Heroes of the Telegraph

to the world as the inventor of Telpherage, he was an electrician and cable engineer of the first rank, a lucid lecturer, and a good

te some six miles north of Hythe, had been in the family since the year 1633, and was held of the Crown by the feudal service of six men and a constable to defend the sea-way at Sandgate. Certain Jenkins ha

Rotulorum of Kingston, Jamaica, and fell in love with Henrietta Camilla, the youngest daughter. Mr. Jackson came of a Yorkshire stock, said to be of Scottish origin, and Susan, his wife, was

cking energy and talent, he never rose above the grade of Commander, and was superseded after forty-five years of service. He is represented as a brave, single-minded, and affectionate sailor, who on one occasion saved several men from suffocation by a burning cargo at the risk of his own life. Henrietta Camilla Jackson, his wife, was a woman of a strong and energetic character. Without beauty of countenance, she possessed the art of pleasing, and in default of genius s

born on March 25, 1833, in a building of the Government near Dungeness, his father at that time being on the coast-guard service. His versatility was evidentl

m drawing among other things, and allowed him to ride his pony on the moors. He went to school at Jedburgh, and afterwards to the Edinburgh A

t. In a letter written to an old schoolfellow while the sound still rang in his ears, and his hand trembled with excitement, he gives a boyish account of the circumstances. The family were living in the Rue Caumartin, and on the evening of February 23 he and his father were taking a walk along the boulevards, which were illuminated for joy at the resignation of M. Guizot. They passed the residence of the Foreign Minister, which was guarded with troops, and further on encountered a band of rioters marching along the street with torches, and singing the Marseillaise. After them came a rabble of men and women of all sorts, rich and poor, some of them armed with sticks and sabres. They turned bac

ining the king and queen, who had abdicated. Then came the sacking of the Tuileries, the people mounting a cannon on the roof, and firing blank cartridges to testify their joy. 'It was a sight to see a palace sacked' (wrote the boy), 'and

and Mrs. Jenkin, with her son and sister-in-law, had to seek the protection of a British vessel in the harbour,

first-class honours, his special subject having been electro-magnetism. The questions in the examinations were put in Latin, and answered in Italian. Fleeming also attended an Art school in the city, and gained a silver medal for a drawing from one of Raphael's c

oleskin suit, and infernally dirty.' At home he pursued his studies, and was for a time engaged with Dr. Bell in working out a geometrical method of arriving at the proportions of Greek architecture. His stay amidst the smoke and bustle of Manchester, though in striking contrast to his life in Genoa, was on the whole agreeable. He liked his work, had the good spirits of youth, and made some pleasant friends, one of them the authoress, M

e had to be 'as little like himself as possible,' and his humble lodgings, 'across a dirty green and through some half-built streets of two-storied houses.... Luckily,' he adds, 'I am fond of my profession, or I could not stand this life.' There was probably no real hardship in his present situation, and thousands of young engineers go through the like experience at th

by Dr. Johnson, while canvassing for Mr. Thrale. Jenkin had been introduced to the Austins by a letter from Mrs. Gaskell, and was charmed with the atmosphere of their choice home, where intellectual conversation was happily united with kind and courteous manners, without any pretence or affectation. 'Each of the Austins,' says Mr. Stevenson, in his memoir of Jenkin, to which we are much indebted, 'was full of high spirits; each practise

or Annie, who, on her part, thought him vain, and by no means good-looking. Mr. Stevenson hints that she vanquished his stubborn heart by correcting a 'false quanti

born confidence in his future, he solicited the Austins for leave to court their daughter, and it was not withheld. Mrs. Austin consented freely, and Mr. Austin only reserved the right to inquire into his character. Neither of them mentioned his income or prospects, and Jenkin, overcome by their disinterestedness, exc

s scientific instruments all round me, and books to read, and experiments to make, and enjoy myself amazingly. I find the study of electricity so entertaining that I am apt to neglect my other work.'... 'What shall I compare them to,' he writes of some electrical experiments, 'a new song? or a Greek play?' In the spring of 1855 he was fitting out the s.s. Elba, at Birkenhead, for his first telegraph cruise. It appears that in 1855 Mr. Henry Brett attempted to lay a cable across the Mediterranean between Cape Spartivento, in the south of Sardinia, and a point near Bona, on the coast of Algeria. It was a gutta-percha cable of six wires or conductors, and manufactured by Messrs. Glass & Elliott, of Greenwich-a firm which afterwards combined with the Gutta-Percha Company, and became the exi

when he came to a few miles from Galita, his destination on the Algerian coast, he had not enough cable to reach the land. He therefore telegraphed to London for more cable to be made and sent out, while the ship remained there holdi

achine for picking up the cable, and a sheave or pulley at the bows for it to run over, both designed by Jenkin, together with a variety of wooden buoys, ropes, and chains. Mr. Liddell, assisted by Mr. F. C. Webb and Fleeming Jenkin, were in cha

ill, licking the clumsy cubs into an active shape, seeing the child of to-day's thought working to-morrow in full vigour at his appointed task.' Another letter, dated May 17, gives a picture of the start. 'Not a sailor will join us till the last moment; and then, just as the sh

leaves, growing about two feet high, forms the staple verdure.' After dining in Fort Genova, he had nothing to do but watch the sailors ordering the Arabs about under the 'generic term "Johnny."' He began to tire of the scene, although, as he confesses, he had willingly paid more money for less strange and lovely sights. Jen

s and marshy pools. Mr. Webb remarks that its reputation for fever was so bad as to cause Italian men-of-war to sheer off in passing by. Jenkin suffered a little from malaria, but of a different

ead, hauling in the cable from the bottom as she proceeded. At half-past nine she anchored for the night some distance from the shore, and at three next morning resumed her picking up. 'With a small delay for one or two improvements I had seen to be necessary last night,' writes Jenkin, 'the engine started, and since that time I do not think there has been half an hour's stoppage. A rope to splice, a block to change, a wheel to oil, an old rusted anchor to disengage from the cable, which brought it up-these have been our only obstructions. Sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty revolutions at last my little engine tears away. The

ess and firmness. I am naturally in good spirits, but keep very quiet, for misfortunes may arise at any instant; moreover, to-morrow my paying-out apparatus will be want

testy word now and then shows the nerves are strained a little, but every one lau

ding at anchor in one thousand fathoms, the engines going constantly, so as to keep the ship's bows close up to the cable, which by this means hangs nearly vertical, and sustains no strain but that caused by its own weight and the pitching of the vessel. We were all up at four, but the w

ip. To-night we grapple for the heavy cable, eight tons to the mile. I long to have a tug at him; he may puzzle me; and though misfortunes, or rather difficulties, are a bore at the time, life, when working wi

taking a siesta. A little further on, and what is this with large pink flowers in such abundance?-the oleander in full flower! At first I fear to pluck them, thinking they must be cultivated and valuable; but soon the banks show a long line of thick tall shrubs, one mass of glorious pink and green, set there in a little valley, whose rocks gleam out blue and purple colours, such as pre-Raphaelites only dare attempt, shining out hard and weird-like amongst the clumps of castor-oil plants, cistus, arbor-vitae, and many o

sprays of coral, twisted and twined with shells of those small fairy animals we saw in the aquarium

on the saloon deck reading back numbers of the TIMES, till something hitches, and then all is hurly-burly once more

ite curling shells. No portion of the dirty black wire was visible; instead we had a garland of soft pink, with little scarlet sprays and whit

o the bow or stern, a grapnel drags along the ground. The grapnel is a small anchor, made like four pot-hooks tied back to back. When the rope gets taut the ship is stopped and the grapnel hauled up to the surface in

two immense tangled skeins were raised on board, one by means of the mast-head and fore-yard tackle. Photographs of this ravelled cable wer

ed its conclusion. On the evening of the 2nd the first mate, while on the water unshackling a buoy, was struck in the back by a fluke of the ship's anchor as she drifted, and so severely injured that he lay for many weeks at Cagl

r Birkenhead Works, and Jenkin, being telegraphed for, arrived next morning, and spent a week in Glasgow, mostly in Sir William's class-room and laboratory at the old college. Sir William tells us that he was struck not only with Jenkin's brightness and ability, but with his resolution to understand everything spoken of; to see, if possible, thoroughly into every difficult question, and to slur over nothing. 'I soon found,' he remarks, 'that thoroughness of honesty wa

ed to his wife, and his letters reveal a warmth of affection, a chivalry of sentiment, and even a romance of expression, which a casual observer would never have suspected in him. Jenkin seemed to the outside world a man without a heart, and yet we find him saying in the year 1869, 'People may write novels, and other people m

a good deal of the world, both in and out of the beaten track; they have curious 'yarns to spin,' and useful hints or scraps of worldly wisdom to bestow. The voyage out is like a holiday excursion, for it is only the laying that is arduous, and even that is lightened by excitement. Glimpses are got of hide-away spots, where the cable is landed, perhaps. on the verge of the primeval forest or near the port of a modern city, or by the site of some ruined monument of the

uses, sometimes plaster, many-coloured, sometimes rough-hewn marble, rise, dirty and ill-finished, to straight, plain, flat roofs; shops guiltless of windows, with signs in Greek letters; dogs, Greeks in blue, baggy, Zouave breeches and a fez, a few narghilehs, and a sprinkling of the ordin

reached on May 16, appeared to Jenkin one of

any rate the big dome is very cool, and the little ones hold batteries capitally. A handsome young Bashi-Bazouk guards it, and a still handsomer mountaineer

sea eagles soaring above our heads-old tanks, ruins, and desolation at our feet. The ancient Arsinoe stood here: a few blocks of marble with the cross attest the presence of Venetian Christians; but now-the desolation of desolations.

ose to Cleopatra's Bath, and made a very satisfactory start about one in the afternoon. We had scarcely

the consort of the Elba, came to her assistance, and by means of a hawser helped to tug her off: The pilot again ran her aground soon after, but she was delivered by the same means without much damage. When two-thirds of this

d mastic, or mint, though they sound well, are not nearly so pretty as grass. Many little churches, glittering white, dot the islands; most of them, I believe, abandoned during the whole year with the exception of one day sacred t

a-Alexandria cable, and was now practising as a civil engineer. For several years after this business was bad, and with a young family coming, it was an anxious time f

more than ever. You shall go where you wish, you shall receive whom you wish, and as for money, you shall have that too. I cannot be mistaken. I have now measured myself with many men. I do not feel weak. I do not feel that I shall fail. In many things I have succeeded, and

tober, 1860, he superintended the repairs of the Bona-Spartivento cable, revisiting Chia and Cagliari, then full of Garibaldi's troops. The cable, which had been broken by the anchors of coral fishers, was grapnelled with difficulty. 'What rocks we did hook!' writes Jenkin. 'N

rs. Never robust, he suffered much from flying rheumatism and sciatica ever afterwards. It nearly disabled him while laying the Lowestoft to Norderney cable for Mr. Reuter, in 1866. This line was designed by M

ered from a letter to his wife: 'With you in the garden (at Claygate), with Austin in the coach-house, with pretty songs in the little low white room, with the moonlight in the dear room upstairs-ah! it was perfect; but the long walk, wondering, pondering, fearing, scheming, and the dusty jolting railway, and the horrid fusty o

to continue his private enterprises, and the summer

F. Varley, Mr. Latimer Clark, and Willoughby Smith. Jenkin's sketches of Clark and Varley are particularly happy. At St. Pierre, where they arrived in a fog, which lifted to show their cons

es were doubtless an advantage to Sir William, relieving him of routine, and sparing his great abilities for higher work. In 1870 the siphon recorder, for tracing a cablegram in ink, instead

coated with india-rubber, then a new insulator. The Hooper left Plymouth in June, and after touching at Madeira, where Sir William was up 'sounding with

xpeditions. While engaged in this work, the ill-fated La Plata, bound with cable from Messrs. Siemens Brothers to Monte Video, perished

her. Of medium height, and very plain, his manner was youthful, and alert, but unimposing. Nevertheless, his

tandards he played a leading part in providing electricians with practical standards of measurement. His Cantor lectures on submarine cables, and his treatise on ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM, published in 1873, were notable works at the time, and contained the latest development of their subjects. He was associated with Sir William Thomson in an ingenious 'curb-key' for sending signals automatically through a long cable; but al

alue. The latter, which is based on Reulaux's prior work, procured him the honour of the Keith Gold Medal from the Royal Society of Edinburgh

han the physicist could grant for the age of the habitable world. Darwin himself confessed that some of his arguments were convincing; and Munro, the scholar, complimented him for his paper on Lucretius and the Atomic Theory.' In 1878 he constructed a phonograph from

the mechanical and fine arts. 'In mechanical arts,' he says, 'the craftsman uses his skill to produce something useful, but (except in the rare case when he is at liberty to choose what he shall produce) his sole merit lies in skill. In the fine arts the student uses skill to produce something beautiful. He is free to cho

rge Eliot, were some of his favourite authors. He once began a review of George Eliot's biography, but left it unfinished. Latterly he had ceased to admire her work as much as before. He was a rapid, fluent talker, with excited utterance at times. Some of his sayings were shrewd and sharp; but he was sometimes aggressive. 'People

reat lady, had married beneath her. At the Saville Club, in London, he was known as the 'man who dines here and goes up to Scotland.' Jenkin was conscious of this churlishness, and latterly improved. 'All my life,' he wrote,'I have talked a good deal, with the almost unfailing result of making people sick of the sound of my tongue. It appeared to me that I had var

little Frewen, the second son, entering in to him one day, while he was at work, and holding out a toy crane he was making, with the request, 'Papa you might finiss windin' this for me, I'm so very

like. He learned to dance a Highland reel, and began the study of Gaelic; but that speech proved too stubborn, craggy, and impregnable even for Jenkin. Once he took his family to Alt Aussee, in the Stiermark, Styria, where he hunted chamois, wo

ering he might have adorned his profession more, for he liked and fitted it; but with his impulses on other lines repressed, he might have been

enkin had showed great devotion to them in their illnesses, and was worn out with grief and watching. His telpherage, too, h

which resulted, it is believed, in blood poisoning. There seemed to be no danger, and his wife was reading aloud to him as he

the inexpressible.' Nevertheless, as time went on he came back to a belief in Christianity. 'The longer I live,' he wrote, 'the mor