CO885-(6-7) — Page 359

161

36

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE

T།། ། །

Reference -

C.O. 885 /

6

ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC- COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NOT TO

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON

1 December 1896.]

Mr. Jones-continued.

Mr. CARSON.

2596. One of the witnesses went so far as to say we would only get two words ?-Well, he may have a different system.

2597. But you feel confident about working your system on that length of cable that you could get ten words?-1 think you ought to get 80 letters a minute.

Sir Donald Smith,

2598. Am I right in understanding you to say that all messages for England, and for Europe generally, handed in to the Canadian Pacife Company's telegraph must pass through the Commercial Cable Company ?—Yes.

2599. Routed or unrouted? There is no such thing as routed.

2600. Then if we have evidence to the con- trary you would still feel assured that such is the case?—Yes.

2601. And so with all the other cables? They are attached to certain lines on the Continent of America, and all the cables must go from the cable company to that particular telegraph company with which they are connected?— Exactly so, by agreement.

2602. Routed or unrouted?-By agreement.

Mr. Jones.

2603. How long has that agreement been to the fore?-Our agreement extends to 1927, 1 think, speaking from memory.

Mr. Murray.

2604. What other element of waste is there besides the preamble ?-Repetition.

2605. Is that all?-That is all.

2606. Would you make any allowance for service messages ?-I thought you meant in a

message.

2606. Well, I mean taking your traffic as a whole? There is a large nuniber of service messages as a rule.

2607. Which are necessarily sent; you cannot do without them ?--We cannot do without them. There is a good number of service messages.

Mr. Jones.

2608. What do you strictly call service mes- Bages?-Service messages referring to messages that have already been transmitted; for instance, repetitions in those messages or non-deliveries of those messages, and so on.

Mr. Murray.

2609. If one were comparing the proportion of paying traffic to the whole traffic passing over the line, you would have to make an allowance for that, would you not?—Yes.

2610. Have you any idea what it would come to?-1 do not suppose it exceeds 5 per cent. Of course, the free-service traffic may amount to

You may

do the whole of your anything. correspondence between your distant stations, if you like.

2611. I was only taking what would be abso- lutely necessary; what you could not get on

Mr. Murray-continued.

[Continued.

without? That would be with reference to mesanges?

2612. Yes?-Certainly not more than 5 per

cent.

cabler

2613. That would not alter your estimate very I was reading the Berne much then? -No. Telegraph" the other day, in which a statement was expressed that interruptions on

We occurred in the first two or three years. have laid eight cables. The 1857-1858 we call one,

Then the 1865, 1866, 1869, 1873, 1874, 1880, and the 1894 cables. There are eight of them. The 1857 and 1858 cable absolutely failed it broke in 1857, and it failed just after a flicker of life in 1858. The making and laying of cables and even navigation by steam were in their infancy, so the cable was abandoned. Nothing was done till 1865, when the cable broke in the laying when half-way across in 1866 it In 1866, therefore, we begin was completed. with the first completed cable across the Atlantic, and it had no interruptions for 1867, 1868, and 1869; there are three years. I merely refer to this article here; I daresay you have seen it.

Chairman.

2614. No, I have not seen it.-It is a foreign paper published on the 25th November 1894, in which Mr. Sandford Fleming says, that in con- sidering the charges which had to be placed against the receipts, there is, first, the interest on the capital; second, the cost of working, and of the direction: and third, the cost of mainten ance and repairs. He says he considered the first two will remain constant; and the third was variable, because experience shows that faults in cables, whether owing to making or during immersion, produce, generally, their effects in the first year, or, at latest, the second year.

2615. Well, what is your experience?—In the 1865 cable, which was the first cable, and there- fore the weakest of all, there were no interrup- tions for the first three years. On the fourth year there were 31 days of interruption; on the next year there were 171 days of interrup- tion, that is in 1871. In 1872 there was nothing; in 1873 the cable died, so that you have a cable from 1865 to 1873, that is the life of it, seven years only.

2616. What did it die of ?—It died of inability to lift it. Perhaps they had used too large a The Great Eastern was, vessel to lift it.

"1

I think, 26,000 tons burthen, and the cable itself would bear the strain of about six tons, would very so that the "Great Eastern easily run through that cable without anybody feeling it, or it being shown on the dynamo- meter. I should think that was really the reason why it broke. Then comes the 1866 cable. The first fault was in 1867, and in that year there were 99 days of interruption. The next year, 1868, 69; in 1869 there were 93 days; the next year, 153 days' interruption; the next year, 154 days; therefore we will take the first three years: the first year there was nothing, the second year 99, the third year 69; then comes the next three years, 93, 153 and 154 days' in-

1 December 1896.]

Mr. CARSON.

years of

[Continued.

Chairman-continued. Next year we sent out our own ship and suc- ceeded in repairing the cable, but at a cost of 273 miles of new cable. The cost of the two expeditions amounted to over 87,000/. The 1880 cable first broke in 1883, 42 days, again in 1854, 16 days, and in 1891, 21 days; and the last in 1896, a total interruption of 80 days. The maximum interruption being 42 days. The last cable that we have laid is the 1894, and it has nut suffered interruption yet.

Mr. Jones.

2620. Were not the early cables which were laid, to which you referred, and to which so many accidents occurred, very much inferior, as a matter of fact, in point of construction ?—No.

Chairman- continual.

terruption. Then there were two quietness, no interruptions at all. In 1874, 92 days, and then no further interruption till 1877, when the cable died. That cable lived 10 years. We now come to the 1869 cable. In 1869, 1970 and 1871 there were no inter- ruptions. In 1872, that was the third year after laying, there was an interruption for 19 days. In the fourth year there were 35 days' inter- ruption, and then come two years when there were no interruptions. In 1876 there were 61 days, then two more years when there were no interruptions, and then we come to 1879, when there were 169 days interruption. In 1880, 50 days; in 1881, 2012 days; in 1882, 186 days; in 1883, there was no interruption, Between 1883 and 1889 there were interruptions in each year extending over 8, 65, 87, 343, 216 and 78 days. In 1890 there was no inter ruption; 1891, 56 days; 1892, 134 days; 1893, 272 days. The total number of interruptions during the life of that cable between 1869 and 1893-that is 24 years life-was 20. The maximum interruption was 10 months, and the total interruptions altogether were 1,981 days in its life, which is roughly five and a-half years out us 300,0007 in of 24 years. That cable cost repairs, and we put 1,100 miles of cable into it. If we had put those 1,100 miles of cable in a straight line, then we could have put on another 1,500 miles and carried it on as a new cable; but in the Atlantic unfortunately there are two ridges, and it was upon these two ridges all those interruptions occurred.

2617. All upon those two ridges ?--All upon gutta-percha that we used to have in those days. those two ridges.

The alteration in the outside is that you are a harder iron wire, which gives a higher using breaking strain, that is all; but if they had chosen I daresay they could have had the same iron wire in 1865.

Chairman.

Mr. Jones,

2618. You had no survey before they were laid think we had, but with apparatus less perfect than that used now. Besides, in laying a long cable in very deep water attention camot be given exclusively to the nature of the bottom.

Chairman.

2619. Can you take us to some of your more modern experiences?—I can, certainly. What I say is, that we are suffering from all those things which I have read to you. We have to pay upon the capital of all cables which are dend. Our capital is seven millions of money. Now take the 1873 cable. There we have been more fortunate. There were no interruptions upon it till 1880, then there came 13 days; then it ran on again till 1891, when there were 46 days; and again till 1895, when there were six daye, a total of 65 days. Of these 65 days, the longest interruption was one and a half months, In the 1874 cable there were no interru tions till

1880. There have been six interruptions since then, the longest of which was one year and two weeks. In 1884 the Commercial Cable Company laid a cable across it, and our cable broke in the neighbourhood of that crossing. It is a coinci- dence, that is all. We sent out an expedition to repair it, and we ordered them to avoid damaging the Commercial Company's cable. That expe dition failed, having made a gap of 125 miles.

you

2621. As compared with the old, are not the present cables which have been laid very much superior in quality ?—The idea of those days was that you should have a soft iron if could get it. They did not care to have a brittle iron, that is, for the iron wires in the cable, they wanted a soft one and they had it, with less strength.

2622. Yes: but without going into particulars, is it not admitted that the cables constructed at the present day are very superior in every res- pect to those of the past ?—No, 1 do not see that there is any great improvement in cables. I can see none from 1865 up to 1894. I can see no great improvement; forone thing, the gutta-percha has very considerably deteriorated. There is a great deal more adulteration in gutta-percha now than there was in 1865-66; you cannot get the

2623. You mean to say that if you laid down a cable to-day you do not think there would be any advantage either from the manufacture of the cable or that the ground would be better surveyed, and that, therefore, the cable would be better laid ?-In regard to the better survey, of course the better the survey the better the cable might be laid: but there is a lot of chance. Taking this 1874 cable, which we tried to lift in 1893 the Telegraph Construction and Main- tenance Company made the cable and laid the cable, and, therefore, they knew where it was. They made 47 dredges for the cable and they only got it to the surface twice, and they only got it aboard the ship once. Eventually they fost it, and in those 47 dredges they cut and broke the cable 27 times. Sometimes they would bring it up 1,500 or 2,000 fathoms, at other times they would break it on the bottom. In the very last dredge that they made eastward they said that it broke on the bottom.

Mr. Jones.

2624. Was that because the cable was weak? That was because the cable was weak at that You see it all depends upon

X

particular spot. the bottom.

162