nies have further greatly added to the efficiency of their system by means of the Creed Printer, which is also installed on the Atlantic section of the "All Red" route, as well as in connexion with Wheatstone high-speed working on the Pacific cable land line system between Melbourne and Sydney.
A Stock Exchange Telegraph Service of a highly efficient order was established some years ago between London and New York. So efficient is this that messages are got through within ten minutes. Something like 2,500 such messages are transmitted between the two Stock Exchanges during an afternoon.
Cables and Commerce. In pre-cablc days each country was, in large measure, an independent commercial unit. The subma- rine cable has done much to alter that state of things. Whereas in 1870 the total value of the commerce between the United States and Great Britain was' about 90,000.000, in the fiscal year ending June 30 1920 it was as much as 525,000,000. Be- sides the enormous increase in volume of business brought about by the extension of telegraphic service across the oceans, this quickened communication has also brought a complete change in business methods. It has, indeed, introduced an element of stability into international trade such as was seriously lacking when intercourse depended solely on the mail.
The World War has tended also to increase cable traffic be- cause of changed business habits. During the early months of the conflict a rigorous censorship on cable messages was enforced by the Allied Governments. At first codes of all kinds were prohib- ited, and although this regulation was subsequently modified to allow the use of ordinary commercial codes, private codes and lighter messages were stopped. As a result, many business firms discovered that for much of their cable business the time and labour spent in coding and decoding as well as the errors which are inevitable in the transmission of unintelligible matter made messages in plain language only slightly more expensive than code. The result after the war has been a considerable increase in the percentage of plain-language messages. Another factor in the greater traffic has been the increased use of the cables for transactions which were formerly carried on by mail. This has been due partly to changed conditions which have made speedy communication more than ever necessary, and partly to the fact that the business houses, which were forced to increase their use of the cables during the war, have continued to do so on discovering the great convenience of cable communication in comparison with the mail.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Sir Charles Bright, Telegraphy, Aeronautics and War (1918) and Inter-Imperial Communication through Cable, Wireless and Air ( Paper to the British Association, Sept. 12 1919); Post Office Electrical Engineers' Journal (1919-20) ; Telegraph and Telephone Journal (1921). (C. BR.*)
SUBMARINE CAMPAIGNS. At the beginning of the World
War the submarine was a comparatively new weapon of untried possibilities, whose ultimate place in naval warfare it was hard to foresee; and there ensued a period of tentative effort, confined at first to the North Sea, which lasted from Aug. 1914 to Feb.
1915. Germany started the war with 28 submarines, but the
unreliable nature of the Korting engines fitted in the first 18
boats (Ui-Ui8) had given her a low opinion of their merits. This
was accentuated by the result of the first operation of the war
consisting of a sortie by 10 boats up the North Sea, in which Uis
was rammed by the light cruiser " Birmingham " on Aug. 9 1914
and Ui3 disappeared. On the British side some 56 submarines
were available, the newest boats of the D and E class being
attached to the 8th Flotilla (18 boats) employed under Com-
modore Roger Keyes in guarding the approach to Dover Straits
with a couple (E6 and E8) reconnoitring in the Bight.
Early Days of the War. Submarines did not play a decisive part in the Heligoland Bight action on Aug. 28. The six British submarines present were disconcerted by the unexpected ap- pearance of British light cruisers, and the German submarines were retained off Heligoland guarding the approach to the rivers. 'The first British warship to be sunk by submarines was the " Pathfinder," a small cruiser torpedoed by U2i (Otto Hersing), off the Forth on Sept. 5, an incident which aroused little com-
icnt beyond emphasizing the danger of old ships patrolling on
regular beats. The sinking of the " Cressy," " Hogue " and
" Aboukir " off the Dutch coast on Sept. 22 1914 was a much
heavier blow. They had been sent to patrol on the Broad Four-
teens, between England and Holland, and were steaming slowly
in line abreast two miles apart at 6:30 A.M. when the " Aboukir,"
" Hogue " and " Cressy " were torpedoed in quick succession.
This was the work of Otto Weddingen in Ug, and the wholesale
disappearance of Cruiser Force C within an hour with a loss of
over 1,400 men came as an unpleasant shock, and definitely
established the power of the new weapon. By the end of Sept.
submarines were pushing past Dover Straits into the Channel,
and on Oct. 16 1914 the fear of the new weapon reached a climax,
when on a false alarm of one in Scapa Flow the British Grand
fleet hastily put to sea at night and proceeded to Lough Swilly
where by a freak of misfortune the "Audacious" ran on a mine
and was lost. Oct. 20 1914 had seen the sinking of the first
merchant ship, the ss. " Glitra," off Norway by Uiy, but it was
not until Nov. 23 that Ui8 actually attempted to enter the Flow.
The Grand fleet were at sea at the time and Ui8 was rammed by
a minesweeper, the " Dorothy Gray," close to the Hoxa entrance.
She went down to 1 1 fathoms with her hydroplanes damaged, and
coming to the surface later was rammed by the destroyer
" Garry " and forced to surrender, the first and (with the excep-
tion of UBn6 in 1918) the last attempt to enter Scapa Flow.
Defensive Methods. The war found the British navy almost destitute of defensive methods against the submarine. A com- mittee had sat on the subject but had evolved nothing but the modified sweep a somewhat clumsy contrivance consisting of a line of explosive charges towed astern, regulated in depth by a water-kite and fired from inboard. The defence of Scapa had been mooted as early as 1912, and Adml. Jellicoe, then at the Admiralty, had taken an important part in discussions on the sub- ject, but nothing had been done beyond allocating a small sum for the purpose in 1913, which was diverted to Dover to build a wall on the breakwater, in pursuance of the pre-war tendency to try and fit prospective wars into the existing naval ports. By the end of 1914 Cromarty had been supplied with Capt. Donald Monro's boom, but Scapa with all its entrances was not secure till Feb. 1915. Counter measures at this stage of the war were confined to an extensive development of the Auxiliary Patrol organization, the tentative supply of defensive armament to merchant shipping, and the equipment of a comparatively small number of vessels with the modified sweep. The trawlers of the Auxiliary Patrol played an important part in minesweeping and in escort work, but were too slow and too poorly armed to be really effective in offensive operations against the submarine. By the end of 1914 the submarine was generally recognized as a new and powerful weapon in naval warfare, though its tremen- dous potency as an instrument of the guerre de course had not been fully realized. Germany had lost 7 and with the addition of ii had 30 now available, with 42 U boats and 127 UB and UC under construction and on order. Von Tirpitz, fully alive to their possibilities, was already building great hopes on them.
The early morning of New Year's Day 1915 saw the old battleship " Formidable " (Capt. A. N. Loxley) fall a victim to U24 off Start Point while patrolling up and down with the Channel fleet at 10 knots. The captain went down with the ship. Only 141 were saved out of a crew of over 800, and the incident demolished once and for all the opinion of a certain school of naval thought that the submarine could be ignored.
They were now going farther afield. Otto Hersing in U2i made his first cruise to the Irish Sea in Jan. 1915, and this month too saw the first instances pf a ship being torpedoed without warning in the case of the British s.s. " Tokemaru " and s.s. "Ikaria " off Havre on Jan. 30 by U2o (Schwieger, who was to earn an unenviable reputation for ruthless warfare).
Campaigns of 1915. Feb. 4 1915 saw the close of what may be termed the preliminary phase of submarine warfare. The German naval staff now decided to conduct a general campaign against merchant shipping, and on this date the German Government issued a declaration constituting all waters round Great Britain and Ireland a war zone (Kriegsgebiet), in which from
