By Pat Sheil
HISTORY
Charles Todd’s Magnificent Obsession
David Dufty
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
From its experimental beginnings alongside the embryonic British railways of the 1830s, to the laying of the first trans-Pacific cable in 1902, the international telegraph network was arguably the most important technological achievement of the 19th century. Steam powered the new trains and ships that transformed trade and commerce, but electricity and instantaneous communication created the real-time international market.
The impact on the economy of late 19th-century Australia was profound. No longer did colonial sheep graziers have to wait almost three months to find out what their wool clip would be worth in London. After 1872, the current price was in the Sydney and Melbourne papers the next day. Australia and New Zealand were the last outposts of Empire to be wired up, when a cable that ran through the Mediterranean, Red Sea, India and Singapore was finally lowered onto the seabed between Java and Darwin.
Most of the line had been laid underwater, thousands of kilometres of wire rolled out from the sterns of huge cable ships. It was the last piece of the puzzle, connecting tropical northern Australia to the colonies down south, that proved to be the most challenging.
The story of how it was finally done, overcoming the perils of deluge and desert, endless political infighting and contractual chicanery, is told with flair and contagious enthusiasm by David Dufty in Charles Todd’s Magnificent Obsession. Dufty’s choice of title, putting Todd and his relentless determination to get the line built at the core of the tale, is a fair call. Of course, Australia was always going to be connected to the world’s telegraphy network eventually, but it was the London-born astronomer/engineer, with his sheer determination to overcome obstacles both natural and political, who gave Australia its most remarkable piece of infrastructure until the Snowy Mountains hydro project was finished a century later.
Charles Todd (third from left) with some of his engineering team at the Roper River camp in the Northern Territory early in 1872.
In 1855, Todd arrived in Adelaide with his wife Alice (the “Alice” of Alice Springs, though she was never to visit), tasked with bringing telegraphic and astronomical technology to the new colony of South Australia, which had been established less than 20 years earlier. It was a very different place to the green fields surrounding Greenwich Observatory, where he had done his technical apprenticeship.
Dufty could have told the story of the next 20 years of Todd’s career differently. He could have stuck to linear biography, colonial political and economic history, or popular science meets exploration. In fact, he has done all of the above, and while some might argue he has neglected some aspects of this remarkable episode of Australia’s past and overplayed others, I believe he has done a wonderful job of pulling together an intrinsically complex chain of events into an engrossing and dramatic saga.
In essence, Dufty has opted for landscape over portraiture; he has placed the characters of Todd and his contemporaries in the context of the territory they had to deal with to survive, and the seemingly insurmountable challenges it had in store for them. He takes his readers into some truly horrible places, and at times leaves us sitting in mosquito-infested swamps or baking deserts for a page or three, just so we can sweat it out and realise how hard this gig really was.
Moving tons of wire, along with untold hundreds of wooden and iron poles, batteries, insulators, food and water across an unmapped wilderness was considered harebrained by some, heroic by many, but to Todd, it was certainly feasible. He turned out to be right. Just. As Dufty writes: “Todd’s plan was a gamble. It is a wonder that he is now lauded as a visionary and not derided as a fool.”
Adding to the heavy baggage was political pressure, a financially punitive contractual deadline that the northern wet season would render impossible to meet, and the brute fact that it took only one break in the line anywhere along its 3000-kilometre length, to render it useless.
The political and economic backdrop to this ghastly landscape was no less menacing for Todd and the colony of South Australia. Australia was decades away from unification, and the various states-in-waiting all wanted their slice of the telegraphic action. The British, in the form of the British Australian Telegraph Company, was playing Adelaide off against Brisbane, and there was no love lost. In the end, South Australia agreed to a very risky deal, guaranteeing completion of the line by New Year’s Day, 1872.
Every day they ran late would incur a fee of £70, and they didn’t complete the line until the end of August of that year. But it worked. And late fees notwithstanding, it would go on to make South Australia (and the British financiers) a great deal of money for many years to come.
The real winners were Australian exporters, governments, newspapers and the families who could finally hear and tell of births, deaths and marriages from across the world, in hours instead of months.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.