ABSTRACT
Fleeming Jenkin, a twenty five years old, had become a person of some consequence in the Birkenhead telegraph works of R. S. Newall and Company. Jenkin had moved from John Penn's in 1856, to work as a draughtsman on railway projects for Liddell and Gordon in London. It was in 1857 that Fleeming Jenkin left railway work, moving into the employment of R. S. Newall and Company and the technological challenges of submarine telegraphy. Much of Jenkin's time between 1857 and 1861 was spent at Newall's factory in Birkenhead, or away on expeditions to lay or retrieve undersea cables in the Mediterranean. Fleeming Jenkin, at the age of twenty-four, was much more than a 'philosophic assistant', for he had become Newall's chief engineer and electrician, designing machinery for paying out and picking up cables, overseeing the construction of those machines, fitting up cable ships and in charge of electrical testing.
