French Cable Station Museum
It may sound more like the name of an early Elephant 6 band – cf. Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control – but it’s a wonderful little museum in Orleans, MA. We went there a few weeks ago during our one week vacation on Cape Cod, and for me, at least, it was the height of the trip.
The first transatlantic telegraph cable connected the US with London, although it took several tries for it to be successful. The French wanted to have their own nearly-instantaneous link with the US that didn’t run through London – diplomatic concerns, don’t you know – and laid their own cable from France to St. Pierre et Miquelon – French-owned islands off the coast of Newfoundland – and from there down the Atlantic coast to Orleans. The French built a telegraph station in a not-so-big house by the water and operated it for over seventy years, apparently upgrading, repairing, patching, and reinventing it on the fly. Much of that equipment has remained in the house since the station shut down in 1959, and it’s now lovingly maintained by a number of elderly gentlemen who run the museum.
The equipment is beautiful. Apologies for the quality of some of these pictures – the only camera I had with me was my iPhone.
They let you use some of the equipment! My favorite thing in the museum is the Kleinschmidt Perforator:
Mr Kleinschmidt – quite an important guy, really- took a standard typewriter and added a tape-puncher on top. Anyone who could type could be a telegrapher; in Thomas Edison’s youth, a skilled telegrapher was a highly-paid professional. Edison himself was one of the best in the world, in fact. By the 20th century, though, innovation had stolen the luster from the telegraphy profession, replacing it with wonderful objects like this.
And this:
This is a telegraph transcriber. They didn’t have felt-tip pens, of course, so they had to invent low-friction pens. Dead center in this picture you can see a tiny white whisker. It’s actually a glass tube about a millimeter wide. In this transcriber, the tip of the glass tube sat a mil or so distant from the paper, and the ink would be drawn to the paper by static electricity generated by this:
Lovely, isn’t it? Unfortunately, the static-charged contactless pen only worked in low humidity. On Cape Cod, you really don’t ever get low humidity, so this experimental transcriber only worked in winter.
Here’s a working transcriber:
By working, I mean they actually let you work it! The low green box to the right is a punched-tape reader; you feed in the tape you punch on the Kleinschmidt Perforator, and the signal travels six inches to the transcriber, which as you see here is currently using a ballpoint pen instead of the incredibly fragile glass pipettes. The transcriber produces an EEG-like trace of the Morse signal, which you can easily read if you have a) learned your Morse cold and b) further, learned to read Morse as an EEG-like high-low voltage trace instead of dots and dashes. Probably only the ancient gentlemen who operate the museum possess these skills today.
The cable carried direct current over two thousand miles! At the end of its transit the signal was extremely weak, so much of the energy of the inventor team was engaged in reading or amplifying the faint voltage fluctuations. Here’s a real gem:
There are only two of these babies left in the whole world. The Heurtley Magnifier used two pairs of platinum wire to form a Wheatstone bridge, with one of the four wires heated ever-so-slightly by the signal current. The slight temperature variations produced enough resistance in the detector wire to control a larger current through the bridge. Vibration was a problem – they couldn’t receive a signal on that one afternoon every couple of weeks when the hardware store across town had its coal shipment dumped into the basement.
If you’re on the Cape, I highly recommend this tiny little museum. Tended with love by men who rescued the building and equipment from destruction, it’s a rare opportunity to understand the technology constraints of an earlier era, and appreciate the astounding feats of engineering on which the modern world is built.
