The Atlantic Telegraph Company’s 1858 failure set the stage for success just eight years later
Photo: Division of Work & Industry/National Museum of American History/Smithsonian Institution
On 16 August 1858, Queen Victoria and U.S. president James Buchanan exchanged telegraphic pleasantries, inaugurating the first transatlantic cable connecting British North America to Ireland. It wasn’t exactly instant messaging: The queen’s 98-word greeting of goodwill took almost 16 hours to send through the 3,200-kilometer cable. Still, compared to packet steamships, which could take 10 days to cross the Atlantic, the cable promised a tremendous improvement in speed for urgent communications.
This milestone in telegraphy had been a long time coming. Samuel Morse first suggested linking the two continents in 1840, and various attempts were made over the ensuing years. Progress on the project took off in the mid-1850s, when U.S. entrepreneur Cyrus W. Field began investing heavily in telegraphy.
Field had made his fortune in the paper industry by the age of 34. The first telegraph project he invested in was a link from St. Johns, Newfoundland, to New York City, as envisioned by Canadian engineer Frederic Newton Gisborne. The venture never secured enough funding, but Field’s enthusiasm for telegraphy was undiminished. Over the next decade, he invested his own money and rallied other inventors and investors to form several telegraph companies.
The most audacious of these was the Atlantic Telegraph Company (ATC). Field and the English engineers John Watkins Brett and Charles Tilston Bright, both specialists in submarine telegraphy, formed the company in 1856, with the goal of laying a transatlantic cable. The British and U.S. governments both agreed to subsidize the project.
Terrestrial telegraphy was by then well established, and several shorter submarine cables had been deployed in Europe and the United States. Still, the transatlantic cable’s great length posed some unique challenges, especially because transmission theory and cable design were still very much under debate.
Photo: SSPL/Getty ImagesIrrational Exuberance: Many souvenirs commemorated the heroic completion of the first transatlantic cable. Some, like this one and the one at top, incorporated actual pieces of leftover cable.
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