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low-tech: They intended to spool the wire (which was about
     the thickness of the power cable of a modern domestic appliance) out of the stern of a boat as it steamed across the Channel.
     They would then connect telegraph instruments at each end, and their company, the grandly named General Oceanic and Subterranean
     Electric Printing Telegraph Company, would be in business. On August 28, 1850, with their cable wound onto a vast drum and
     mounted on the back of a small steam tug, the Goliath, they set out for France.
    Things did not go according to plan. For starters, the wire was so thin that it wouldn't sink; it simply floated pathetically
     in the water behind the boat. The Bretts' response was to clamp weights around the wire at regular intervals to get it to
     sink. By the evening, they had arrived at Cap Gris-Nez near Calais in France, where they wired up their newfangled telegraph
     instrument—the very latest automatic printing model—and waited for the first test message to be sent from England. It came
     out as gibberish.
    The cable was working, but the messages were being garbled because the surrounding water changed the cable's electrical properties
     in a way that was poorly understood at the time. Effectively, it meant that the staccato pulses of electricity were smoothed
     out, and the Bretts' high-speed automatic machines transmitted so fast that succeeding pulses overlapped and became indistinct.
     But, using an old-fashioned single-needle telegraph, they were eventually able to send a few messages manually, in much the
     same way that a preacher in a resonant cathedral must speak slowly and distinctly in order to be understood. However, the
     next day the cable met a watery end; a French fisherman snagged it in his net, and when he brought it to the surface he hacked
     off a piece to see what it was. Deciding that it was a hitherto unknown form of seaweed with a gold center, he took it to
     show his friends in Boulogne.
    It took the Bretts over a year to raise the money for another cable, and they would probably have had to give up altogether
     but for the intervention of Thomas Crampton, a railway engineer. He put up half the £15,000 needed, and also designed the
     new cable. He wanted to protect his investment, so the new cable consisted of four gutta-percha-covered wires twisted together
     and wrapped in tar-covered hemp, and then encased in a cladding of tar-covered iron cords. It was far tougher than the first
     cable, and it weighed thirty times as much. This meant it was harder to lay—not because it wouldn't sink, like the first cable,
     but because it was so heavy it ran off the drum on the back of the boat faster than the Bretts wanted it to. It was so hard
     to control, in fact, that all the cable had been paid out before the boat carrying it reached France. Fortunately, the Bretts
     had brought along a spare piece of cable, which they spliced on, and in November 1851, after a few weeks of testing, the cable
     was opened to the public. The first direct message from London to Paris was sent in 1852.
    The success of the Channel cable led to a boom in submarine telegraphy—to the delight of the directors of the Gutta Percha
     Company. With a virtual monopoly on the supply of gutta-percha, they suddenly found they were sitting on a gold mine. The
     problem of laying a telegraph link across a stretch of water seemed to have been cracked: It was simply a matter of making
     sure that the cable was properly insulated, strong enough not to break, and heavy enough to sink, and that messages weren't
     sent too quickly along it. Before long Dover had been linked to Ostend, and after two failed attempts England was linked to
     Ireland in 1853. Further underwater links across the North Sea directly connected Britain with the coasts of Germany, Russia,
     and Holland. John Rrett soon turned his attention to linking Europe with Africa and succeeded in connecting Corsica and Sardinia
     to Genoa on the