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09.07
The Electron and the
Sea
By John Vardalas
The story of the sea has been a
central theme in the drama of human history. And
so it shouldn’t be surprising that the
development of science and technology is interwoven
with the story of the sea. During a recent
five-week sea voyage from Cape Town, South
Africa, to the Caribbean, I had ample to time
reflect on the extent to which IEEE technologies
have become embedded in maritime transport, even
in relatively simple sail boats. With strong
winds and all sails out, our vessel sliced
through the waves as sailing ships have done for
millennia. But beneath the deck lay a complex
array of electrical and electronic systems:
sonar, radar, GPS, electronic charts, real-time
access to digital weather data, a computer
system to link these systems together, an
Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB),
a single sideband radio and a phone using
low-orbital satellites as communication systems,
a flux-gate compass, an autopilot, running
lights for night sailing, various electrical and
electronic creature comforts, and, of course,
batteries and an efficient, compact generator
system to feed electrons to all this equipment.
As impressive as this array of equipment may
appear, it pales in comparison to the scale and
complexity of the electrical and electronic
technologies found on modern super-cargo ships
and naval vessels.
In today’s society, maritime
commerce is out of sight and hence out of mind.
But e-commerce and the global economy are held
together by the world’s maritime shipping lanes.
And yet, despite the ubiquity of the electron in
maritime systems, the role of the sea is rarely
mentioned in the conventional story of
electricity. Rather than being an afterthought
in the application of electricity, the sea has,
in some instances, been the perfect venue for
first adopters. And in other instances the
specific needs of maritime transport have served
as drivers for the overall advance of
technology.
Consider the story of electric
lighting. In 1808, Davy demonstrated the first
arc light to the Royal Society. Of profound
ramifications for humanity, the discovery of the
arc-light had been an unintended consequence of
Davy’s electrochemical experiments with
batteries. For the first time in human history,
fire was no longer the only source of artificial
lighting. But because of the inherent
inadequacies of batteries, the practical use of
arc-lighting would have to wait for nearly
another six decades until the appearance of
suitable electric generators. The story of
lighting, as usually told, then goes on to
relate how the arc-light found its earliest use
in the theatres and in the illumination of city
streets. Rarely, however, does this standard
narrative explain that before dazzling urban
dwellers, arc lighting was pointed toward the
sea.
With the economic growth of the
Industrial Revolution accelerating during the
19th century, the number of people and the
volume of goods that were moved around the world
by ships expanded at a phenomenal pace. As
maritime commerce grew so did the disasters at
sea. The thousands of shipwrecks represented
many lives lost and great economic losses. The
greatest danger for ships did not reside in the
high seas. Being close to a shore when night,
fog, or a storm could easily conceal the
existence of dangerous rocks, shoals, and reefs
was, and still is, the sailor’s greatest fear.
Lighthouses offered mariners rays of salvation.
Concerned about the higher risks
to life and property, the world’s major maritime
nations of the 19th century expanded the number
of lighthouses. Up most in the minds of those
who oversaw lighthouses was the effectiveness of
the light signal. A good deal of effort was
devoted to improving illumination produced by
oil- and gas-lamps. Capable of penetrating
deeper into the night and fog, the arc-light
offered an important advance in lighthouse
design. In 1860, British lighthouse authorities
asked Michael Faraday to explore the use
electricity in lighthouses. That same year,
Faraday proclaimed to the Royal Institution:
“The use of light to guide the mariner …
has…caused such a necessity for means more and
more perfect as to tax the utmost powers both of
the philosopher and practical man in the
development of the principles concerned, and
their practical applications.” During the
early 1860s, Britain and France installed the
first electric lighthouses — a decade before
arc-lighting appeared in the British and French
urban landscape and a little longer before it appeared
on U.S. city streets. When consideration was
given to building America’s first electric
lighthouse, an 1882 report to the U.S. Congress
made it clear that “there [could] be no better
place to adapt [electricity] to our light-house
service than at Hell Gate, in New York. … At
present, sailing vessels approaching the Gate at
night are compelled to anchor until morning; and
in consequence of this, daybreak, when the large
Sound steamers come in the harbor, the channel
is filled with sailing craft, and the dangers of
collision accordingly increased. The electric
light of Hell Gate will avoid this blockade,
with its risks.”
Built in 1774, the lighthouses at
La Hève changed to arc-lighting in 1863,
making this the first electric light application
in the world.
The regulator used in the La Hève
to maintain the optimal distance
between the tips of the carbon rods in the
arc-light.
Though arc-lighting provided a
more powerful beam, its widespread diffusion
into lighthouse design did not follow. By the
start of the 20th century, there were thousands
of lighthouses around the world but only about
30 used an electric light. France had twelve,
Britain six, and the U.S. two. All the rest
still used oil or gas lighting. For Michael
Schiffer, a behavioral archaeologist who has
studied the history of the electric lighthouses,
the failure of the more advanced technology is
an excellent illustration of the
multidimensional considerations needed to
explain technological diffusion, or lack
thereof. The imperative of marine safety may
have provoked the earliest adoption of
arc-lighting, but it could not sustain
widespread adoption. The story of wireless
telegraphy, on the other hand, is quite a
different story.
At the start of the 20th
century, ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore
communications were very limited. Written
messages could be physically transported, but
that was extremely slow. The semaphore offered
much faster communications but the sender and
receiver had to be within visual range. The
revolution of electrical telegraphy, which had
started in the first half of the 19th century,
had transformed terrestrial communications.
Marine communications, however, still remained
primitive. Submarine telegraph cables spanning
the ocean’s of the world could link far flung
lands, but no electrical technology existed that
allowed ships to communicate. The mobility of
ships does not lend itself to wires.
Edison proposed wireless
telegraphy to meet the special needs of
seafaring. In an 1885 patent application, Edison
underscored the importance to safety if ships
could communicate through dense fog by means of
wireless telegraphy. Ships not only could crash
on rocks hidden by dense fog, they could easily
collide into each other as they came closer to
shore. Ship-to-ship communication through the
thick fog would have been heaven sent. Based on
electrostatic induction, Edison’s patent did not
offer a realistic solution to maritime
communication. His patent, nevertheless, did lay
claim to the idea of an aerial antenna whose
rights Marconi felt compelled to buy in 1903.
From Thomas Edison’s 1885 patent
application, “Means for Transmitting Signals
Electrically”
Much is written about Marconi’s
great breakthrough: the transmission and
reception of a wireless telegraphic signal
across the Atlantic Ocean on 12 December 1901.
This achievement is all too often portrayed as
the pivotal point which brought radio
communications to the public consciousness and
gave a critical, and much needed, boost to
Marconi’s business ambitions. It would take many
years before wireless transatlantic telegraphy
could compete against the existing submarine
cables. However, years before any transatlantic
transmission had been proven, the navies of the
major power at the world saw the strategic
importance of ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore
wireless communications. As early as 1891,
Captain Henry Jackson, who was later to become
First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty, sent
wireless Morse code signals over a few hundred
yards. Britain’s Royal Navy was the leader. Not
only did it work closely with Marconi, the Royal
Navy also set up its own wireless R&D group in
1897, within the Torpedo Branch. In 1899,
wireless telegraphy was used for the first time
in naval maneuvers. With a number of ships in a
fleet using wireless telegraphy, naval
applications first challenged engineers to solve
the problems of interference. With wireless
communications, navies were the first contend
with the need to encrypt wireless messages, to
prevent jamming, and to spot counterfeited
messages. The British Navy developed 3 channel
systems for wireless communications. In
his historical study, “Electronics and sea Power.”
Vice-Admiral Sir Arthur Hezlet concludes that by
1905, “there is little doubt that from every
point of view the Royal Navy at this time had
the most efficient wireless communication system
in the world … and produced the best material.”
The sea not only provided an
early push for wireless innovation, but it also
provided the Marconi Company with a sizable and
vital revenue stream. By 1905, the world’s naval
powers had 110 ships equipped with wireless
telegraphy, many of which were equipped with
Marconi equipment. In 1904, Marconi entered into
an agreement with the Cunard Steamship Line to
create the first civilian ship-to-shore
communication system. The Titanic sailed with a
Marconi wireless system. In the aftermath of
this great tragedy regulations for the use of
wireless at sea were proposed for the first
time. In Britain it was recommended that all
ships be equipped with wireless equipment. But
equally important that they be staffed by
trained operators on a 24 hour basis. The
prospect of the world’s ships carrying wireless
equipment was of enormous commercial potential
for Marconi.
This article has given a sketchy
overview of two examples that illustrate the
historic relationship between IEEE technologies
and the sea. There are several more that come to
my mind. If any of you have other examples
please share them with me and the IEEE History
Center. For further information on the ideas
contained in this article, please consult the
following:
Edison, Thomas A., “Means of
Transmitting Signals Electrically”, filed on 23
May 1885, patent granted on 29 December 1991,
U.S. Patent #465,971. Electronic copy available
at Thomas A. Edison Papers, Rutgers
University, http://edison.rutgers.edu/patents/00465971.PDF
Elliot, Major George H.,
Report of a Tour of Inspection of European
Light-House Establishments Made in 1873,
under authority for the U.S. Secretary of the
Treasury, (Washington, D.C: Government Printing
Office, 1874)
Hezlet, Vice-Admiral Sir Arthur,
Electronics and Sea Power (New York:
Stein and Day, 1975)
MacLeod, Roy M., “Science and
Government in Victorian England: Lighthouse
Illumination and the Board of Trade, 1866-1886,
ISIS, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Spring 1969), pp. 4-38
Sarkar, Tapan, et al, History
of Wireless, (Hoboken, NJ: IEEE Press and
John Wiley & Sons, 2006)
Schiffer, Michael Brian, “The
Electric Lighthouse in the Nineteenth Century”,
Technology & Culture, Vol. 46 (April 2005), pp.
275-305.
John Vardalas, Ph.D., is an
IEEE Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of
History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick,
N.J. Visit the IEEE History Center's Web page
at:
www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center. He can be reached at
todaysengineer@ieee.org.
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