The SS Great Eastern

I forgot to mention back here about my fascination with the ship which laid most of the first transatlantic cable. Launched in 1858, the SS Great Eastern was the biggest vessel of her day until the White Star Line's RMS Oceanic came along a generation later. Christened the SS Leviathan, she was quickly renamed the Great Eastern and crossed the seas as a passenger vessel, mainly ferrying immigrants to the U.S.

What I find cool about this ship is that she resembles a transition state in the sense that she embodied the past, present, and future of ship propulsion: sails, paddle wheels, and a screw propeller. Of course she was steam driven—Diesel hadn't yet invented his eponymous engine.

The Great Eastern was sold and refitted with several spools of wire-thousands of miles of it. She set about laying wire on the ocean floor between Ireland and Newfoundland and elsewhere around the world. Here's a sketch of what the giant reels of copper wire looked like inside her:

Inside the SS Great Eastern, spooling out copper wire to lay across the ocean floor.

The Great Eastern met a rather ignominious end.  Like the RMS Olympic (older sister of the RMS Titanic), she was scrapped.

Stripped carcass of the SS Great Eastern awaiting the scrapper's torch in 1889.

What God Hath Wrought, Men First Wrought Of Copper*

I'm always disturbed to hear about copper wire and plumbing being ripped from abandoned and not-so abandoned properties. Thieves are motivated by commodity price inflation, or dollar devaluation--take your pick. It seems like such wanton destruction--an undoing of modern communication and sanitation.  That the copper is probably being recycled and that alternative technologies to copper wire exist for telecommunications, viz., wireless and fiber optics, is small consolation. Those newer technologies bring their own vulnerabilities.

Copper telegraph cable first linked cities beginning around the 1830's. A submarine cable was laid under the English Channel in the 1850's using a continuous length of copper coated with natural rubber. In 1858, the first of several trans-Atlantic cables was laid. A US stamp commemorated the feat:

We may think that we are now safely linked by satellite, but the bulk of Internet communication is still via cable transmission. Not copper, but fiber-optic transmission:

Link to Original

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*The title is a pun/homage to Samuel F.B. Morse's first telegram: "What hath God Wrought?"