Queen Victoria managed to send President Buchanan a celebratory message, but it took a whole day to send it. On a good day, the cable could carry something like one word per minute. This fact was generally hushed up, but the important people knew about it — so the pressure was on Wildman Whitehouse, whose theories were blatantly contradicted by the facts. Whitehouse convinced himself that the solution to their troubles was brute force — send the message at extremely high voltages. To that end, he invented and patented a set of 5-foot-long induction coils capable of ramming 2,000 volts into the
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