The Gutta Percha Company was an English company formed in 1845 to make a variety of products from the recently introduced natural rubber gutta-percha. Unlike other natural rubbers, this material was thermoplastic allowing it to be easily moulded. Nothing else like it was available to manufacturing until well into the twentieth century when synthetic plastics were developed.
Gutta-percha proved to be an ideal insulator for submarine telegraph cables. The company started making this type of cable in 1848 and it rapidly became their main product, on which it had a near monopoly. The world's first international telegraph connection under the sea, a link from Dover to Calais in 1851, used a cable made by the company. Except for a few early ones, submarine cables were armoured with iron, then later steel, wires. The Gutta Percha Company made only the insulated cores, not the complete cable, until April 1864 when it merged into the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, which was later acquired by British Insulated Callender's Cables in 1959.
Gutta-percha
Gutta-percha is a natural rubber that has the unusual property (for 19th-century materials) of being thermoplastic. It can be moulded after placing in hot water and will reharden when cool. It was brought to attention in Europe by William Montgomerie, a Scottish surgeon of the East India Company in Singapore where the trees from which the material is obtained are native. Montgomerie sent samples to the Society of Arts in London in 1843 with the idea that the material could be used for medical apparatus.
In 1844, Montgomerie left samples with Charles Mackintosh's raincoat company. A partner in the company, Thomas Hancock, passed samples to his brother Charles who was trying to invent a new bottle stopper made from cemented ground cork. Hancock then abandoned his original idea and took out a patent for bottle stoppers made from gutta-percha.
Company history
The company was formed on 4 February 1845 by partners Charles Hancock and Henry Bewley, a Dublin chemist making soda water, initially to make Hancock's bottle stoppers. Their premises were at Wharf Road, Islington, London. The range of products was soon greatly expanded, and included machine belts, shoe soles, and toys. However, one of their most important products was gutta-percha insulated electrical cable.
Bewley was also a lead pipe maker. He had designed a machine for extruding lead pipes and on the formation of the Gutta Percha Company, he used this machine for extruding gutta-percha tubing. The company did not at first use this machine for insulating electrical cable. The method initially used was to apply strips of gutta-percha to copper wire. The resulting seam in the insulation was to prove problematic for underwater cables as it provided a route for the ingress of water.
Submarine cables
Gutta-percha made possible practical submarine telegraph cables because it was both waterproof and resistant to seawater as well as being thermoplastic. Gutta-percha's use as an electrical insulator was first suggested by Michael Faraday after he tested a sample. Many possible insulation schemes for a submarine cable, such as hemp impregnated with tar, were tested by Charles Wheatstone who had suggested a cable between England and France as early as 1840. None of these schemes were successful. Wheatstone had looked at gutta-percha but could not find a good way of applying it to the conductor.
On hearing of this possible application for gutta-percha, Hancock designed a machine for applying it to a conductor seamlessly. Hancock's machine was an adaptation of Bewley's tube extruding machine. However, Hancock denied Bewley the right to use the machine. The dispute resulted in Hancock leaving and setting up the rival West Ham Gutta Percha Company. Hancock lost the dispute in court and his company went bankrupt. The first order for gutta-percha electrical cable came in 1848 from the South Eastern Railway for a length for experiment. South Eastern Railway, in collaboration with the Submarine Telegraph Company, wished to extend their telegraph line through to France. The cable was successfully tested off Folkestone from the ship Princess Clementine with messages sent through the cable to London. The railway afterwards used the cable in a wet railway tunnel.