Saxony, and Austria and Bavaria. In 1850, the four states established
     the Austro-German Telegraph Union to regulate tarriffs and set common rules for interconnection. The following year, the Morse
     telegraph system was adopted as a standard to allow direct connections to be established between the four networks. Soon interconnection
     agreements had also been signed between France, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and Sardinia. But if Britain was to be connected
     to the growing European network, a significant barrier would have to be overcome: the English Channel.
    Actually, experiments with sending messages along underwater telegraph cables had been going on almost since the earliest
     days of electric telegraphy. Wheatstone had tried it out in Wales, sending messages from a boat to a lighthouse, and in 1840
     he proposed the establishment of a cross-Channel telegraph. But at that time the telegraph had yet to prove itself over short
     distances on land, let alone across water.
    Morse, too, had a go at underwater telegraphy. In 1843, after coating a wire in rubber and encasing it in a lead pipe, he
     sent messages along a submerged cable between Castle Garden and Governors Island in New York Harbor. He also succeeded in
     using water itself as the conductor, with metal plates dipped in the water on each bank of a river and connected to the telegraph
     wires. (Wheat­stone did some similar experiments across the river Thames in the presence of Prince Albert the same year.)
     At any rate, Morse was sufficiently pleased with the results across a few feet of water that, in typical indefatigable Morse
     fashion, he predicted that it wouldn't be long before there would be telegraph wires across the Atlantic.
    For advocates of cross-Channel telegraphy, however, there were practical problems to be overcome. Laying a rubber-coated wire
     inside a lead pipe was possible in New York Harbor; laying a pipe along the seabed across the English Channel was another
     matter entirely. And if the cable was to last any length of time, an alternative to coating it in rubber would have to be
     found, since rubber quickly deteriorated in water.
    The solution was to use gutta-percha, a kind of rubbery gum obtained from the gutta-percha tree, which grows in the jungles
     of Southeast Asia. One useful property of gutta-percha is that it is hard at room temperature but softens when immersed in
     hot water and can be molded into any shape. The Victorians used it much as we use plastic today. Dolls, chess pieces, and
     ear trumpets were all made of gutta-percha. And although it was expensive, it turned out to be ideal for insulating cables.
    Once the question of what to use for insulation had been resolved, John Brett, a retired antique dealer, and his younger brother
     Jacob, an engineer, decided to embark upon building a telegraph link between England and France. They got the appropriate
     permission from the British and French governments and ordered a wire coated with a quarter of an inch of gutta-percha from
     the Gutta Percha Company in London. Their plan was breathtakingly