Atlantic Cable

Atlantic Cable. A cable telegraph link between the United States and Great Britain was conceived soon after the first telegraph systems were developed in those countries in the 1840s. Little progress was made until 1854, however, when the New York City paper merchant Cyrus W. Field (1819–1892) became the principal promoter of the project. With a group of his wealthy New York friends, Field formed an American company to undertake the project. After completing construction of the Newfoundland–New York overland route and organizing the American Telegraph Company to control telegraph lines along the eastern seaboard, Field was unable to convince American investors to back the Atlantic cable. Accompanied by Samuel F.B. Morse, inventor of the first American telegraph, he traveled to London to raise the necessary funds by forming the Atlantic Telegraph Company (1856) and winning the support of the British government. Work began in August 1857, but the cable broke while being laid. Raising additional capital, Field completed the cable in August 1858 between Newfoundland and Ireland. (Transatlantic messages were then relayed to England via an England–Ireland cable.) People on both sides of the Atlantic celebrated the cable's success, and Queen Victoria sent a celebratory message to President James Buchanan, but after operating for only about a month, the cable failed. Unable to raise sufficient capital in America for a third attempt, especially after the outbreak of the Civil War, Field once again turned to British investors. The first permanent Atlantic Cable, completed in 1866, was largely a British project, and British investors, cable companies, and engineers would continue to dominate the world's cable industry.

Bibliography

Samuel Carter , Cyrus Field: A Man of Two Worlds, 1968.
Vary T. Coates and and Bernard Finn , A Retrospective Technology Assessment: Submarine Telegraphy: The Transatlantic Cable of 1866, 1979.

Paul Israel