It took more than money and man-power to lay the transatlantic cable. Gutta-percha, a natural plastic extracted from trees in Southeast Asia, sparked a craze in Victorian England, leading to its use ...
Lithograph after Robert Dudley from 'The Atlantic Telegraph', a book by W H Russell with 26 illustrations by Dudley, published in 1866. This plate shows the reels of gutta-percha-covered conducting ...
New York Times subscribers* enjoy full access to TimesMachine—view over 150 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared. *Does not include Games-only or Cooking-only subscribers.
Hosted on MSN
From the telegraph to AI, our communications systems have always had hidden environmental costs
Wrapped around the wires is a mixture of tarred yarn and gutta percha. Cable companies used this naturally occurring latex to insulate telegraph wires from the harsh conditions on the sea floor. To ...
On June 23, 1874, the front page of the Jornal do Recife newspaper celebrated the new development: “We are, now, in instant communication with the whole world, and just yesterday some private ...
In the 1800s, a fashionable European gentleman would wear a top hat and carry a walking stick that served both as a decorative dress accessory and as a self-defence item against street crime. Although ...
Gutta Percha is a natural polymer, chemically the same as natural rubber, however, it has a different molecular shape, giving it different properties. The milky fluid from the gutta-percha tree ...
Few materials are as misunderstood, or misidentified as often, as gutta-percha. Pick up a union case in any antiques shop, and odds are good the tag will say "gutta-percha." Wrong. Most likely the ...
Some results have been hidden because they may be inaccessible to you
Show inaccessible results