Background
Charles Tilston Bright was born on the 8th of June 1832, at Wanstead, England and came of an old Yorkshire family.
Charles Tilston Bright was born on the 8th of June 1832, at Wanstead, England and came of an old Yorkshire family.
Bright was educated at Merchant Taylors' School.
At the age of fifteen he became a clerk under the Electric Telegraph Company. His talent for electrical engineering was soon shown, and his progress was rapid; so that in 1852 he was appointed engineer to the Magnetic Telegraph Company. His experiments convinced him of the practicability of an electric submarine cable connexion between Ireland and America; and having in 1855 already discussed the question with Cyrus Field, who with I. W. Brett controlled the Newfoundland Telegraph Company on the other side of the ocean, Bright organized with them the Atlantic Telegraph Company in 1856 for the purpose of carrying out the idea, himself becoming engineer-in-chief. The story of the first Atlantic cable is told elsewhere, and it must suffice here to say that in 1858, after two disappointments, Bright successfully accomplished what to many had seemed an impossible feat, and within a few days of landing the Irish end of the line at Valentia he was knighted in Dublin. He died on the 3rd of May 1888, at Abbey Wood, near London.
He superintended the laying of lines in various parts of the British Isles, including in 1853 the first cable between Great Britain and Ireland, from Portpatrick to Donaghadee. He was one of the founders of the Atlantic Telegraph Company and oversaw the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. Sir Charles Bright also supervised the laying of submarine cables in various regions of the world, and took a leading part as pioneer in other developments of the electrical industry. In conjunction with Josiah Latimer Clark, with whom he entered into partnership in 1861, he invented improved methods of insulating submarine cables, and a paper on electrical standards read by them before the British Association in the same year led to the establishment of the British Association committee on that subject, whose work formed the foundations of the system still in use. In 1865 he was awarded a Telford Medal for a paper on the possibilities of submarine cable telegraphy from England to China and Australia.
From 1865 to 1868 he was Liberal Member of Parliament for Greenwich.
His son Charles Bright was also a noted cable engineer and historian of the subject.
