Copyright ©2002 by John Steele GordonAll rights reserved. No part of this book may

be reproduced or transmitted in any form orbyany means, electronic or mechanical, includingphotocopying, recording, or by anyinformationstorage and retrieval system, without permissionin writing from the Publisher.

First published in the United States ofAmerica in 2002 by Walker Publishing Company,Inc.

Published simultaneously in Canada byFitzhenry and Whiteside, Markham, Ontario l^R4T8

Every effort has been made to locate andcontact all the holders of copyright to materialreproduced in this book.

Illustrations on pages ill and 207 arc usedbypermission of The Granger Collection,NewYork. Illustrations on pages 11 and 34,courtesy of the New York Historical Society, NewYork City. Illustration on page 37 is used by

permission of the Library of Congress.Illustration on page 43, courtesy of the Chamberof Commerce, New York City. Illustrations onpages 81,103, and 105 are from Harper's Weekly[TelegraphSupplement] September 4, 1858.Illustration on page 124 is from Harper'sWeekly,August 14, 1858. Illustrations on pages133,136, and 204 are used by permission ofCulver Pictures. Illustrations on page157,courtesy of the Burndy Library, Norwalk,Connecticut. Illustrations on page 148, courtesyof the Nautical Photo Agency. Illustration onpage 156 is by Ley Kenyonpublished in Builderand Dreamer by Laurence Maynell, The BodleyHead Ltd.,London, 1952. Illustration on page 161,courtesy of C. C. Bennett. Illustration on page175 used by permission of The IllustratedLondon News Picture Library.Illustration onpage 194 is used by permission of TheMetropolitan Museum ofArt, all rights reserved.Illustration on page199 is courtesy of theNational Archives of Canada/C-oo4484.

ISBN 0-8027-1364-5

For George Gibbon

In comparison with the ship from which itwas payed out, and the gigantic waves amongwhich it was delivered, [the cable] was but amere thread.

—NICHOLAS WOODS The Times of London ,1858

Let us then be up and doing, With a heart forany fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to laborand to wait.

-HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW "APsalm of Life"

A Note on Money

The laying of the Atlantic cable was one of thegreat international undertakings of the mid-nineteenth century. Although organized andpushed to completion by an American, much ofthe technology and most of the financing camefrom Britain. Thus, figures in both dollars andpounds appear frequently on these pages. Whatwas the relative value of each currency at thattime?

In the middle of the nineteenth century, GreatBritain had the world's largest economy, thepound sterling was the dominant currency ofinternational trade, and the Bank of Englandwas, effectively, the world's central bank. Sincethe early eighteenth century, the pound had beenvalued at three pounds, seventeen shillings, tenand a halfpence to the ounce of gold. After 1821the Bank of England had stood ready to buy orsell unlimited amounts of sterling for gold at

that rate. This was the beginning of the "goldstandard" that would spread around the worldover the next half century and endure in oneform or another until 1971. As a result, Bank ofEngland pound notes traded at par with gold andwere acceptable as payment almost everywhere.

The dollar had been valued at $20.6£ to theounce of gold since 1834, but the United Stateshad no central bank after 1836, when the charterof the Second Bank of the United States expiredand President Andrew Jackson vetoed itsrenewal. The United States Treasury minted goldand silver coins, but American paper money,before the Civil War, was issued by thousands ofstate-chartered banks. These notes traded forgold at ratios that ranged from nearly par tonearly infinity, depending on the reputation ofthe bank and the distance of the transactionfrom the hank's headquarters, where they couldbe redeemed for specie (in coin). American papermoney had no currency abroad.

With the advent of the Civil War, the UnitedStates Treasury began issuing "greenbacks,"paper currency that was not redeemable in gold(and not acceptable in payment of federal taxes).The ratio of the value of these greenback dollarsto the gold dollar tended to correlate, inversely,with the fortunes of the Union Army, reaching ahigh of 2.87 greenback dollars needed to buy igold dollar just before the Battle of Gettysburg in1863.

That year the National Banking Act ended theissuance of bank notes by state banks andprovided for the chartering of national banks,which could issue banknotes only under strictregulations and to a uniform design. This gavethe United States a sound and coherent papermoney system for the first time m its history.With the return of peace and of the Confederatestates to the Union, the dollar became once morefully convertible into gold in 1875.

Based on their values relative to gold, in the

18508 and 1860s, one pound was worth slightlymore than five dollars. The various monetarysums given in this book can be accuratelyconverted at this ratio.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my publisher, George Gibson,who had the idea that I should write this bookand waited more patiently than I would have forit to be delivered; Katinka Matson, my agent;Jackie Johnson, who edited the book; my friendDavid Stebbings, who made sure I got thetechnical details correct; Judith Gelernter of theUnion Club Library, for aEowing me to keepbooks long after they were past due; TimothyField Beard for details on the ancestry of theField family; and John K. Howat for information

on the South American adventure of Cyrus Fieldand Frederic Church.

1. "An Enterprise Worthyof This Day of Great

Things"

THOMAS NIGHTINGALE HAD PROSPEREDin South Carolina almost from the day he hadarrived as a young man from his native Yorkshirein the 1720s. He got his start operating a cow penon the frontier but soon branched into numerousother activities, including building NewmarketRace Track in Charleston and importing some ofthe first thoroughbred horses to the NorthAmerican colonies.

The timing of his arrival had been fortunate.Trade in rice and indigo was fast making the

Carolina tidewater the richest part of the BritishNorth American empire, and ThomasNightingale grew rich right along with hisadopted land.

In 1760, already well established amongCharleston's aristocracy, he decided to add onemore proof of his status in that very status-conscious society. He bought a pew, number 101,in St. Michael's Church, then under constructionin Charleston. With the great wealth at thecongregation's disposal, little expense had beenspared in the building of St. Michael's, amasterpiece of American colonial architecture.Much of the woodwork, for instance, would besupplied by Thomas Elfe, the city's leadingcabinetmaker and himself a pew holder. A pew insuch a church did not come cheaply. But for fiftypounds—more than a workman's annual wage inthe middle of the eighteenth century—ThomasNightingale received a deed to the pew, signedand sealed by the church commissioners.

That deed, to our eyes, has one very curiousaspect. It is dated "the fifth day of December inthe Year of our Lord One Thousand SevenHundred and Sixty and in the Thirty-Fourth yearof the Reign of our Sovereign Lord KingGEORGE the Second . . ."* But King George haddied suddenly of a burst blood vessel on October25, 1760, while in his water closet. December 5,therefore, was in fact in the first year of the reignof his grandson, King George in.

It is a measure of the perceived vastness ofthe Atlantic Ocean in the eighteenth century thatthe king's richest North American possessionremained ignorant of his death a full six weeksafter the event. Charleston, in fact, did not learnof the king's death for another two weeks ormore.

Yet America's civilization and characterdeveloped during the colonial period in thecontext of this profound isolation from itsEuropean roots. In 1620, the Mayflower had

sailed from Plymouth, in Devonshire, onSeptember 16, and raised Cape Cod only onNovember cj. That was considered a very goodpassage at the time, and in fact it was still a goodpassage two hundred years later. It was by nomeans unprecedented for a ship unfortunate inweather to take four months to make the tripfrom the Old World to the New.

Because the trip was so long, expensive, andperilous, only a handful of immigrants to theNew World — mostly members of the colonies'business and political elites — ever had theopportunity to return to the Old. Tbus, to set sailfor America in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies was, almost always, to say good-byeforever to all the emigrant had known and loved.

Since for all practical purposes news couldtravel no faster than human beings could carry it,knowledge of events in Europe — the center ofthe Western world — was just as slow to flowacross the ocean as men and goods. North

America was not only three thousand miles fromEurope — it was two months from it as well.There was not even a regular postal system;letters were entrusted to anyone willing to carrythem, to be delivered when and if possible.

Today, such isolation is almost inconceivable.After all, it took the Apollo astronauts only threedays to reach the moon, a distance almost ahundred times as great as the width of theAtlantic, and news from the moon (not, to besure, that there is much) could reach us inseconds.

But in Thomas Nightingale's day, the vast gulfbetween Europe and America was simply a factof life. Like growing old, or needing to sleep forseveral hours a day, it was taken as a given, ifsometimes regretted.

But even as King George lay dying in his watercloset, many of his subjects, especially in theMidlands of England, were already deeplyinvolved in a process dhat would profoundly

alter the boundaries of what was possible. Thecloth industry, for example, a mainstay of theBritish economy for centuries, had begun tomechanize, adopting the factory system ofmanufacture, which would come to dominate theworld economy. John Kay's flying shuttle,introduced in 1733, considerably increased thespeed with which cloth could be woven. Thespinning jenny and the water frame, introducedin the 1760s, greatly accelerated the manufactureof yarn. The power loom in the 1780s completedthe mechanization of the industry.

At first these machines were powered byfalling water pushing on mill wheels. Then, in1769, the Scotsman James Watt patented agreatly improved steam engine, and in 1784introduced a rotary version, capable of turning ashaft. The new power source, which made work-doing energy both cheap and capable of beingapplied in almost unlimited amounts to a singletask, proved the catalyst of profound change.Dubbed the Industrial Revolution in 1848 (when

it was already almost a century old), it sweptaway the world of Thomas Nightingale andGeorge n in a matter of two generations andcreated the modern world.

Politics helped. With the final defeat ofNapoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, on June16,1815, the Western world entered into a periodof peace that would last nearly a hundred years,until the outbreak of the First World War onAugust i, 1914. In this period of relative peace,with the exception of the American Civil War,wars were mostly short and often distant fromthe centers of Western civilization. Thus,national and individual energies could bedirected to peaceful pursuits. With steam, thenew energy source, offering a myriad ofpossibilities, men of the highest talent andambition—men who in earlier times might havegone into politics, the military, or trade—movedto exploit these possibilities to the fullest.

Soon the steam engine was being used not

only to power factories that produced an ever-growing number of products at prices the middleclass could afford but also to revolutionizetransportation. In the eighteenth century, bulkygoods were transported by water or they did notmove at all. But in the first decade of thenineteenth century, Richard Trevithick inEngland and Oliver Evans in the United Statesdeveloped high-pressure steam engines thatproduced far more power per unit of weight thanWatt's engine had. Fitted to wagons that movedon rails, a technique used in mining since thesixteenth century, the new high-pressure engineswere capable of hauling large loads atunprecedented speeds over land.

After George Stephenson solved any numberof engineering puzzles and built the Manchesterand Liverpool Railroad, which began operatingprofitably in 1829, railroads quickly spread like aspiderweb across both Europe and NorthAmerica. This development greatly reduced thecost of transporting both people and goods, and

made possible markets of national scope. This, inturn, greatly reduced the cost of manufacturingthose goods through economies of scale —decreasing their price and increasing the demandfor them. The rate of economic growth andwealth creation soared.

This new wealth enormously increased thesize and influence of the middle class. Indeed,the very term middle class was coined only in1812. And this new socioeconomic group beganto enjoy a lifestyle quite unknown even to therich fifty years earlier. In the first half of thenineteenth century, most of the attributes of themodern domestic world became common in theirhouseholds: central heating, running water, andabundant interior lighting; cheap newspapers,magazines, artwork, and books; cheaper clothes,linens, china, carpeting, and wallpaper.

Given human nature, it is not surprising thatpeople indulged in these rich new possibilities,and an overstuffed, densely furnished, intricately

appointed style of decor was the height offashion in the mid-nineteenth century. At thattime, more was more.

This sudden, accelerating increase in thestandard of living and in the technology ofeveryday life also affirmed a belief in progressand in the possibility of improvement, a sensethat anything — economic, technical, or social —was possible. The nineteenth century thusbecame a great age of both optimism and reformas people began to tackle social problems thathad once been thought intractable artifacts of thehuman condition, such as poverty, drunkenness,and gambling. Not the least of these reforms wasin politics.

Where wealth, and thus power, had once beenconcentrated among the owners of land and thegreat merchants, now a new class of factoryowners rose who were often richer—and moreliquid—by far than the older moneyed class. Inthe 1830s the franchise was widened in both

Britain and the United States, and in 1832Parliament was reformed and the seatsredistributed for the first time since the time ofHenry VIII. This recognition of the neweconomic reality via a peaceful, constitutionaltransfer of power from the landed aristocracy tothe bourgeoisie is one of the most remarkableevents of the nineteenth century or, indeed, ofany age.

The wealth these factory owners piled upchanged society in other ways. Money became anobsession. "Wealth! Wealth! Wealth!" wrote theEnglish social critic John Sterling as early as1828. "Praise to the God of the nineteenthcentury! The Golden Idol! The mightyMammon! Such are the accents of the time, suchthe cry of the nation. . . . There may be here andthere an individual who does not spend his heartin laboring for riches; but there is nothingapproaching to a class of persons actuated by anyother desire."2 The year before, the young

novelist and future prime minister BenjaminDisraeli had coined the word millionaire todescribe the members of this new class.

The steam engine was also soon applied totransportation at sea. The Savannah, built inNew York in 1819, weighed 320 tons and wasequipped with a ^o-horsepower engine andcollapsible paddle wheels. That year she crossedfrom Savannah, Georgia, to Liverpool in only 27days and 15 hours (£63 hours), having used herengine for about 80 hours of the trip.

Measured in time, the Atlantic was shrinkingrapidly before the onslaught of the IndustrialRevolution, but transportation was by no meansthe only field in which speed was increasing byorders of magnitude, thanks to anotherprofoundly new technology. Long-distancecommunication as well was changing beyondrecognition.

IT HAD NEVER BEEN QUITE TRUE thatnews and men moved at the same speed. Smoke

and flag signals had been around since antiquity.The homing instinct of pigeons was exploited tocarry messages at least as early as A.D. 1150,when the sultan of Baghdad established a pigeonpostal system. In 1588, Queen Elizabeth Iordered the construction of bonfires along thesouth coast of England, to be ready to convey toLondon in a couple of hours instead of days asingle message: "The Armada has been sighted.'

The French took visual signaling to theultimate. Beginning in 1794, Claude Chappe builta series of semaphore stations between Paris andimportant military posts, such as the great navalbase at Brest, three hundred miles west of Panson the tip of the Brittany peninsula. Equippedwith a mast and two cross arms, these stationswere spaced five to ten miles apart and workedby four or five people each. They were, in effect,a series of gigantic Boy Scouts wigwagging toeach other across the French landscape. By thismethod, messages could be transmitted at a rateof several hundred miles a day, far faster than

any other method of the time.The system had numerous disadvantages. For

one thing, it was so expensive on a per wordbasis that only a sovereign government couldafford to utilize it. For another, it was useless inbad weather and at night. And because eachmessage had to be copied and repeated manytimes by fallible human beings, the error ratewas extremely high. Regardless, timelyinformation can be so valuable (bat the Chappesystem (which he dubbed a

telegraph — from theGreek words meaning writing at a distance)

and variations of it spread rapidly across Europe.Even before Chappe developed his signaling

system, however, indeed before ThomasNightingale bought his church pew, the basis of awholly new communications technology wasbeing laid by — to use the marvelous phrase ofSir Arthur Clarke — "beachcombers on thefurther shores of theoretical physics. "3

That basis was electricity. It had first beenrecognized as a separate phenomenon in theseventeenth century, although its nature was anutter mystery at the time. It was in theeighteenth century that that nature began to bestudied seriously. In 1747 Sir William Watsondemonstrated that it was possible to transmitelectricity down a metal wire for long distances.In the next decade Benjamin Franklin exploredthe subject. He proved among much else thatlightning was an electrical phenomenon, thanksto his famous — and extremely hazardous —experiment with a kite and a key. It was alsoFranklin who coined many words that are stillused in discussing electricity, such as positive,negative, battery, and conductor, Fie onceamused dinner guests by igniting spirits ofalcohol from across the Schuylkill River inPhiladelphia, using an electric wire to convey thespark.

In 1753 an unknown writer, using only theinitials C.M., proposed in Scots' Magazine the

use of electricity to convey information over longdistances by means of wires. The first suchsystem actually built, in Geneva in 1774, usedone wire for each letter of the alphabet. Thecurrent would charge a pith ball with staticelectricity, which in turn would attract a bell andring it. This alphabetical carillon actually worked,after a fashion, but was hardly a practical system.It was only with the invention of theelectromagnet and much better batteries, and theavailability of cheap wire thanks to the IndustrialRevolution in the early years of the nineteenthcentury, that it became possible to convert theelectric telegraph from a parlor trick to use as aworld-transforming technology.

Like many seminal inventions of theindustrial era—the railroad, automobile,television, the computer—the electric telegraphwas not the invention of one person. Severalpeople contributed vital parts of the system, butit was William Fothergill Cooke and CharlesWheatstone in England and Samuel F. B. Morse

in the United States who first built practical,working telegraph lines of substantial length andtransmitted messages over them. Eventually itwas Morse's particular system and, especially,his marvelously efficient code — the only part ofhis telegraph system wholly original with Morse— that became the standard.

The telegraph was something very new underthe sun, some-thing that would have been utterlyinconceivable to the world of ThomasNightingale. The telegraph could transmitinformation .11 very high speed—thousands oftimes faster than it could be physically carriedand hundreds of times faster than Chappe'svisual telegraph could transmit it—and at verylow cost. So it is not surprising that once itspracticality was demonstrated, the telegraphspread with astonishing speed, often using theconvenient pathways forged by the equally fast-spreading railroads.

The relatively small countries of western

Europe were mostly wired by 1850. Even the vastand only partially settled United States had atelegraph line running across the continent toCalifornia by 1861, only seventeen years afterMorse had first tapped out the dashes and dotsspelling "What hath God wrought?"

Because nearly three-quarters of the surfaceof the Earth is covered by water, it was not longbefore men began to consider the problem ofextending the miracle of telegraphy across thesebodies of water. Indeed, Samuel Morse studiedthe problem in 1842, two years before he sent hisfamous message from Washington to Baltimore,when he laid an insulated copper wire acrossNew York harbor and transmitted an electriccurrent through it. In 1845, Ezra Cornell (whowould found Cornell University two decadeslater) laid a line that crossed the Hudson Riverfrom Fort Lee, New Jersey, to Manhattan, wherethe George Washington Bridge is today. Itworked satisfactorily for several months until icebroke it.

Stringing wires on land and across rivers wasone thing, however, and crossing a substantialbody of water quite another. But because therichest, most powerful, and most technologicallyadvanced country in the world in the mid-nineteenth century happened to be located on anarchipelago off northwest Europe, it was not longbefore the attempt was made. In 1845 twoEnglish brothers, John and Jacob Brett, soughtgovernment approval for laying a telegraph lineacross the twenty-two miles that separated theisland of Great Britain from the coast of France.Finally receiving permission from the twogovernments in 1850, they ordered twenty-fivemiles of insulated wire no bigger around than aman's little finger, set the seven- by fifteen-footspool on the back of a small steam tug, and setoff across the channel, reeling out the wire asthey went.

The cable was so light that it wouldn't sink,and thirty-pound lead weights had to be addedevery so often. The Bretts reached France by

nightfall and quickly tried to send a messageback to England. What emerged at Dover wasgibberish, but at least they had proved it waspossible to transmit electricity across asubmarine cable of that length. As The Times ofLondon expressed it, "The jest of yesterday hasbecome the fact of today. "4

The next morning, however, the line wascompletely dead. It was subsequently discoveredthat it had been fouled by a fisherman's anchor.It was so light he was easily able to haul it upand, thinking the copper core might be gold, hecut out a piece to show others.

Regardless of the failure of the world's firstsubmarine telegraph cable, the next year a newand vastly improved one was laid, and it worked.England was connected for the first time sincethe last Ice Age to the continent of Europe, sonews in Paris could be news in London at thesame time. Soon submarine cables connectedEngland to Holland and Ireland and, in 1854, one

was laid (rom Italy to Sardinia and Corsica. Butthese were baby steps, across shallow andnarrow seas.

Then, in the same year the cable betweenCorsica and Sardinia was laid across the nine-mile-wide Strait of Bonifacio, an Americanbusinessman named Cyrus Field made theastonishing decision to lay one across theAtlantic Ocean and end at a stroke his country'sremoteness from the rest of the world.

At that time, the longest submarine cable inoperation ran no miles and lay at a depth nogreater than 300 fathoms. An Atlantic cablewould have to be more than 2,000 miles longand reach depths of 2,600 fathoms. It was a bit

as if someone in the 1550s, reading of thesuccess of the Russian Sputnik, had decided toorganize a manned expedition to Mars.

That Field would get to his Mars only aftertwelve years, five attempts, and endless trialsand tribulations is hardly surprising. But getthere he did, and the attempt was entirely inkeeping with both the man and his times. In thewords of Salmon P. Chase, secretary of thetreasury and chief justice of the United States, itwas certainly "an enterprise worthy of this day ofgreat things. "5

His epic quest would fascinate the world helived in and deeply involve some of the finestscientific, engineering, and business minds ofthat, or for that matter any other, day. But it wasCyrus Field alone who made it happen, for heserved the same function in the enterprise of theAtlantic cable that a producer serves in atheatrical production. A producer does not act ordirect or design scenery. But without him,

neither does anyone else.By the mid-nineteenth century it was known

that the powers of science, technology, andwealth — all greatly increased by the IndustrialRevolution — were capable of profound synergy.And some people were beginning to realize thatsynergy could be maximized, even multiplied, ifthe various elements were brought together andUtilized in a deliberate and productive way by a.new type of businessman, the entrepreneur.Indeed, the very word entrepreneur entered theEnglish language only in 1852, and Cyrus Field isa nearly perfect exemplar of the new breed. Theconcept was, perhaps, the greatest of the myriadinventions of the age in which Cyrus Field livedand the greatest gift that age bestowed uponours, for it was nothing less than the key to thefuture.

Only much money, faith, doggedperseverance, innovation, and occasional greatgood luck would see him and those he brought

together through to one of the true triumphs ofhis era.

2. Cyrus Field

IN THE EARLY DAYS of the American nation,several

New England families each produced anextraordinary number of people of highachievement and lasting fame.

Over the course of four generations, theAdams dynasty produced two presidents and anumber of diplomats and writers whose namesare still familiar. Harriet Beecher

Stowe, who wrote the most politicallyinfluential novel in

American history, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was thesister of

Henry Ward Beecher, the best-known (andprobably the best-paid) American minister of thenineteenth century.

His Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York,held twenty-five hundred people and wasstanding room only whenever he preached.

Cyrus Field was born into another suchfamily, perhaps the most prolific of all. ZechanahField, grandson of the astronomer John Field —who introduced the heliocentric theory ofCopernicus to England —arrived in the NewWorld as early as 1629. Several generations later,his descendant David Dudley Field, Cyrus'sfather, was born in 1781 in East Guilford (nowMadison), Connecticut.

David Field was born to be a minister. Even asa boy he would preach to his friends (at least foras long as they would listen). After graduatingfrom Yale with high honors in 1801, he studiedunder Dr. Charles Backus, of Somers,Connecticut, whose book The Nature and

Influence of Godly Fear had been widely read.He was soon licensed to preach himself and thenext month he married Submit Dickinson,known as "the Somers beauty."1

The Reverend Field was a New Englandpreacher of the old school, "tall, erect of carriagewith keen piercing steel-gray eyes set in histypically Puritan, stern, Old-Testament type offace."2 As one might expect, he was not given tomincing words. When Peter Lung was sentencedto hang for having hacked his wife to death in adrunken rage, Field preached a sermon at hisexecution, as the condemned stood before him.What you have done, he told Lung, "subjects youto ignominious execution. From this there is noescape. . . . Pray God, then, if perhaps your sinsmay be forgiven you. Cry to him, God be mercifulto me, a sinner! And continue those cries tilldeath shall move you hence."3 But at least theReverend Field held out a modicum of hope."Before yonder sun shall set in the west," he told

the condemned man, "your probationary stateshall be closed forever. This day you will citherlift up your eyes in hell, being in torment, or,through the rich, overflowing, and sovereigngrace of God, be carried by the angels toAbraham's bosom. "4

The Reverend Field believed fully in thenotion that idle hands arc the devil's tools.Certainly his own hands were anything but idle.He was a full-time clergyman, first in Haddam,Connecticut, where the seven oldest of hischildren were born, and then Stockbridge,Massachusetts, where the last three arrived,including Cyrus, the seventh of his eight sons. Atthat time, the local C Congregational ministerwas among the most important people in everyNew England community, constantly consultedand involved on matters ranging far beyondreligion. But Field also found time, besideswriting a weekly sermon — many of which werepublished—to write numerous books on localhistory that remain useful source material today.

He also served as his Yale class historian andwrote and published his memoirs.

Despite these demands on his time, theReverend Field took care to school his childrencarefully in the Bible, the Greek and Latinauthors they would not encounter m the localschool— which offered little more than thebasics of reading, writing, and arithmetic — andEnglish literature. His sons long remembered afavorite line of their father from John Bunyan'sThe Pilgram’s Progress, "To know is a thingwhich pleaseth talkers and boasters; but to Jo isthat which pleaseth God. "5 There is no doubtthat the Reverend Field instilled that idea in hissons.

But while David Dudley Field was a sternpreacher and hard taskmaster, he was also aloving father and a good friend who knew how toenjoy himself. Ministers would come to thehouse for theological discussions over wine andbrandy. His son Henry remembered how after

the discussions, "peals of laughter . . . shook theplace" when his father told stories, and theReverend Field "laughed till the tears ran downhis cheeks.""

Field's professional career was distinguishedenough to earn him an entry in the Dictionary ofAmerican Biography, a standard work of twenty-four volumes, published in the 1920s and 1930s,modeled on the British Dictionary of NationalBiography, one of the great monuments ofVictorian scholarship. But the domesticaccomplishments of his wife and himself arequite as impressive as his professional ones. Nofewer than four of his eight sons (two of whomdid not live long enough to make a mark on theworld) would also find places of their own in theDictionary of American Biography. That,perhaps, is a record.

His namesake, David Dudley Field Jr., born in1805, became one of the most highly paidlawyers in the country, representing clients as

varied as "Boss" Tweed ofTammany Hall, the Erie Railway, and Samuel

J. Tilden,Democratic candidate for president in 187^.

But his greatest achievement was the reform ofthe common law.

The Field Code of Civil Procedure, largely hiswork, was adopted in New York State in the1840s to simplify the procedures — andeliminate the abuses—of the law that weredepicted so savagely m Dickens's Bleak House,published in 1852.

The Field Code was quickly adopted in otherstates and by the federal government. In 1873 itwas used as the basis of reforming the law inEngland and then throughout the BritishEmpire. No nineteenth-century lawyer or judgeof the English-speaking world had a greaterinfluence on the law as it is still encountereddaily by ordinary people than David Dudley FieldJr.

Stephen Johnson Field (born in 1816) alsoentered the law. In 1849, however, he joined thegreat migration to California after gold wasdiscovered there. But he never prospected.Instead he served as a lawyer, invested shrewdlyin land, and rose quickly in the state's politics. In1863 President Lincoln appointed him to theUnited States Supreme Court, a seat he wouldhold for a then record thirty-four years.*

Henry Martyn Field, the youngest of thefamily, born in 1822, became a minister andauthor like his father. His books on travel,history, and biography proved very popular, oftenrunning through several editions and remainingin print for years. His History of the AtlanticTelegraph, perhaps his most popular book, wasin print for over forty years and is, as we shallsee, a prime, indeed inescapable, source for thehistory of the venture.

The two remaining sons (not given space inthe DAB) were only slightly less successful than

their brothers. Jonathan Field served three termsas president of the Massachusetts State Senate.Matthew Field became a civil engineerresponsible for railroads and bridges in manyareas of the country. His railroad bridge acrossthe Cumberland River at Nashville, Tennessee,was destroyed in the battle for that city in theCivil War.

*His sister's son, David ]. Brewer, also sat onthe high court, for twenty years, the first seven ofthem concurrently with his uncle.

Henry would marry Henriette Desportes, aFrenchwoman acquitted of murdering a duchessafter a spectacular trial in Paris in the 1840s. In1938, the story was told as a best-selling novel byRachel Field, a granddaughter of Manhew Field,called All This and Heaven Too, which was madeinto a highly sun < v,!ul movie of the same namestarring Bette Davis and Charles Boyer.

And then there was Cyrus West Field. BornNovember 30, 1819, Cyrus was less studious than

some of his older brothers, who had attendednearby Williams College, but was no less active,ambitious, or intelligent. At the age of sixteen hepersuaded his father to let him seek his fortunein business. He made his way from Stockbndgeto the Hudson River and took a boat south toNew York City. It was a fateful encounter. CyrusField would turn out to be a very giftedentrepreneur, and nineteenth-century New York,where he would live for most of the rest of hislife, was devoted to moneymaking more than anyother city in the nation.

Founded by the Dutch two centuries earlier tofacilitate their trade in beaver skins, New Yorkhad always been commercially minded. Indeed,the Dutch West India Company was so bentupon profits that it didn't even get around tobuilding a proper church on Manhattan forseventeen years. The Dutch Reform ministersimply preached in the fort. Before the end of theDutch era, which lasted only forty years, NewYork merchants were trading with Europe and

the West Indies and as far afield as the IndianOcean.

The city became even more devoted tocommerce with the lifting of British restrictionson American economic activity at the end of theRevolutionary War. In 1784 the city's first bankopened and New York merchants dispatched thefirst American voyage to the Far East and beganthe American China trade. In 1819 New Yorkersbegan the first regularly scheduled passengerservice to Europe and back, which helpedmightily to cement the city's position as thecountry's leading port.

The Industrial Revolution provided the city'sbusinessmen with even greater opportunities,and they seized them. Eli Whitney's cotton ginmade cotton king in the South, But the cottontrade with Europe — the fiber would be thecountry's leading export until the 1930s— waslargely brokered through New York.

New York had surpassed Philadelphia as the

country's largest city by 1790 and increased itslead in every census thereafter. But though NewYork was the country's leading city from theearly days of the Republic, it became thecountry's dominating city only after the openingof the Erie Canal in 1825. Once Governor DeWittClinton pushed it through an often reluctantlegislature, the canal was built in only eight yearsand proved the most consequential public workin the nation's history.

Before the canal, the vast, burgeoning trans-Appalachian area of the country could notprofitably export the rapidly increasing produceof its rich farmland over the mountains to theeastern seaboard. Thus the West had no choicebut to utilize the Mississippi to export throughNew Orleans, or the Great Lakes and the St.Lawrence River, portaging around Niagara Falls.

The Erie Canal provided a direct link betweenLake Erie and the Hudson River at Albany, 150miles north of New York. The canal captured

much of the western commerce immediately.Within a few years the Boston physician andpoet Oliver Wendell Holmes (father of theSupreme Court justice) would complain thatNew York had become "that tongue that islicking up the cream of commerce and finance ofa continent. "7 He was not overstating the case.In 1800, about 9 percent of the country's foreigncommerce passed through New York. By 1860the figure was no less than 62 percent.

Canals became an investment craze, and theywere soon joined in popularity by the newrailroads. Wall Street enjoyed its first great bullmarket in the 1830s, and "Wall Street" came tobe synonymous with the American financialworld.

Thus, thanks to the Erie Canal, the city thatCyrus Field entered for the first time in 1835 wasin the midst of an unprecedented building boom.Indeed, New York at that time was the greatestboomtown the world has ever known, rushingpell-mell up Manhattan Island and adding onaverage ten miles of developed street front peryear. While thousands of buildings a year werebeing built, the streets were clogged withconstruction materials, and traffic was alreadynotorious for obstruction and delay.

In this remarkable hustle and bustle, theopportunities for making a fortune were nearlyunlimited. In 1828, when the city's populationwas 185,000, there were only 59 New Yorkersthought 10 have a net worth in excess of$100,000 —a large fortune by the standards ofthe day. Seventeen years later, the city'spopulation had doubled to 371,000, and thenumber of citizens worth $100,000 hadquintupled, to 294.

In 1835 New York was still largely a city ofbrick and wood town houses. The brownstonethat would come to dominate the domesticcityscape in the next decades was only beginningto be utilized in large quantities. But while NewYork as a whole was impressive, there were fewbuildings of note besides City Hall. For example,the present Trinity Church, by now an enduringsymbol of Wall Street, would not replace itsmodest predecessor until the 1840s. Nor wasNew York much loved by its inhabitants. It wassimply changing too fast for that. "Why should itbe loved as a city?" Harper's Monthly asked in185^. "It is never the same city for a dozen yearsaltogether. A man born in New York forty yearsago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the NewYork he knew. If he chances to stumble upon afew old houses not yet leveled, he is fortunate.But the landmarks, the objects which marked thecity to him, as a city, are gone."8

Contributing to the disappearance of old New

York was the great fire of 1835 on the night ofDecember 16. The night was so bitterly cold thatfiremen had to chip through the ice on the EastRiver to obtain water and they could do little tohalt the spread of the wind-whipped flames. Theglow was seen in the night sky of Poughkeepsie,New Haven, and Philadelphia. A total of 674buildings were destroyed in the area bounded byWall, Broad, and South Streets, the heart of theold business district.

The sixteen-year-old Cyrus was greatly excitedby the fire, writing his parents proudly that hehad been up all night helping to fight theconflagration and had spent the previous Sunday"on duty with [his brother] David as a guard toprevent people from going to the ruins to stealproperty that was saved from the fire and layingin heaps on the streets. "9

Cyrus's brother David was already wellestablished as a lawyer in New York, and hearranged for Cyrus to apprentice at A. T.

Stewart's store at 257 Broadway, across thethoroughfare from City Hall. Stewart's was thecity's leading dry goods store and Stewart wouldin later years go on to build first the MarblePalace at 280 Broadway, probably the largeststore in the United States at the time, and thenthe Iron Palace at Broadway and Tenth Streets,occupying an entire city block. A genius in the artof retailing, Stewart more or less invented thedepartment store and became one of the city'srichest men, leaving an estate at his death in1876^ of more than $40 million.*

Cyrus was paid fifty dollars for his first year'sapprenticeship, and his salary was doubled forthe second year and doubled again for the thirdyear. He impressed his fellow clerks and hisbosses with his friendly, outgoing personalityand his attention to business. He carefully notedStewart's merchandising techniques and neverhesitated to ask questions when he wanted toknow the reason for something. He also studiedon his own, taking night courses in bookkeeping.

And, though not involved personally, Cyrus had aringside seat at the financial crash of 1837, whenas many as seven out often businesses failed, atleast temporarily, in New York City. Strong, well-capitalized businesses survived; badly managedones did not. It was a lesson he would not forget.

*In one of the more bizarre crimes in NewYork's history, Stewart's body was snatched fromits tomb two years after his death and held forransom. Redeemed for $200,000, it wasreturned to the Episcopal Cathedral in GardenCity, Long Island, a suburb that Stewart haddeveloped.

Stewart, like Field's father, was a stern but fairtaskmaster. He expected his clerks to be on timeand fined those who were late. The finesaccumulated in a fund that Stewart said could bedonated to the charity of the clerks' choice. Fieldwas elected treasurer of this fund.

When the time came to select a charity, Fieldtold the clerks to meet him at a local oyster bar

so that they could decide on what to do with themoney. The first decision they made was to paythe oyster bar's bill out of the fund. Field thensuggested that the most deserving group m NewYork that he could think of to receive the balanceof the fund were the clerks at A. T. Stewart'sstore. His fellow clerks happily agreed andproceeded to divide the money amongthemselves.

Stewart, of course, found out about this andcalled a meeting, where he asked Field to give anaccount. Field told the truth and Stewart onlysaid, pointedly, that in future the firm would be"very careful"10 in selecting the charity.Apparently he was more amused than angered bythe clerks' action, as indicated by the fact that heraised Field's salary to $300 instead of thescheduled $200 in the last year of hisapprenticeship.

When Field's apprenticeship came to an end,he decided to strike out on his own, although

Stewart made him an attractive offer. His brotherDavid assured their parents that Cyrus wasleaving Stewart's "with the best of testimonialsof esteem from all his employers andassociates."11 Indeed, his fellow clerks gave him adinner at Delmonico's, New York's leadingrestaurant, and one of Stewart's partnerspresented him with a diamond stick pin.

Many paper mills had opened in recent yearsalong the Housatonic River, which flowedthrough Field's native Stock-bridge,Massachusetts. His older brother Matthew hadbecome a partner m one of these mills butneeded help with the business end of things. Heagreed to pay his younger brother $250 a yearplus room and board to keep the firm's booksand be his assistant.

Field's outgoing personality soon freed himfrom the drudgery of bookkeeping, and he wassent on the road to sell paper to wholesalers inNew York and New England, a task at which he

excelled. On his travels he met Mary Stone,whom he had known as a child, and fell in love.They married in 1840, when he was barelytwenty-one years old, and the marriage provedan enduringly happy one. And, because shewanted to live in New York, Field accepted ajunior partnership with the paper wholesalingfirm of E. Root and Company in the city.

E. Root and Company was not well run and,badly damaged by the crash of 1837 and theensuing depression, it collapsed in bankruptcysoon after Field joined it. Field, however,managed to settle the old firm's debt for thirtycents on the dollar and acquire its stock-intrade.He was soon in business for himself under thename of Cyrus W. Field and Company. Beforelong he was one of the leading paper and printingsupplies wholesalers in the country.

By the end of the 1840s Field had a net worthof more than $200,000, according to Moses Y.Beach, editor of the New York Sun, who had

begun publishing a list of the richest NewYorkers (the precursor of the "Forbes 400" list)in 1845. in recognition of his success, he built alarge house uptown on the corner of LexingtonAvenue and Twenty-first Street, facingfashionable Gramercy Park. His brother Davidbuilt one next door. They would both live therefor the rest of their lives.

Together they hired the cabinetmaker CharlesA. Baudouine, a New Yorker of French Huguenotdescent, to decorate their houses. This is said tohave been the first time a professional decoratorwas employed in New York for private houses,and Baudouine did them up in the overstuffedhigh Victorian style then approaching the peak ofits popularity. When he was done, "Louis XIVfurniture abounded, as did Italian draperies,Greek Statues, marble mantels, and frescoedceilings."12

Many of their neighbors were among the city'smost notable citizens, including Samuel Tilden,

the Democratic nominee for president in 1876;James Harper, head of Harper and BrothersPublishers, the country's largest publishinghouse, and onetime mayor of New York; andGeorge Templeton Strong, a successful lawyer,whose vast diary, running from 1835 to 1875, isan indispensable and often highly entertainingresource for the history of his time and place.

Cyrus also began traveling extensively, anactivity for which he would never lose his taste,despite chronic susceptibility to seasickness. Buteven when on "vacation," his relentless drive wasalways evident. Returning from a grand tour ofEurope, his daughter remembered that "Mr.Field amused his friends by stating thecharacteristic fact that the first word he learnedof each new language, as he crossed from onecountry to another, was, faster.” 3

Field's business continued to expand in bothsize and profitability. In 1852 it had gross salesof more than $800,000, well over twice what it

had done five years earlier. Field then did a mostunusual thing. Although under no obligation todo so, he paid off the debts, with interest, of E.Root and Company, which lie had settled, andbeen released from, for thirty cents on the dollarten years earlier. One surprised recipient wroteField that he wished to express "our thanks forthe sum enclosed, not so much for the valuethereof in currency as for the proof it affords that'honesty still dwells among men.'"14 There is nodoubt that whatever this gesture cost him inmoney, it was far less than what he gained inreputation.

Like all natural-born entrepreneurs, Field,only in his early thirties, was not content simplyto run a successful and growing business. Heneeded new worlds to conquer. He turned overmanagement of the firm to his brother-in-lawand partner, Joseph Stone, and set ofi with hisfriend, the great landscape painter FredericChurch, to explore South America.

Arriving at Barranquilla, Colombia, Field andChurch struck out overland to Bogota onmuleback. They stayed for a while in the Bogotaarea so Church could do sketches nearby for oneof his most famous paintings, The FallsofTequenJama. Dozens ol workmen wereemployed to foil trees from an area the size of acity block so diat Church could have the view hedesired. On July 4, the two Americans roundedup all the English-speaking people they couldfind in Bogota—most of whom were, in fact,British—and gave a banquet.

Then the two set out on muleback forGuayaquil, the main port of Ecuador on thePacific Ocean, more than six hundred milesaway. The trail, such as it was, crossed themountain wilderness of the northern Andes,ranging from tropical rainforest to well above thesnow line. The trip took four months. Churchsketched endlessly while Field collectedbiological specimens. Sometimes they wereentertained handsomely at haciendas; at other

times they spent the night in filthy mud huts.Finally arriving in Guayaquil, they set off for

Panama by ship, crossed the Isthmus of Panama,and returned to New York by steamer. Thearrival of Field and Church in New York, onOctober 29, 1853, created a minor sensation, asField had in tow, besides many specimens andsouvenirs, twenty parrots and parakeets, a jaguaron a leash, and the son of one of his guides, afourteen-yearold boy named Marcos, who movedin with the family on Gramercy Park. The boy,whom Field hoped to educate, caused endlesstrouble. "A civilized life was not attractive tohim," Field's daughter noted laconically in herbiography of her father.1?

A few years later, when Field was away inEngland, the family summarily shipped him backto his father, a bullfighter, in Colombia.

Back from his great adventure, semiretiredfrom business, and only thirty-four years old inNovember of that year, Cyrus Field was at loose

ends, undecided what to do next. As so oftenhappens in Victorian novels, fate promptlyprovided an answer when his brother Matthewbrought a Canadian engineer named FrederickGisborne to see him.

3. NEWFOUNDLAND

MATTHEW FIELD HAD LEFT the paperbusiness and become a successful civil engineer.At this time he was staying at the Astor House,New York's best-known hotel, located acrossfrom the foot of City Hall Park on Broadway,when he met Gisborne, who was also stayingthere.

Frederick Gisborne had been born in Englandbut immigrated to Canada as a young man. Hefarmed in Quebec for a couple of years beforebecoming the chief operator for the MontrealTelegraph Company just as the new technologybegan to sweep the world. He was soon working

for the Nova Scotia Telegraph Company, buildingtelegraph lines connecting Montreal with theMaritime Provinces of New Brunswick and NovaScotia, becoming a largely self-taught engineer inthe process. To the north and east of theseBritish colonies, as they then were, across theGulf of St. Lawrence, lay another crown colony,the rugged, remote, and often fogbound island ofNewfoundland.*

Although fishermen had been settled inNewfoundland for centuries, the island'spopulation was only a few tens of thousands inthe mid-nineteenth century and was largelyrestricted to isolated fishing villages along itsdeeply indented eastern and southern coastline.Communications between these villages wasalmost entirely by sea, as the island was nearlydevoid of roads. At forty-two thousand squaremiles, Newfoundland is the fourth-largest islandin the Atlantic Ocean, a third again as large asthe island of Ireland. But its vast interior wasstill largely unexplored in the middle of the

nineteenth century and remains largelyuninhabited lo this day.

*The self-governing Dominion of Canadacame into being in 1867, consisting of Ontario,Quebec, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick,and Nova Scotia. Newfoundland remained acrown colony, however, until it joined Canada m1945) as its tentb province.

It would seem an unlikely place to attractinterest in the new technology of telegraphy. Butbesides its proximity to the great fishing groundsthat have been the island's lifeblood sinceEuropeans first settled there, Newfoundlandpossessed one other great advantage: it is thecloset point in North America to Europe. St.John's, the island's capital and only city, locatednear the southeast corner of the island, is almosttwelve hundred miles — one-third of the totaldistance — closer to the British Isles than NewYork, and lies close to the shortest route as well.

The first to notice the possibilities for

telegraphy in this geographical propinquity wasthe Roman Catholic bishop of. Newfoundland, }.T. Bullock. On November 8, 1850, BishopBullock wrote a letter to the local newspaper inSt. John's pointing it out.

Sir:"I regret to find that, in every plan for

transatlantic communication, Halifax [the capitalof Nova Scotia] is always mentioned, and thenatural capabilities of Newfoundland entirelyoverlooked. This has been deeply impressed onmy mind by the communication I read in yourpaper of Saturday last, regarding telegraphiccommunication between England and Ireland, inwhich it is said that the nearest telegraphicstation on the American side is Halifax, twenty-one hundred and fifty-five miles from the west ofIreland. Now would it not be well to call theattention of England and America to theextraordinary capabilities of St. John's, as thenearest telegraphic point? It is an Atlantic port

lying, I may say, in the track of the oceansteamers, and by establishing it as the Americantelegraphic station, news could be communicatedto the whole American continent forty-eighthours, at least, sooner than by any other route.

The Bishop suggested running a telegraph linefrom St. John's to Cape Ray, at the southwest tip

of Newfoundland. From there, he proposed asubmarine cable across the Cabot Strait to thenorthern tip of Cape Breton Island, the northernpart of Nova Scotia.

"Thus, it is not only practicable to bringAmerica two days nearer to Europe by this route,but should the telegraphic communicationbetween England and Ireland, sixty-two miles, berealized, it presents not the least difficulty.

"Of course, we in Newfoundland will havenothing to do with the erection, working, andmaintenance of the telegraph; but I suppose ourgovernment will give every facility to thecompany, either English or American, who willundertake it, as it will be an incalculableadvantage to this country. I hope the day is notfar distant when St. John's will be the first link inthe electric chain which will unite the Old Worldand the New."1

At the time Bishop Bullock published hisletter, there were as yet no working submarine

cables at all. The Brett brothers would not lay thesuccessful English Channel cable until thefollowing year. But Gisborne, far more familiarwith the technical aspects of telegraphy, wasalready thinking along lines similar to thebishop's, though his proposal was somewhatmore conservative. The following spring heproposed to the Newfoundland legislature that a4Oo-mile telegraph line be built from St. John'sto Cape Ray and that it be connected to thetelegraph on Cape Breton by means of steamersand carrier pigeons. The legislature voted toappropriate £500 to fund an exploratory survey.

Gisborne resigned as head of the Nova ScotiaTelegraph Company and devoted himself to thenew project. The survey, begun in September1851, proved a difficult business. The south coastof Newfoundland is extremely rugged and to thisday there is no road along it; the Trans-CanadaHighway to St. John's lies far inland. After thesurvey was finally finished, Gisborne wrote in aletter that "on the fourth day of December, I

accomplished the survey through three hundredand fifty miles of woods and wilderness. It wasan arduous undertaking. My original party,consisting of six white men, were exchanged forfour Indians; of the latter party, two deserted,one died a few days after my return, and theother, 'Joe Paul,' has ever since proclaimedhimself an ailing man."2

Gisborne went to New York and arranged forbacking from a syndicate of investors. Returningto St. John's in the spring of 1852, he obtained acharter from the legislature giving hisNewfoundland Electric Telegraph Companyexclusive rights for thirty years to buildtelegraphic lines on the island and granting thecompany considerable land upon the successfulcompletion of the line to Cape Ray.

Gisborne then went to England to arrange forsupplies, and there he consulted with the Brettbrothers regarding undersea cables. On hisreturn he laid the first true submarine cable in

the Western Hemisphere, running nine milesunder the Northumberland Strait, whichseparates Prince Edward Island from NewBrunswick.

He soon turned to completing the line acrossNewfoundland, with a crew of 350 men. But itturned out to be much more difficult than theinitial survey had indicated. He had originallyintended to lay most of it underground butquickly abandoned the attempt when the soil inmany areas turned out to be only inches deep.Indeed, he found it impossible even to dig holesfor poles in many areas and the poles had to besupported by piles of rock, perhaps the one landresource that the south coast of Newfoundlandhas in limitless abundance

Before he had gone more than forty miles—about one-tenth of the total distance—he was outof money and his partners in New York refusedto provide more, despite their promises. AsGisborne's was the only name to appear on the

charter of incorporation, he was held whollyresponsible. He was arrested and whatever assetshe had in Newfoundland were seized. Gisborne,an honorable man, did what he could to pay thecompany creditors, mostly workmen, but hiscompany was bankrupt before the project wasfairly begun. He made his way to New York inhopes of finding new funding.

Wholly by chance he met Matthew Field atthe Astor House, and Field managed to talk hisinitially reluctant brother Cyrus into hearingwhat Gisborne had to say.

Like most good businessmen, Cyrus Field wasa good listener, and he listened quietly asGisborne outlined his idea in Field's library oneevening. But Field was not much impressed withthe idea. It was true that St. John's was twelvehundred miles along the route to Europe fromNew York. Thus, at the current speed of steamersat that time, roughly ten knots, a telegraph linefrom St. John's to Cape Ray and then across the

Cabot Strait would speed up the transmission ofnews from Europe somewhat.

But Halifax, a far larger and more importantcity than St. John's (it is Canada's only ice-freemainland port on the Atlantic), was six hundredmiles en route to Europe and was alreadyconnected to the burgeoning telegraph network.Field could see little reason to go to the trouble,expense, and risk of building a telegraph lineacross an inhospitable wilderness and laying aconsiderable submarine cable, just to shortennews travel by a day.

But after his brother and Gisborne left, Fieldlooked at the globe in his library. He suddenlyrealized that if a submarine cable could be laidacross the Atlantic from Ireland toNewfoundland, the time needed for news tocross the ocean would be shortened not by acouple of days but by a couple of weeks. That wasa different matter altogether.

London was the center of the financial world

and Britain the world's foremost economic powerin the 1850s. The United States, though growingexplosively, was still a major importer of capitalto fund construction of its railroads andindustries, and that capital came mainly fromBritain. Furthermore, Britain was then truly the"workshop of the world," producing the majorityof the world's industrial goods. Thus, what washappening in "the City," as London's financialdistrict is called, was of the utmost importance toevery businessman in America, and, as that verysuccessful American businessman BenjaminFranklin had noted a century earlier, "time ismoney."

Field knew that to own the means of instantcommunication with the London markets wouldbe to own an instrument of potentiallyformidable profit. But could it be done? Couldsomeone, in Henry Field's words, "lay a bridle onthe neck of the sea"?3

Field knew little of the science or technology

involved in such an undertaking. Indeed, it isprobably fortunate that he did not, because hemight well have dismissed the entire notion asimpossibly fanciful. But the next day he wrote totwo experts for their advice. One was Samuel F.B. Morse.

Morse, like Field, was the son of a notable

New England Congregational minister, JedidiahMorse, who was also the founder of Americangeography. His first book, Geography MadeEasy, published in 1784, was the first work onthe subject published in the United States.Samuel Morse was a generation older than Field,having been born in 1791. He studied to be anartist and had a moderately successful career as aportrait painter. His larger historical works,however, were not very successful, and he beganto turn his attention to telegraphy. Between 1832and 1844 he struggled to perfect his system,often incorporating the ideas of others, such asJoseph Henry, the first head of the SmithsonianInstitution and perhaps the most distinguishedscientist in the United States at that time, andAlfred Vail, his business partner.

After success was finally achieved with agovernment-financed line between Baltimoreand Washington, D.C., he had to defend hispatents vigorously in court and did not finallysucceed in establishing his priority until 1854,

when the U.S. Supreme Court decided in hisfavor. Once his patents were secure, however,they made Morse a very rich man.

Even before he achieved success on land in1844, Morse was confident that an Atlantic cablewas possible. "A telegraphic communication onthe electro-magnetic plan may with certainty beestablished across the Atlantic," he had writtenSecretary of the Treasury John C. Spencer in1843, relating his experiments with underwatertelegraph lines across New York Bay. "Startlingas this may now seem, I am confident that thetime will come when this project will berealized."4 He told Field that his confidence wasno less now dian it had been a decade before andoffered his enthusiastic support. Field, almostwholly lacking in technical knowledge himself,probably did not realize how limited was Morse'sown knowledge of the technical problemsinvolved.

The other expert to whom Cyrus Field wrote

for advice was Lieutenant Matthew FontaineMaury of the United States Navy. Maury, aVirginian, had joined the navy in 1825 at the ageof nineteen. He spent four yearscircumnavigating the globe on the USSVincennes, and remained on sea duty until 1854,when he took a leave of absence to write A NewTheoretical and Practical Treatise onNavigation. Increasingly interested in improvingnavigation, he was assigned to surveying thesoutheast coast of the United States. In his sparetime he published numerous articles, lobbyingfor increased expertise and professionalism inthe navy. Widely read, these articles wereimportant in persuading Congress to establishthe United States Naval Academy at Annapolis,Maryland, in 1845.

A stagecoach accident in 1835 rendered Maurypermanently lame and he did not serve again atsea. He was named head of the Depot of Chartsand Instruments, and in 1844 the navy appointedhim head of the new United States Naval

Observatory in Washington. He devoted the restof his naval career to charting the winds andcurrents of the world's oceans and promotinginternational data gathering for meteorology.*He represented the United States at the BrusselsInternational Meteorological Conference in1853, where uniform standards formeteorological data were developed. By using thenew knowledge that was becoming availablethrough his efforts, Maury charted a better routebetween New York and San Francisco andreduced the average time needed for the trip byno less than forty-seven days.

*His career ended in 1861, when he resignedhis commission after his native Virginia secededfrom the

Union and ofiered his services to theConfederacy.

By the early 1850s, Maury was the nation'spremier oceanographer, and in 1855 his ThePhysical Geography of the Sea, the firstAmerican textbook on oceanography, made himinternationally famous and proved to be one ofthe great scientific best-sellers of the nineteenthcentury.

It was only natural, therefore, that Cyrus Fieldwould turn to Maury to learn if laying a cableacross the Atlantic Ocean was a practicalpossibility from an oceanographic standpoint.Maury promptly replied, writing that "singularlyenough, just as I received your letter, I wasclosing one to the Secretary of the Navy on thesame subject." He enclosed a copy.

Maury had written the secretary that theUnited States brig Dolphin had spent thesummer of 1853 surveying the winds andcurrents of "that part of the ocean which themerchantmen, as they pass to and fro upon thebusiness of trade between Europe and the UnitedStates, use as their great thoroughfare." TheDolphin's captain had taken the opportunity tomake a line of deep sea soundings betweenNewfoundland and Ireland, providing preciselythe information Field needed. Maury wrote,

This line of deep-sea soundings seems to bedecisive of the question of the practicability of a

submarine telegraph between the twocontinents, in so far as the bottom of the Jeepsea is concerned. From Newfoundland to Ireland,the distance between the nearest points is aboutsixteen hundred miles; and the bottom of the seabetween the two places is a plateau, which seemsto have been placed there especially for thepurpose of holding the wires of a submarinetelegraph, and of keeping them out of harm'sway. It is neither too deep nor too shallow; yet itis so deep that the wires but once landed, willremain for ever beyond the reach of vessels'anchors, icebergs, and drifts of any kind, and soshallow, that the wires may be readily lodgedupon the bottom.

The depth of this plateau is quite regular,gradually increasing from the shores ofNewfoundland to the depth of from fifteenhundred to two thousand fathoms, as youapproach the other side. . . .

I [do not] pretend to consider the question as

to the possibility of finding a time calm enough,the sea smooth enough, a wire long enough, aship big enough, to lay a coil of wire sixteenhundred miles in length; though I have no fearbut that the enterprise and ingenuity of the age,whenever called on with these problems, will beready with a satisfactory and practical solution ofthem. "5

Maury also told the navy secretary thatsamples brought up from what he called "thatbeautiful plateau" were entirely of microscopicshells, with no sand or gravel. These shells werethe remains of plankton that had drifted downafter death, indicating that there were noscouring currents at the bottom that mightdisturb a submarine cable. "Therefore," Mauryconcluded, "so far as the bottom of the deep seabetween Newfoundland . . . and Ireland isconcerned, the practicality of a submarinetelegraph across the Atlantic is proved.” 6

Cyrus Field could hardly have received better

news. Not only had the obvious route for asubmarine cable been explored, it had beenfound to be nearly ideal for the purpose.

Field decided to see if he could raise enoughcapital to make it worthwhile to organize acompany to take over Gisborne's franchise inNewfoundland and then to lay a cable across theAtlantic. The first person he called on was hisGramercy Park neighbor Peter Cooper.

Cooper, the child of an unsuccessful father,had had little formal education, but he was aborn tinkerer and from an early age had helpedhis father in various enterprises. He had alsohelped his mother with the household chores,and while still a child, he had invented a machinefor pounding dirty clothes, perhaps the world'sfirst washing machine, and designed amechanical lawn mower at a time when lawnmowers were called sheep.

Frugal by nature (he regularly settled all hisdebts every .Saturday throughout his life),

Cooper as a young man managed to accumulate$2,000 and buy a run-down glue factory in NewYork. A notably good chemist as well as anengineer, he quickly improved the product lineand in his first year cleared a profit of $10,000,five times what he had paid for the entire factory.Soon he was making $100,000 a year from hisglue factory, a vast income at the time.

He moved into the iron business andproduced the very first locomotive ever built inthe United States, for the

Baltimore &, Ohio Railroad, which hadpreviously used horses. The Tom Thumb, as itwas known to history,* was a work ofimprovisation. Cooper had to take into accountthe tight curves of the B&O, and he cobbledtogether some old wheels, a carriage, and asteam engine he had built earlier for anotherpurpose. The only piping available at that timewas made of lead, which could not stand up tothe heat and pressure of steam, so Cooper sawed

off a couple of rifle barrels and used them forpiping. To everyone's surprise, except Cooper's,the Tom Thumb functioned well.

By the 1850s Peter Cooper was among therichest men in the United States, but he was notmuch interested in new enterprises. He was inhis sixties and very actively engaged in foundingthe Cooper Union, a technical college located atAstor Place in Manhattan. Cooper had alwaysregretted his own lack of formal education andwanted to make it possible for people who had towork for a living to get an education by providingevening classes and charging no tuition. TheCooper Union to this day is the only majorprivate college in the United States that is tuitionfree.

In addition, though Peter Cooper lacked evena vestige of a sense of humor, he had a deepsense of the moral obligations imposed bywealth and a streak of mysticism that made theidea of an Atlantic cable attractive. "It was an

enterprise that struck me very forcibly themoment he mentioned it," he wrote later.

I thought I saw in it, if it was possible, ameans by which we would communicatebetween the two continents, and send knowledgebroadcast over all parts of the world. It seemedto strike me as though it were the consummationof that great prophecy, that "knowledge shallcover the earth, as the waters cover the deep,"and with that feeling I joined him ... in what thenappeared to most men a wild and visionaryscheme; a scheme that fitted those who engagedin it for an asylum. . . . But believing, as I did,that it offered the possibility of a mighty powerfor the good of the world, I embarked on it.7

*It acquired its name only later, after theshowman P. T. Barnum had made the midget"General Tom Thumb" an international celebrity.It may be seen today at the Baltimore &. OhioRailroad Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.

Cooper, of course, was no fool. He made his

support contingent on Field's getting others toagree to come into the enterprise as well. Fieldthen went to see another New Yorker, MosesTaylor, who had made a vast fortune from theopportunities presented by the industrialrevolution.

Taylor, fifteen years younger than Cooper andthirteen years older than Field, was the son ofJohn Jacob Astor's business manager. As a youngman he went to work for a company thatspecialized in trading with Latin America andsoon founded his own importing firm. By the1850s Moses Taylor and Company was payingmore import duties than any firm in the countryexcept A. T. Stewart's store. Taylor became adirector of the City Bank, an ancestor of today'sgiant Citibank, when not yet thirty, and would bethe bank's president for the last twenty-six yearsof his life. He also invested in insurancecompanies, railroads, coal companies, and,especially, gas lighting companies. By the end ofthe Civil War, Taylor would control the entire gas

lighting industry in New York City.Cyrus Field did not know Moses Taylor

personally, but his brother David did andprovided a letter of introduction. Taylor invitedField to his house and listened to what he had tosay. "I shall never forget how Mr. Taylor receivedme," he remembered years later. "He fixed on mehis keen eye, as if he would look through me:and then, sitting down, he listened to me fornearly an hour without saying a word."8 Taylor,though far less concerned with the moralobligations of wealth than was Peter Cooper, wasquite as capable of seeing the economicpossibilities. He, too, agreed to invest as long asenough others could be found. He immediatelysuggested Marshall O. Roberts, another nativeNew Yorker, who was a major shipowner,running ships on the Hudson River and toPanama, then the shortest route to California.Roberts, too, agreed to participate.

Field then persuaded Chandler White, who,

like Field, had made a fortune in the paperbusiness, and whom he had known since thedays when he had been working for his brotherMatthew, to invest in the new enterprise. Fieldhad been hoping to gather a group ofteninvestors, but when Field had assembled five,including himself, Peter Cooper suggested that"if ten men can carry out the project, so can five."9

Field agreed and arranged for Cooper, Taylor,Roberts, White, and himself to meet withGisborne. Also present were Samuel Morse andField's brother David, who would act as theattorney for the enterprise. They first met at theClarendon Hotel, located far uptown at Broadwayand Thirty-eighth Street. Then, on foursubsequent nights, the group assembled inField's dining room, where maps and chartscould be spread out on the table.

Years later Daniel Huntington, a leadingAmerican portrait artist, who had studied under

Samuel Morse, would paint The Atlantic CableProjectors, which enjoyed wide popularity.Though not strictly accurate, as it includedDaniel Huntington himself as well as Wilson G.Hunt, who would not join the group until afterthe death of Chandler White in 1856, it is stillregarded as one of better group portraits of theera.

The group agreed on March 10, 1854, to takeover the Newfoundland Electric TelegraphCompany from Gisborne, assuming its debts ofabout $50,000, and to form a new company to becalled the New York, Newfoundland, and LondonTelegraph Company. But all of this wascontingent on persuading the government ofNewfoundland to grant the new company a morefavorable charter than it had granted toGisborne. The two Field brothers and Gisborneagreed to go at once to St. John's and approachthe government there.

It was a miserable trip. They left New York onMarch 14 by steamer for Boston, transferredthere the next day to one bound for Halifax, andon March 18 left Halifax for St. John's on thesmall steamer Merlin. David Field wrote

Three more disagreeable days, voyagersscarcely ever passed, than we spent in thatsmallest of steamers. It seemed as if all thestorms of winter had been reserved for the first

month of spring. A frost-bound coast, an icy sea,rain, hail, snow and tempest, were the greetingsof the telegraph adventurers* in their firstmovement toward Europe. In the darkest night,through which no man could see the snip'slength, with snow filling the air and flying intothe eyes ot the sailors, with ice in the water, anda heavy sea rolling and moaning about us, thecaptain felt his way around Cape Race [thesoutheastern most point of Newfoundland] withhis lead [taking soundings] as the blind manfeels his way with his staff, but as confidentlyand as safely as if the sky had been clear and thesea calm; and the light of morning dawned uponthe deck and mast and spar, coated withglittering ice, but floating securely between themountains which form the gates of the harbor ofSt. John's.10

The adventurers quickly disembarked andwent to call on Edward M. Archibald, attorneygeneral of Newfoundland. Archibald was

delighted with this turn of events and soonintroduced the trio to the governor, Kerr BaileyHamilton. Governor Hamilton convened hiscouncil and they agreed to ask the NewfoundlandAssembly to grant a charter giving the newcompany exclusive rights to lay telegraph lineson the island and cables touching Newfoundlandfor fifty years. Together with this monopoly, thecharter also gave a guarantee of the interest on£50,000 worth of bonds, an immediate grant offifty square miles of land and another fifty uponcompletion of the cable to Ireland, and a grant of£5,000 toward the completion of a bridle pathalong the line of the telegraph to Cape Ray.

After debate, the Assembly, anxious to pay offthe workmen from the last attempt and hopefulthat the project would be an economic boost toNewfoundland, passed the necessary legislation

*Field here is using the word adventurer inthe sense of one who invests in an enterprise, ameaning that came into use in the dawn of

capitalism in the early seventeenth century. Theobsolete term is echoed today in the phrase

venture capitalist. with only a singledissenting vote. Cyrus Field rushed back to NewYork and arranged to transfer $50,000 to aNewfoundland bank to pay the workmen.

The charter was highly favorable to theinterests of the New York, Newfoundland, andLondon Telegraph Company, which is notsurprising, as it had been written almost in itsentirety by avid Dudley Field, during the passagefrom Halifax. Indeed, it was so favorable that thegovernment in London later noted that "HerMajesty will be advised not to give herratification to the creation of similarmonopolies."11 It accepted this one, however, andthe charter was celebrated in typical Victorianfashion with a large banquet.

David Field and Chandler White did not getback to New York from Newfoundland until theevening of Saturday, May 6. Because some were

unwilling to do business on the Sabbath and oneof the group had to leave the city early Monday,the organizational meeting was held at six in themorning on May 8 at the house of David Field.Cooper, Cyrus Field, White, Taylor, and Robertswere named directors. Peter Cooper was electedpresident, Chandler White vice president, andMoses Taylor treasurer. Cyrus Field was given noformal position, as it was understood that hewould be, in effect, chief operating officer of theenterprise and far too busy to handle details. Hewas soon to leave on the first of what turned outto be more than fifty Atlantic crossings oncompany business.

The group members committed themselves toraising capital in the amount of $1.5 million.That was a huge sum for those days,* but itwould prove to be nowhere near enough. Itwould not have been nearly enough even ifeverything had gone right, which it certainlydidn't.

Thus, five of the most successful and savvybusinessmen in New York had, in fifteenminutes before breakfast one bright Maymorning, casually committed themselves, interms of both money and personal prestige, toone of the epic undertakings of the nineteenthcentury. As Cyrus Field ruefully admittedfourteen years later, "God knows that none of uswere aware of what we had undertaken toaccomplish."12

*In 1854, the total expenditure of the federalgovernment was only a little more than $58 million.

4. "How Many Months?Let's Say How Many

Years"

THE PLAN WAS FIRST TO accomplish thelink between New York and Newfoundland. Thiswould give the company an asset that wouldgenerate some revenue and was regarded as theeasy part of the whole venture.

It required three steps: completing the lineacross southern Newfoundland, laying asubmarine cable across the Cabot Strait thatseparated Newfoundland from Cape BretonIsland, and building a i4o-mile line on CapeBreton Island to connect to the existingtelegraph system in Nova Scotia. Chandler Whitewas appointed to run the office in St. John's andMatthew Field was appointed supervisingengineer, with Frederick Gisborne as consultant,of the Newfoundland portion.

Gisborne's first company had strung about 40miles of the line, but it was the easiest 40 miles,nearest St. John's and through the most settledcountry. The next 360 miles were nearlyuninhabited except for the fishing villages found

at the head of the fiords that frequently interruptthe coastline, which consists mostly of toweringcliffs. Swift-flowing streams rush down fromhills of nearly 2,000 feet to these fiords, carryingthe rain and summer snowmelt. Dense fog isoften a problem on this coast, especially insummer, thanks to the meeting of the LabradorCurrent and the Gulf Stream over the nearbyGrand Banks. At least the south coast ofNewfoundland is reliably ice free.

The overland construction party, whichnumbered about six hundred, could only besupplied by sea, and Cyrus Field purchased asteamer in Halifax, the Victoria, to do so. Theship plied continuously between Halifax, St.John's, and whatever fjord was closest to theworking party, carrying "barrels of pork andpotatoes, kegs of powder, pickaxes and spadesand shovels, and all the implements of labor."1

Once put ashore, these had to be carried up thehills to the camp on the backs of the men. In

clear weather, the cookfires of the camp couldoften be seen far out at sea. But the weather wasnot often clear. Rain was frequent and heavy inthe summer and the snows deep in the winter.

Even by the standards of that time, whenpeople were far more used to hard physical laborthan today, the work was both brutal andunrelenting, except when the weather was sofoul the men could only huddle in their tents. AsHenry Field wrote, "How at such times theexpedition lay floundering in the woods, stillstruggling to force its way onward; whathardships and sufferings the men endured— allthis is a chapter in the History of the Telegraphwhich has not been written, and which can neverbe fully told."2

Peter Cooper's wire factory in Trenton, NewJersey, supplied the construction team withtelegraph wire, but the demands for money fromMatthew were unceasing. It had been lightlythought that the Newfoundland phase of

construction could be completed in the summerof 1854. In fact, it would take well over a year tofinish and cost $500,000, one-third of the firm'scapital.

As Matthew Field worked his way slowlyacross the Newfoundland wilderness, Cyrus Fieldwent to England to arrange for the manufactureof cable to cross the Cabot Strait. While PeterCooper's firm could produce excellent telegraphwire for landlines, only Britain had the capacityat that time to produce submarine telegraphcable. The reason was not so much Britain'stechnological and industrial lead over the rest ofthe world, considerable as that was in the 1850s,as its monopoly on a now nearly forgottenmaterial, gutta-percha.

Humans have used any number of naturalmaterials— stone, wood, and plant fibers—for aninfinity of purposes since long before recordedhistory. But after the discovery of metals around3500 B.C., few new substances came into use

until very recent times. The eighteenth centuryutilized virtually no materials unknown to theRomans except porcelain. And the twentiethcentury would prove to be a golden age of newmaterials, with the explosive development ofplastics, artificial fibers, and ceramics.

But the chemical foundations of the newscience of materials (hat has transformed theworld in recent decades were, as so much else,laid down in the Victorian era. Coal tar—theresidue left after coal is heated in the absence ofair to produce the coal gas i hat lighted theVictorian urban world—proved to be a richsource' of new substances. Among them werenaphtha, which C. Charles Mackintosh used in1820 to produce the first waterproof cloth, andcreosote, which preserved wood, mostsignificantly the railroad ties and telegraph polesthat were knitting the world economy together.Aniline dyes, first synthesized from coal tar bythe Englishman William H. Perkin in 1856, madea rainbow of colors for cloth, paper, and paint

available for the first time.*Rubber was another substance whose

chemistry was explored"These new dyes also freed up millions of

acres of agncultural land, once used for such dyecrops as madder (which produced a red dye) andindigo (which produced a blue one) for foodproduction. This is one of many reasons thatThomas Malthus was wrong and why food pricesfell in the nineteenth century while populationrose swiftly. in the early nineteenth century,notably by the American Charles Goodyear, whodiscovered in 1839 that rubber, when mixed withsulfur and heated, became stable, its plasticity nolonger a function of temperature. The newmaterial would prove to have any number ofindustrial and commercial uses, notably tires,but also bushings, gaskets, and belts inmachinery.

For submarine telegraphy, however, none ofthe new substances were nearly as important as

gutta-percha. It comes from several trees nativeto Malaya, mostly of the genus Palaquium. It ischemically similar to rubber, and both arenatural plastics, polymers in chemical terms. Butgutta-percha is only moderately flexible, notelastic like rubber. Also unlike rubber, it does notdeteriorate when immersed in water for longperiods.

The gray, milky sap of the gutta tree is boiledto produce gutta-percha, which is naturally grayin color. Because the latex does not flowcopiously when tapped, as the sap of the rubbertree does, the trees must be killed in the processof obtaining it. Soft and pliable at temperaturesabove one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, at roomtemperature gutta-percha becomes hard (afingernail can barely mark it) while remainingflexible.

Gutta-percha had been known for centuries tothe Malayans, who used it to make whips, tubs,knife handles, and other objects. It was first

brought to Europe, as a curiosity, in theseventeenth century, and it remained just thatuntil the 1840s. In that decade, however, theboom in "economic botany" reached a high point,with European and American botanists scouringthe world for plants and plant materials thatmight have commercial applications. Many oftoday's most treasured garden flowers—manyvarieties of rhododendron and primroses fromChina, for instance—first appeared in the west atthis time.

In 1843 a Portuguese engineer named Josed'Almeida described gutta-percha and its uses tothe Royal Asiatic Society in London. A fewmonths later an East India Company surgeonwrote a paper on gutta-percha and sent samplesto London that were displayed at the Society ofArts. The stuff immediately became a craze. SoonBritish rubber manufacturers were using gutta-percha to make such items as boot soles, bottlestoppers, snuffboxes, objets d'art, jewelry, andwalking sticks. It would also revolutionize the

game of golf, when a golf-playing Scottishclergyman made golf balls out of gutta-percha.They proved both much cheaper and longer-lasting than the old "feathenes" made of leatherstuffed with boiled goose feathers and soonreplaced them.*

"Werner von Siemens in Germany, founder ofthe great electronics firm that bears his name,soon determined that gutta-percha was a goodelectrical insulator (as, indeed, nearly all plasticsare). He quickly developed a press, not unlike amacaroni-making machine, that extruded asheath of gutta-percha around a copper wire.Michael Faraday, one of the giants of nineteenth-century science, also investigated gutta-perchaand wrote a short paper on gutta-percha'selectrical qualites in 1848.t It was soon thepreferred material for waterproof insulation anda vast improvement on tarred hemp, which wasall that had been available before. The GuttaPercha Company, headed by Willoughby Smith,quickly established a near monopoly on the

importation of the substance from Malaya, andworked hard to develop its electrical possibilities.

*Gutta-percha golf balls turned out to haveone other, highly appealing virtue. It was quicklynoticed that the new balls could be driven fartherafter they had been used a few times. The reasonturned out to be that the dents and nicks theyacquired in use gave them better aerodynamics.Equipped with the dimples that have been afeature of golf balls ever since, the new ballscould be driven on average about twenty-fiveyards farther than the old feathenes.

t Among numerous other accomplishments,Faraday proved the identity of electricity andmagnetism in the 1830s, the first step toward theunified field theory ol physical forces that is stillthe Holy Grail of modern physics.

In 1850 the Brett brothers ordered twenty-fivemiles of cable insulated with gutta-percha fortheir English Channel project. After their successthe following year, gutta-percha became standard

for the manufacture of submarine cable anddemand for the material soared. But becauseeach gutta tree yields only two or three poundsof gutta-percha, and long submarine cables couldrequire hundreds, even thousands, of tons, thenext fifty years would see the gutta treesextirpated from much of their native range.

To order the cable, Field sailed for Englandnear the end of 1854. He had been delayed, firstbecause of the death of his brother-in-law,Joseph Stone, who was also his partner in thepaper business. Field had no choice but toresume running Cyrus Field and Company oncemore, at least for a while.

Then in August, his only son, Arthur StoneField, age four, died suddenly, plunging hisfather into grief In the 1850s, more than half thechildren born m New York City died beforereaching the age of five. Often the cause was oneof such waterborne diseases as cholera andtyphoid that were only beginning to ebb as clean

water and proper sewage removal spread throughthe city. However, fresh milk—now brought infrom the countryside by the new railroads ataffordable prices—proved to be a new and potentsource of infant mortality. Every summerthousands of children would come down with"summer complaint," a violent diarrhea that wenow know was caused by variousmicroorganisms that thrived in milk. Many ofthese children did not survive. Infant mortalitywas, of course, more common in the fast-spreading slums, but even in the most affluenthouseholds, such as that of Cyrus Field, it wastragically common for a seemingly healthy childsuddenly to sicken and die.

He did not reach England until the new yearand immediately went to see John Brett, whonow headed the Magnetic Telegraph Company inEngland and was the acknowledged expert onsubmarine telegraphy. While many in Englandlaughed at Field's project, Brett did not. Indeed,he was the first Britisher to invest in Field's

company.Brett took Field around to the various cable

manufacturers and suggested that Field choose acable consisting of three copper wires, eachindividually insulated with gutta-percha andthen bundled together, wrapped in tarred hempand another layer of gutta-percha and the wholesheathed in galvanized iron wire. Field, who hadno expertise whatever in these matters, had nochoice but to accept Brett's recommendation andplaced the order with Kliper and Company. Hearranged to have the completed cable loadedaboard a 5OO-ton brig named the Sarah L.Bryant, ready for laying. She was to make forPort aux Basques,* near Cape Ray, theNewfoundland terminus of the cable across theCabot Strait. He also hired Samuel Canning, ayoung British engineer who had experiencelaying cables in the Mediterranean, to supervisethe project.

BACK IN NEW YORK by March 1855, Field

wrote to his brother Matthew asking how long itwould be before completion of the landline fromSt. John's to Cape Ray. Matthew wasstraightforward, a characteristic of the Fieldbrothers. "How many months?" he askedrhetorically. "Let's say how many years!Recently, in building half a mile of road we hadto bridge three ravines. Why didn't we go aroundthe ravines? Because Mr. Gisborne had exploredtwenty miles in both directions and found moreravines. That's why! You have no idea of theproblem we face. We hope to finish the land linein '55, but wouldn't bet on it before '56, if I wereyou. "3

* Basque fishermen had been catching cod in Newfoundland waters for decades beforeColumbus "discovered" America.

But while the slowness of the landline'sprogress was disappointing, there was no reasonto delay laying the submarine cable on accountof it. When the cable, all eighty-five miles of it,was finished and on its way, Field chartered theJames Adger, a coastal steamer that regularlyran between Charleston, South Carolina, andNew York, at the cost of $750 a day. The ship wasneeded to tow the Sarah L. Bryant across thestrait while the latter vessel laid the cable, but

she also provided luxurious accommodation forthe directors, wives, children, and assortedfriends and distinguished guests.

Among those invited to take part in theexpedition who accepted were Mr. and Mrs. PeterCooper; Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Morse and theirson; the seventy-four-year-old Reverend DavidDudley Field; the equally prominent ReverendGardner Spring, rector of the Brick PresbyterianChurch in New York for an astonishing sixty-three years; Henry Field and his wife; and two ofCyrus Field's daughters. Cyrus Field's wife, Mary,however, was not along. She had given birth theprevious month to a second son, Edward MorseField (his middle name honored Samuel F. B.Morse) and was still nursing him. Altogether theparty numbered more than fifty people,including several reporters from New Yorknewspapers.

On the morning of August 7,1855, a beautifulday, the James Adger departed New York on

what was, in about equal measure, a yachtingparty, a cutting-edge technological expedition,and a capital-intensive business venture, boundfor Halifax and then Newfoundland. On deck,Samuel Morse demonstrated telegraphy with aportable apparatus he had brought along; PeterCooper and the two distinguished clergymendiscussed theology; sailors strummed guitars toentertain the ladies; and the ship plowednorthward through initially perfect weather thatsoon turned foul. Several passengers, includingHenry Field, had to disembark at Halifax and theship then made for Port aux Basques, hoping tofind the Sarah L. Bryant there, ready to lay thecable.

The little harbor proved to be empty ofshipping, and

Samuel Canning rowed out to the JamesAdger to say that there had been no sign of theSarah L. Bryant, which had evidently beendelayed by weather. Field decided to go to

St. John's, hoping, no doubt, to sight the othership en route. At the pier at St. John's theexpedition was greeted by a pack of tail-waggingNewfoundlands, the large, black, intelligent,long-furred dogs, "wolf-colored and web-footed,"for which the island has long been known.Dozens of these dogs wandered the city, and thepassengers promptly bought several of them totake home.

Always conscious of public relations, Fieldinvited the city council to a party on board andthe passengers, in turn, were invited to a ballashore.

Back at Port aux Basques, the Sarah L. Bryanthad appeared, in need of repair after a roughpassage and with her cable-laying equipment stillunassembled. Field and Samuel Canning,reconnoitering by rowboat, decided to land thecable at Cape Ray cove, which had a smooth,sandy bottom, a few miles west of Port auxBasques. The Victoria brought lumber from Port

aux Basques to the cove to build a shelter for thetelegraphic crew that would be stationed there,but the only way to get the lumber ashore was tofloat it in as rafts, each raft guided by a sailor. Asthe rafts approached the shore, however, the surfbroke the rafts apart, flinging the men into thesea and covering the water with planks, beams,and packages of shingles.

The dogs aboard the James Augerimmediately came to the rescue. As BayardTaylor, a reporter for the New York Tribune,described it, "the dogs rendered capital service—plunging boldly into the sea and seizing uponevery stick which they could manage. Sometimestwo of them would take a plank between them,and watching the proper moment with a trulyhuman sagacity, bring it to the beach on the topof a breaker and there deliver it into the hands oftheir masters. "5

Once the shelter was built and the Sarah L.Bryant repaired, fog immediately closed in and

nothing could be done for two days. And whenthe weather cleared up, nearly everything elsewent wrong. As the James Adger took the SarahL. Bryant in tow, the sailing vessel discoveredthat her anchor was foul and had to be slipped.The Adger began drifting down upon the SarahL. Bryant and hit her broadside to bow, carryingaway several shrouds. In response, CaptainTurner of the Adger cut the tow rope andsteamed off, leaving the Sarah L. Bryant to fendfor herself The crew tried to lower her remaininganchor but lost it and had to cut the telegraphcable, hurriedly hoist sail, and claw out to seabefore she ran aground.

Several people accused Captain Turner ofdeliberately ramming the Sarah L. Bryant, andthere is no doubt that he was not in a cooperativemood. He had taken umbrage at the fact thatField had placed the Reverend Spring at the headof the table, which the captain felt belonged tohim. And Turner also resented taking ordersfrom a mere passenger, although that passenger,

Cyrus Field, was paying $750 a day for the use ofthe steamer, the crew, and the captain's services.

When the Sarah L. Bryant had been repairedand her anchors retrieved, the cable laying beganagain. And again Turner did his considerable bestto frustrate success. A flag had been placed ontop of the shelter built the previous day and thecaptain was told to steer a course that wouldkeep the flag in line with a white rock on themountainside behind. This line, it wascalculated, was the shortest course to the landingsite on Cape Breton Island.

The captain, however, proceeded to steer hisown course, far out of line with the oneindicated, until Peter Cooper went up to him anddemanded that he follow instructions.

"I know how to steer my ship," he replied, "Isteer by my compass.""

Cooper could see how far off the shortestcourse they were and again demanded that thecaptain follow his instructions, warning him that

he would be responsible for all losses otherwise.The captain ignored him, so Cooper instructedRobert W. Lowber, a company lawyer on board,to draw up a document stating the captain'sresponsibility. The captain's response was tochange course, but only to steer equally far offcourse in the other direction. The abrupt changein course caused a kink to form in the cable, andthe erratic steering meant that while the Sarah

L. Bryant had payed out twenty-five miles ofcable, the ships were only nine miles from shore.At that rate, there would be only enough cable toreach two-thirds of the way across the CabotStrait.

But besides ignoring his instructions withregard to course, the captain also refused toadjust his vessel's speed to take into account thespeed at which the paying-out machinery couldpass the cable from the hold of the Sarah L.Bryant to the sea. As the captain of the JamesAdger thrashed along, the cable acted more and

more like an anchor, increasingly dragging downthe stern of the helpless Sarah L. Bryant.

Meanwhile, the breeze had been fresheninginto a gale and the seas were rising, never aneasy condition for a vessel under tow to dealwith, even when not attached to tons ofsubmarine cable at its stern. Finally, SamuelCanning, aboard the Sarah L. Bryant, was forcedto cut the cable before his ship was draggedunder by it. The laying of the first submarinecable through open waters in the WesternHemisphere, and the first link of a telegraphcable to Europe, had been an ignominiousfailure.

Cyrus Field was crushed. But, as he orderedboth vessels to proceed to Sydney, the largestport on Cape Breton Island, he managed to haveSamuel Canning transferred to the James Adgerfrom the Sarah L. Bryant. Before the assembledpassengers, he told Canning that he was in noway responsible for the failure, but rather that he

had done his best under impossiblecircumstances. Canning was deeply grateful forthis vote of confidence from a man who mightwell have been looking for scapegoats. The SarahI,. Bryant unloaded her remaining cable inSydney and the James Adger made for New York.Despite the failure, the atmosphere of a yachtingparty still prevailed and the passengers held acostume party the last night aboard.

THE DIRECTORS HAD MUCH TO Discusswhen they met in New York. The cable-layingexpedition had been a total failure, but they hadlearned valuable lessons. One was thatsubmarine cables could not be laid from sailingships or vessels under tow, unable to adjust theirspeed easily and quickly as circumstancesrequired. The cutting-edge technology oftelegraph cables required the cutting-edgetechnology of steam to lay them. The directorsalso had no trouble assigning personal blame forthe failure. As Peter Cooper wrote years later,"We had spent so much money, and lost so much

time, that it was very vexatious to have ourenterprise defeated by the stupidity andobstinacy of one man." Although a devoutChristian, Cooper must have felt somesatisfaction in reporting Captain Turner's fate."This man was one of the rebels that fired thefirst guns on Fort Sumter. The poor fellow is nowdead. "7

Cooper persuaded his fellow directors to presson. But, as always, it was Cyrus Field whosupplied most of the drive. Cooper wrote, "It wasin great measure due to the indomitable courageand zeal of Mr. Field inspiring us that we wenton and on until we got another cable across thegulf"8

They also contracted again with the firm ofKiper and Company, but this time both to makeand lay the cable, at its own risk. Field hadlearned his lesson and wanted no more yachtingparties. The cable was successfully laid the nextsummer, 1856, using the steamer Propontis,

with Samuel Canning once more the engineer incharge of tke operation. That year also saw thecompletion, finally, of the landline acrossNewfoundland and the 140-mile line across thefar more settled and more gentle landscape ofCape Breton Island.

The New York, Newfoundland, and LondonTelegraph Company had a line running fromNew York to Newfoundland and was thus one-third of its way, geographically, to its goal.Technologically, of course, it had barely begun,for this was the easy part. Financially, too, only abeginning had been made. While the new linewould generate some revenue with trafficbetween St. John's and points south, that would,at best, barely cover the maintenance expenses.St. John's was a small port of no importance inand of itself

The company had also nearly exhausted itscapital. The fiasco of the first cable-layingattempt had cost the firm $351,000, all of it a

dead loss. Field had personally invested$200,000 and Cooper, Taylor, and Roberts eachnot much less.* With their original investmentsnearly all sunk, the directors decided to raiseadditional capital with an issue of bonds, whichthey took up themselves. Obviously, a great dealmore money was going to be needed before themighty Atlantic could be spanned. Such sumscould be raised only in the richest nation in theworld. Cyrus Field sailed once more for England.

*To give some idea of what $200,000 meantin the 1850s, consider that $1,000 per year wasenough income for a family to live a modest,middle-class life, and there were not two dozenmen in all of New York City—which then had apopulation of over 700,000—who had a networth of $1,000,000.

5. Raising More Capital

THE LONDON MONEY MARKET was, as yet,

untapped. "Our little company," Field saidproudly ten years later, "raised and expendedover a quarter of a million pounds sterling beforean Englishman paid a single pound."1 Field nowintended to change that and moved to form aBritish company.

The concept of the corporation (known as acompany in Britain) is central to the financing ofso large an undertaking as the Atlantic cable.Partnerships had long been the primary meansof pooling capital in Western economies, butpartnerships had severe disadvantages. As theneed for capital increased, and more partnersjoined, they tended to become unwieldy and hardto manage.

The corporation came into being m theRenaissance. Indeed, except for the nation-stateitself, the corporation is the most importantorganizational invention of the Renaissance, forwithout it, the modern world could not havecome into being. Also developed at this time was

another invention crucial to the corporation:double-entry bookkeeping. Large corporationswould have been impossible to manage withoutit, and their profits would have been very hard todetermine. The importance of good accountingwas recognized very early. Ferdinand andIsabella saw to it that accountants accompaniedColumbus on his voyage in 1492, to ensure theygot their share of the hoped-for booty.

What makes a corporation different from apartnership is the concept of limited liability.Unlike a partnership, where every partner'sentire net worth is at risk, in a joint-stockcompany only the amount invested could be lost,for technically a corporation is a legal "person." Acorporation can be sued, it can own property, itcan go broke, it can even be criminally indicted.And, of course, a corporation can be taxed. Butthe stockholders are not the corporation. Theycan be held to account for their own actions, butnot for the actions of the corporation they ownan interest in.

Thus, using this form of organization, manyinvestors could join together to seek thepotentially huge profits in exploration anddistant trade without having to fear being wipedout by the equally huge risks. But whereasanyone can form a partnership with anotherperson, only the government had the power tocreate a legal person in the first place. That iswhy the early history of corporations is so full ofpolitics, and it would remain so until well intothe nineteenth century.

In England, the Moscow Company and theEast India Company were chartered by the crownin the late sixteenth century and evolved intovast, and vastly profitable, enterprises. Indeed,the East India Company would be the sovereignpower in British India until the middle of thenineteenth century. Holland's East IndiaCompany would make the Netherlands therichest country in Europe in the seventeenthcentury.

And without the joint-stock company, thehistory of that most modern nation, the UnitedStates, would have taken a very different turnindeed. For one thing, many of the early colonieswere founded by joint-stock enterprises seekingprofits in the New World. Like so many start-upcompanies in a brand-new field, most werefinancial failures. But the Dutch West IndiaCompany, which founded New York, did verywell, at least initially. It cost the Dutch WestIndia Company twenty thousand guilders toestablish New Amsterdam. In the very first yearof the colony's formal existence, the companysent back to Holland more than 7,500 furs,valued at forty-five thousand guilders.

Even those colonies that had more on theiragenda than profits —such as freedom to practicetheir religious beliefs—were expected to paydividends. Both the Massachusetts Bay Colonyand the Plymouth Colony were organized asjoint-stock companies. The investors in thePlymouth Colony were not pleased, to put it

mildly, when the Mayflower returned to Englandin the spring of 1621 without a cargo of goodsthey could sell.

The right to operate with limited liabilitywould remain a gift of the sovereign or hisrepresentatives for centuries. But when theAmerican colonies achieved their independence,the crown's power to establish corporationsdevolved on the successors to the British crown,the various state legislatures. This introduced anew element into corporation forming: the give-and-take, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't politicsthat characterizes legislatures.

Beginning in the 1820s, legislatures begangiving up the power to form corporations. Thereason was not altruistic, for it is not in thenature of human beings to give up powervoluntarily. Rather, it was sheer necessity. In theentire colonial period, a grand total of only sevenbusinesses were incorporated in the Americancolonies. But, as the Industrial Revolution rolled

on and capital needs increased dramatically, thedemand for enterprises organized ascorporations increased as well. In the last fouryears of the eighteenth century, there were 335businesses incorporated in the new UnitedStates. Between 1800 and 1860, the state ofPennsylvania alone incorporated more than2,000. The state legislatures were simply unableto process all the applications for corporatecharters.

As early as 1811, New York State became thefirst state to pass a general incorporation law,although it was restricted to companies seekingto manufacture particular items, such as anchorsand linen goods. Most of the incorporations inthe early years, however, involved companiesthat proposed to build and operate railroads,canals, and telegraph lines.

In Britain as well the Industrial Revolutioncaused the formation of many new corporations,either by charter from the crown or by statute.

Because of the South Sea Bubble, a stock fraud inthe early eighteenth century that ruinedthousands, there was long-standing hostility tothe concept of limited liability except for publicutilities, such as railroads. But the pressure for ameans of raising large sums from many peoplewho risked no more than their investmentproved irresistible. In 1844 a generalincorporation law passed Parliament, and thenumber of companies began to increasedramatically, as did business on the LondonStock Exchange.

BESIDES NEEDING THE FRESH financialpastures to be found in the United Kingdom,Field also realized that the British governmenthad an important interest in the success of theAtlantic cable in particular and in long-distancesubmarine cables in general. By the mid-nineteenth century, the sun had long sinceceased to set on the British Empire. Butgoverning that empire from London was a slowprocess: two weeks to Canada, two months to

India, three months or more to New Zealand.During the Crimean WW, which was just ending,the British and French had cooperatedsuccessfully on laying a cable across the BlackSea, from Varna, in what is now Bulgaria, toBalaklava on the Crimean Peninsula, allowingthe two governments to manage matters muchmore closely than would otherwise have beenpossible.* It was at the time by far the longestsubmarine cable in the world. But once thepoliticians possessed the ability to personallydirect day-to-day actions in a faraway war, theynaturally yearned to have instantcommunications everywhere, the better to gathermore power into their own hands.

Back in England, Field wrote to GeorgeVilliers, Lord Clarendon, the foreign secretary,asking for a meeting. One was quickly arranged,and Samuel Morse, whose prestige by this timewas considerable, was also present to lendsupport. The conversation lasted an hour andLord Clarendon showed great interest and asked

many questions. Perhaps a bit startled not onlyby the magnitude of the enterprise but also byField's confidence that it could be successfullycompleted, he asked, "But suppose you Jon tsucceed? Suppose you make the attempt and fail— your cable is lost at sea—then what will youdo?"

"Charge it to profit and loss," said Field in hisusual direct and very American way, "and go towork to lay another."2

Clarendon asked Field to put his proposal inwriting and intimated that the Britishgovernment, which often dealt with suchrequests by offering "all aid short of actualhelp,"3 would look with favor on this project.Field shortly received an invitation to visit JamesWilson, secretary to the treasury, and spend afew days at his country house to discuss theproposal in depth.

*It was ordered and laid with such haste thatit was not armored at all, but was merely a

copper wire insulated with gutta-percha.Nevertheless, it worked for a year, which waslong enough.

tClarendon was a professional diplomat forfifteen years before succeeding an uncle as thefourth earl of Clarendon and entering the Houseof Lords and politics. He remains to this day theonly professional diplomat ever to be Britishforeign secretary. He was also one of the best. Hewas again serving as foreign secretary in 1870when he died a few weeks before the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Later, Bismarck toldClarendon's daughter that if her father had lived,"he would have prevented the war."

Afterward, Wilson wrote Field a lettercontaining the British government's offer: toprovide ships to take any further sounding thatmight be needed, and to consider favorably anyrequest for ships to help lay the cable itselfFurther, it agreed to pay, once the cable wasworking, £14,000 a year, provided that

government messages had priority over allothers except those of the government of theUnited States if it agreed to enter into a similararrangement. The amount of £14,000 equaledthe interest (at 4 percent) on the estimated costof laying the cable — £350,000.

Field could hardly have hoped for betterterms. It meant that the final route would besurveyed at no cost to the company, that thegreat expense of chartering, altering, andmanning major oceangoing steamers to lay thecable could be avoided, and that prospectiveEnglish investors would know that, once thecable was laid, the interest on their investmentwould be secure. Field immediately wrote toPeter Cooper to tell him of this development. Hepointed out that while both ends of the cablewould be in British territory, the Britishgovernment expected no more than equality withthe United States. Field suggested that Cooperwrite to President Franklin Pierce to solicit theAmerican government for the same terms.

Meanwhile, Field formed the AtlanticTelegraph Company, chartered in London inOctober 185^. To raise the money, he made atour of the country, addressing chambers ofcommerce and other meetings with people ofmeans. There he presented the facts, figures,estimates, and opinions of engineers andscientists, including Samuel Morse, who hadconnected in series ten 2Oo-mile telegraphcircuits running between London andBIRmingham. Using these, he demonstrated thatas many as two hundred signals a minute couldbe transmitted through a 2,000-mile-long wire.

Needless to say, there was a great deal ofpublicity regarding so grand a scheme as well as,inevitably, many doubts and unsolicitedsuggestions about how best to accomplish thetask. People suggested suspending the cablefrom balloons, or floating it just below thesurface. One person thought it should beattached to a string of buoys where ships couldtie up to send and receive messages. Even Prince

Albert got in on the act, suggesting that the cablebe enclosed in a glass tube.

Many people thought the whole project to beflatly impossible. The company received manyletters pointing out that the cable would not sinkto the bottom but would float at the point whereits density equaled the density of the water. Infact, since water is very nearly incompressible,its density does not increase significantly withdepth. The density of the water at the bottom ofthe Atlantic, despite the enormous pressure, isonly about 2 percent more than it is at thesurface.

These ideas were not confined to thescientifically illiterate. Even Astronomer RoyalSir George Airy, who ran the Royal GreenwichObservatory, stated that "it was a mathematicalimpossibility to submerge the cable successfullyat so great a depth, and if it were possible, nosignals could be transmitted through so great alength."4*

But the sheer grandeur of the enterprise,along with

Cyrus^British Astronomers Royal have a reputation

for making fools of themselves withpronouncements outside their field of expertise.In 1956, Sir Richard Wooley, on assuming thepost, declared that "space travel is utter bilge." Ayear and nine months later, the Soviet Unionlaunched Sputnik and the space age began.Thirteen years later, men landed on the moon.

Field's unfeigned enthusiasm, ensured thatthere would be takers. Field's simpledetermination also helped. When one wealthypotential investor, whose passion was raisingvery large beagles, declined to participate, Fieldvisited him at his kennels, hoping still topersuade him. In the course of the visit, Fieldasked him if he could imagine a dog so large thatit stretched from England to the United States.The man replied, "Certainly, Sir; I could imagine

anything.""Well," replied Field, "the project of which I've

spoken and tried to interest you in is essentiallyjust such a dog. If you pinch his tail in Liverpool,he'll bark in New York. "5

The entire stock issue, 350 shares at £1,000each, was subscribed within a few weeks: noshares were taken in London, & 6 in Liverpool,37 in Glasgow, 28 in Manchester. Among theindividual investors was the novelist WilliamMakepeace Thackeray. Two American bankerslong resident in London, George Peabody and C.

M. Lampson, took £10,000 and £2,000respectively.* Field himself took 88 shares,expecting to be able to sell them to investors inthe United States. He was to be greatlydisappointed in this and was able to dispose ofonly 27 of them, some of them at a loss. ThusCyrus Field had to carry the remaining 61 shareshimself, more than twice the investment of allother American shareholders combined. This

investment, $305,000, together with the$200,000 he had already put into the scheme,represented the great bulk of his assets.

*George Peabody was, along with PeterCooper, the founder of the tradition of vastphilanthropy among the American rich. Hefounded the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, thePeabody Museums at Yale and Harvard, and thePeabody Education Fund to help the cause ofreconstruction after the Civil War by improvingSouthern schools. Offered a baronetcy by QueenVictoria in recognition of his generosity, hemodestly declined. When he died in 1869 hisbanking house was taken over by his partner,Jumus Spencer Morgan, and became the Londonbranch of the House of Morgan.

The fortunes of both Cyrus Field and theAtlantic cable had become inextricably linked.They would prosper or fail together.

WHEN CYRUS FIELD RETURNED to theUnited States, arriving in New York on Christmas

Day, he had to go immediately to St. John's toattend to business there. The trip toNewfoundland in the dead of winter wasdreadful, and Field, very susceptible toseasickness, soon fell ill. Regardless, once he hadaccomplished what he came to do (arranging forthe legislature to grant to the Atlantic TelegraphCompany landing privileges similar to what ithad already granted to the New York,Newfoundland, and London TelegraphCompany), he returned at once to New York.

There he found that he was neededimmediately in Washington, where there wasserious opposition to an agreement along thelines of the British one. The directors had writtenPresident Franklin Pierce, enclosing a copy of theoffer of the British government and asking forsimilar terms. However, the British governmentspeaks with one voice, as the prime minister andthe cabinet are in firm control of both theexecutive departments and Parliament. It can actvery quickly when it wants to. But in

Washington, Congress is entirely independent ofthe president and has its own politicalconsiderations to take into account.

Pierce, seeing obvious advantages to theparticipation of the American government in thelaying of an Atlantic cable, was in favor of theproposal. But he was reluctant to back it publicly,so Senator William Seward of New York (soon tobe President Lincoln's secretary of state)submitted the proposal to Congress, whichwould have to appropriate the necessary funds.With no far-flung empire to manage and defend,many in Congress failed to see any nationalinterest in an Atlantic cable.

Like many British intellectuals and writers(Charles Dickens, for instance), their Americancounterparts distrusted and disliked the effectsof the Industrial Revolution in general, and suchnew technology as railroads, steamboats, and thetelegraph in particular. Just two years earlier, themisanthropic Henry David Thoreau had written

contemptuously in Walden, "We are in greathaste to construct a magnetic telegraph fromMaine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be,have nothing important to communicate. We areeager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring theOld World some weeks nearer to the New; but,perchance the first news that will leak throughinto the broad, flapping American ear will be thatPrincess Adelaide has the whooping cough.""

Of more concern to Congress was the strongundercurrent of Anglophobia that had runthrough the American psyche since theRevolution and which would not entirelydisappear until the United States entered WorldWar I on the side of Britain. This feeling wasespecially prevalent in the South, which hadsuffered grievously during the Revolution frommarauding British soldiers under the likes ofBannister Tarleton and Patrick Ferguson.Senator James C. Jones of Tennessee statedforthrightly that he "didn't want anything to do

with England or Englishmen.".7

And, of course, there were some in Congresswho felt that since the projectors of the Atlanticcable were all very rich men, they should pay forthe privilege of having the legislation passed. Asa result, Cyrus Field had to go to Washingtonand lobby hard to get the bill through Congress."Those few weeks in Washington," his brotherreported, "were worse than being among theicebergs off the coast of Newfoundland. TheAtlantic Cable has had many a kink since, butnever did it seem to be entangled in such ahopeless twist as when it got among thepoliticians."^

Many senators, of course, had no problemseeing the potential utility of the enterprise andfought hard to get the legislation passed.

Besides Senator Seward of New York, thesebackers included Senator Stephen A. Douglas ofIllinois, whose debates with Lincoln two yearshence would help delineate the coming conflict

between North and South, and Senator Judah P.Benjamin of I Louisiana, who would serve in theConfederate cabinet as attorney general,secretary of war, and secretary of state.*Benjamin, addressing the Senate, confessed,

I feel a glow of something like pride that Ibelong to the great human family when I seethese triumphs of science, by which mind isbrought into instant communication with mindacross the intervening oceans, which, to ourunenlightened forefathers, seemed placed thereby Providence as an eternal barrier tocommunication between man and man. Now, Sir,we speak from minute to minute. Scarcely can agun be fired in war on the European shore ere itsechoes will reverberate among our ownmountains, and be heard by every citizen in theland. All this is a triumph of science — ofAmerican genius, and I for one feel proud of it,and feel desirous of sustaining and promotingit.9

Despite such political backing, the bill clearedthe Senate by a single vote and the House by notmuch more. It was signed into law by PresidentPierce on March 3,1857, the day before he leftoffice, to be replaced by fames Buchanan. The actgranted the New York, Newfoundland, andLondon Telegraph Company essentially the samedeal the London government had given theAtlantic Telegraph Company in terms of subsidy,surveying, and ships.

*Judah P. Benjamin's was one of the moreextraordinary lives of the nineteenth century.Born a British subject in the Virgin Islands in1811 of Jewish parents, he came to the UnitedStates at the age of two. Admitted to theLouisiana bar in 1832, he was soon one of thatstate's most successful lawyers. Offered a seat onthe U.S. Supreme Court in 1852, he declined, andwas elected a senator in 1854. After the CivilWar, he escaped to England, where be was calledto the English bar in 1866, quickly becoming oneof its leaders and named a queen's counsel in

1872. His textbook Law of Sale of PersonalProperty, published in 1868, became thestandard work on the subject for many years inboth Britain and the United States. On his deathin 1884, The Times of London wrote of him that"he carved out for himself by his own unaidedexertions not one, but three [careers] of greatand well-earned distinction."

Indeed, one promise had already been kept, asLieutenant O. H. Berryman, U.S.N., commandingthe steamer USS Arctic, had the previous yearcarefully surveyed the route along a great circlerunning from St. John's to the coast of Ireland.*In the spring of 1857 the Royal Navy sentLieutenant Commander Joseph Dayman,commanding HMS Cyclops, to make a similarsurvey.

A precise knowledge of the depths to beencountered was necessary to design the cable.The reason was not that depth affects how well asubmarine cable operates but that depth

determines how much strain will be put on it asit is being laid. The greater the depth, the longerthe length of cable that would necessarily have tohang from the ship, its weight pulling on thecable. The cable, obviously, would have towithstand the greatest strain to be encountered,so the depth determined the required strength ofthe cable.

The two surveys took soundings every two orthree miles near shore, where the bottom wasfound to slope gently on the Newfoundland sideand more abruptly near Ireland. Farther out, thesoundings were spaced every twenty or thirtymiles. The reason they were done so infrequentlyis that at ocean depth, the paying out and reelingin of the heavy hemp line was a time-consumingbusiness, each sounding requiring almost sixhours. The new soundings fully confirmed theearlier American findings of a telegraph plateau(as Matthew Maury had dubbed it) runningbetween the two landing sites, the average depthslowly increasing between Newfoundland and

Ireland.*A great circle is any circle on the surface of a

sphere whose center is the same as the center ofthe sphere. The equator and all lines of longitudeare thus great circles. Great circles are importantin navigation because the shortest distancebetween any two points on the surface of asphere is the arc of a great circle.

The only serious exception to this relativelylevel ground was about 200 miles off Ireland,where the depth plunged in about a dozen milesfrom 550 fathoms to 1,750 fathoms. Although

600 feet in a mile is a steep gradient (the U.S.Interstate Highway System does not exceed 211feet in a mile), it is no worse than occurs inmany city streets, such as in San Francisco, andis not much worse than Murray Hill in New Yorkor Holborn Hill in London.

The surveys were also able to determine thenature of the bottom as well as its depths, thanksto an ingenious mechanical device invented byLieutenant J. M. Brooke of the United StatesNavy . The traditional sounding line hadconsisted merely of a lead weight attached to aline marked at intervals to indicate how muchhad been payed out. Sometimes the bottom ofthe lead was coated in wax, which would take animpression of the bottom. Lieutenant Brooke's"sounder" featured an iron weight much like acannonball with a hole through its center. Thiswas fitted over a hollow tube with a trapdoor andattached to the line by a pair of links. Allowed tofall freely through the water, when it hit bottom,the weight drove the tube into the ocean floor,

grabbing a sample of it. The impact caused thelinks to release the weight, which was leftbehind, allowing the line to be hauled up quicklywithout fear of its breaking.*

The soundings taken by the two navies withthis device revealed that the floor of the oceanfor virtually the entire route was covered in ooze,consisting largely of the exoskeletons ofplankton that had drifted down from the surfaceafter death. The presence of this ooze — the dustof the sea—indicated that the bottom along theproposed route was free of scouring currents.

With the route determined, the companiesformed, the capital raised, and substantialgovernment help secured, it only remained tosettle the exact design of the cable itself andorder its manufacture. Indeed, by the time theAmerican government had agreed to help, thecable was already well on its way to beingcompleted.

*Brooke's invention became the standard

sounding device for generations, and the oceanfloor today is littered with uncounted thousandsof weights that have been left behind.

6. The First Cable

CYRUS FIELD AND THE OTHERDIRECTORS, both in England and in the UnitedStates, were anxious to lay the cable thatsummer and that meant decisions had to bemade quickly. This rush to get the job done wasunderstandable. The sooner the cable was laidand working, the sooner the companies wouldbegin to receive the $140,000 a year in paymentsfrom the British and American governments andthe sooner they would begin receiving revenuesfrom other customers.

Moreover, public interest in the enterprisewas intense on both sides of the Atlantic.

Newspapers and magazines not only followedactual developments closely but speculatedendlessly regarding how the future would beaffected by knitting the whole world togetherwith instant communication. The New YorkHerald called the Atlantic cable "the grandestwork which has ever been attempted by thegenius and enterprise of man." The New YorkEvening Post thought that it would "make thegreat heart of humanity beat with a single pulse."An editor in Tennessee, getting quite carriedaway, thought that the various nations would"assemble around a common council board andengage together in diplomatic deliberations. . . .Wars are to cease. The kingdom of peace will beset up.'1

But the rush to get the job done would provethe greatest mistake of the entire enterprise. Thefinest minds in electrical engineering and theoryat the time were by no means in agreement as tothe nature of the hest design. The best way to

determine the best design was experimentation,but the time pressure did not allow for much. Asa result, the directors, most of whom had nocompetence whatever in the infant field ofelectrical engineering, made decisions basedmostly on considerations of speed and cost. Itwas Cyrus Field's greatest failure as theentrepreneur of the Atlantic cable.

Samuel Morse had shown that messagescould be transmitted rapidly over two thousandmiles of telegraph line. To Morse and thedirectors, this was proof that the project wasentirely feasible. But a telegraph line strungthrough air—which is not a conductor ofelectricity—is by no means a model for onestrung through seawater. The fact that seawateris an excellent conductor of electricity changeseverything.

It is commonly thought that electricity flowsthrough a wire at the speed of light, about186,000 miles a second. But that is the speed of

light (or any other form of electromagneticenergy) propagating through a vacuum. Througha medium, such as air or water, the speed of lightis reduced. Electricity flows through copper wiremuch more slowly still, often only 10 or even ipercent of the speed of light.* The exact speeddepends on the wire's capacity. The larger thewire, the more electricity is needed to "fill" it, ina way not at all dissimilar to a hose, which mustfill with water before any will come out the farend.

In telegraphy's earliest days, this was noproblem, because the capacity of the wires wasso small that they operated at full speed nearlyinstantly. But when a telegraph wire is laid inseawater, its capacity may be as muck as twentytimes greater, causing the signal to slow downvery considerably, a problem called retardation.There were two schools of thought about howbest to deal with the problem. One theory heldthat the wire should be as small as possible. Noless an authority than Michael Faraday stated

flatly that "the larger the wire, the moreelectricity was required to charge it; and thegreater was the retardation of that electricimpulse which should be occupied in sendingthat charge forward."2

*Of course, this is of little more thantheoretical interest. A telegraphic messagemoving at just i percent of the speed of lightwould still cross the Atlantic in only slightlymore than a second.

Samuel Morse was also of this opinion, as wasDr. Edward Whitehouse, who would soon behired as electrician for the Atlantic TelegraphCompany. Whitehouse was a medical doctor byprofession but had done much experimenting intelegraphy. In this dawn of the electrical age, hisqualifications were equal to the job he had.Unfortunately, he was also obstinate and alwaysutterly certain of the correctness of his ownopinions.

Two other men who became closely

associated with the Atlantic cable at this timewere of a different opinion. Charles Bright,introduced to Cyrus Field by John Brett of theMagnetic Telegraph Company, for which Brightworked, was appointed chief engineer of theproject, although he was only twenty-four. Theson of a successful chemical manufacturer,Bright had been involved with telegraphy sincehe was fifteen. At nineteen he had laid acomplete system of telegraph wires under thestreets of the city of Manchester in a singlenight. By the time he was twenty he held nofewer than twenty-four patents, some of them sobasic—such as the porcelain insulator—that theyare still in use.

Bright had been interested in the possibility ofan Atlantic cable as early as 1853, and in 1855 hesurveyed the west coast of Ireland to find asuitable landing site for such a cable. He choseValentia Bay in the extreme southwest ofIreland, in County Kerry, because it wassheltered from the fierce Atlantic rollers and

featured a smoothly shelving, sandy shore. Hischoice would in the future become the site of allcables originating in Ireland.

The other person to become associated withthe project, when he was invited to join theboard of directors of the Atlantic TelegraphCompany, was a professor at Glasgow Universitynamed William Thomson. Thomson, like hiscontemporaries Michael Faraday and JamesClerk Maxwell, was one of the true giants in the

history of science. The son of a professor ofmathematics at Glasgow, he was born in 1824and entered Glasgow University at the age ofeleven. He took his degree at Cambridge,however, where he made a brilliant record. Hethen studied in Paris under the great Frenchchemist and physicist Henri Victor Regnault. In1846, at the age of twenty-two, he was appointedto the chair in natural philosophy at GlasgowUniversity, a post he would hold for fifty-threeyears. At Glasgow he set up the world's firstphysics laboratory where students could dopractical experiments instead of merely readingtheory. It has been the basic method of teachingphysics ever since.

William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin)Thomson's paper on the dynamical theory of

heat, presented to the Royal Society ofEdinburgh in 1851, contained the first statementof the Second Law of Thermodynamics, one ofthe fundamental laws by which we understandthe universe.* But though William Thomson wasa great theoretical physicist, who published morethan three hundred papers in his lifetime, he was

much more besides. As Sir Arthur Clarke put it,"If one took half

C. P. Snow (1905-80), the writer andphilosopher of science, regarded the Second Lawol Thermodynamics as so fundamental that hedivided the intellectual world into two halves:those who understood the law and itsconsequences and those who did not. the talentsof Einstein, and half the talents of Edison, andsucceeded in fusing such incompatible gifts intoa single person, the result would be rather likeWilliam Thomson. "3

Thomson's endlessly restless scientificimagination produced a nearly endless stream ofinventions, and in 186^ he formed the firm ofKelvin and White to manufacture the morecommercially important ones. So successful wasthe firm that at his death in 1907 he left an estateof £162,000, enough at that time to make him avery rich man. In 1852, William Thomsonbecame the first British scientist to be raised to

the peerage, when Queen Victoria created himLord Kelvin of Largs. He has been known eversince as Lord Kelvin. In 1908, the year after hedied, the Kelvin temperature scale, devised byhim in the 1850s, was named in his honor.

Thomson's interest in what are known astransient electrical currents got him interested intelegraphy. To put it simply, Thomson wonderedexactly what happened in the very brief intervalbetween the time an electric battery was appliedto a wire and when the current settled down to asteady value. One could hardly ask for a moreperfect example of how a talent for asking theright question is the most precious attribute ascientist can have. Thomson's experiments inthis area would lead directly to wirelesstelegraphy, then radio, and then television, afundamental technological revolution thatbecame one of the defining attributes of thetwentieth century.

But in the 1850s, Thomson's great question

led him to experiment with how long it took asignal to go from one end of a telegraph line toanother when the line was immersed inseawater. He quickly deduced the so-called lawof squares, arguing that the amount ofretardation of the signal was inverselyproportional to the square of the cable's length.In other words, a signal would pass through acable of a hundred miles only 1/500th as fast asthrough the same cable ten miles long.

This information, of course, had profoundimplications for the Atlantic cable, which wouldhave to be almost seven times as long as anysubmarine cable yet laid. Thomson set aboutexperimenting to learn ways to lessen the impactof his law of squares. He advocated usingparticularly pure copper for the core of the cableand using a large-diameter core to reduce theresistance. He also set about developinginstruments that would be sensitive to the leastvariations in electrical currents—very weak

signals, in other words.Charles Bright agreed with Thomson and

advocated a cable that would have a coreweighing 392 pounds per nautical mile with thesame weight of gutta-percha insulation. ButEdward Whitehouse and Samuel Morsedisagreed with Thomson, and by the time Brightand Thomson joined the Atlantic TelegraphCompany, it was too late for them to change thedesign of the cable. The directors were anxious toorder the manufacture of the cable and, asCharles Bright's son noted in his history of theproject, published in 1903, "they were perhapsover quick to recognize the difference in thecapital required."4

The cable as it was ordered consisted of sevenstrands of copper wire, each .028 inches indiameter, twisted together to make a wire .083inches m diameter. This core was thensurrounded by three separate layers of gutta-percha so that a flaw in any one layer of the

insulation would be covered by another. Thegutta-percha was then covered with hempsaturated with a mixture of tar, pitch, linseed oil,and wax, and that layer was covered in turn by anarmoring layer of eighteen iron wires, each ofseven strands, the whole cable being then coatedby another mixture of tar. The finished cable,though far larger than any previously laidsubmarine cable, was much less substantial thanwhat Bright and Thomson thought was needed.The core weighed only 107 pounds per nauticalmile, while Bright had wanted 392 pounds pernautical mile. When Thomson tested sections ofthe cable, he was horrified to find that the copperused was so impure that some parts of the cableconducted electricity twice as well as other parts.

A sketch of the i8ff cable shown in actual size.

The finished cable was about five-eighths of

an inch in diameter, only about as big around asa man's index finger. In air it weighed one tonper mile, while its weight in water was only 1,340pounds per mile. It was calculated that it wasstrong enough to bear a weight of 6,500 poundsbefore breaking, equivalent to nearly five milesof its weight in water. As the water over theproposed route was nowhere greater than twoand a half miles, this was thought an adequatesafety margin.

The core and its insulation were made by theGutta Percha Company, but because of the needfor speed, the work of armoring the cable wasdivided between two companies. While thecontracts with the two firms specified precisedesigns for the iron-wire armoring,unfortunately it failed to specify which way theiron wires should spiral around the core. As luckwould have it, one firm's armoring spiraled tothe left and the other's to the right. This wouldcause endless problems when the two halves ofthe cable had to be spliced together.

By July, the cable was ready. At 2,500 nauticalmiles in length, it consisted of 340,500 miles ofcopper and iron wire — more than enough toreach the moon—and 300 tons of gutta-percha.The core had cost £40 per mile, the armor £50.Altogether, the cable had cost £225,000.

IN 1857 THERE WAS NOT a ship in the worldcapable of carrying 2,500 miles of submarinecable weighing 2,500 tons. Therefore there wasno choice but to employ two ships and splice thecable together at some point. The engineers ofthe project, such as Charles Bright, engineer inchief, argued that it would be better to splice thecable at midocean and then have the two shipslay the cable simultaneously, one heading forIreland, the other for Newfoundland. Theadvantages of this plan were twofold. First, theexpedition could rendezvous at the splice pointand wait if necessary for opportune weather tomake the splice. Second, with both ships layingcable simultaneously, the total time needed tolay the entire cable would be halved, and this

would also cut in half the chance of encounteringfoul weather while the operation was in progress.

The electricians, notably Samuel Morse,preferred to begin laying the cable in Ireland andmaking the splice when the cable was half laid.The advantage of this arrangement was that theship could be in continuous contact with theshore during the entire operation, making surethat the signal was adequate. The directors optedfor this plan.

The two ships assigned to the task of layingthe Atlantic cable were the USS Niagara and theHMS Agamemnon.

The Niagara had been laid down in 1845 toplans by the great American naval architectGeorge Steers. In 1851, Steers would design theyacht America for a syndicate of wealthy NewYorkers. Its smashing victory over the entire

Royal Yacht squadron that year would give theUnited States a dominance in international yachtracing that lasted 132 years and would give its

name to the America's Cup, the oldest sportingtrophy in the world.*

The Niagara, at 5,200 tons, was not only thelargest ship in the United States Navy butperhaps the largest warship in the world at thetime. She is also a perfect example of navalarchitecture in transition from sail to steam.Flush-decked, she had been designed from thekeel up to be a steamship but was also equippedwith three masts and a full suit of sails. Thanksto her powerful engine and graceful, yachtlikelines, she was easily capable of making twelveknots. And while wooden hulled, she was ironribbed. Originally designed to carry ninety-oneconventional cannons, the Niagara had beenstripped of armament to be refitted with onlytwelve new, immensely powerful Dahlgren guns,invented by the American naval officer JohnAdolphus Dahlgren. Each was huge. Weighingfourteen tons, they required gun crewsnumbering twenty-five and fired explosive shellsthat weighed 130 pounds apiece. When she was

assigned to help in the cable project, theNiagara's refitting was delayed to make room forthe cable.

The British entry, HMS Agamemnon, was amuch more old-fashioned vessel. A wooden shipof the line with a displacement of 3,500 tons, theAgamemnon, although built later, would nothave looked a bit out of place at the Battle ofTrafalgar fifty-two years earlier. Only thesmokestack of her steam engine, incongruouslypiercing her deck, would have been unfamiliar toNelson.

*By no means the least of what the vastwealth creation of the nineteenth centurybrought about was the beginning of organizedand then professional sports. Today, sports are amultibillion-dollar worldwide industry and amajor means up the socioeconomic ladder forpeople of talent, much as the church and themilitary were in the preindustnal era.

The arrangement and apparatus for stowingand paying the cable on board the Niagara.

Like most wooden battleships, she was alubberly sailor, and would have been no matchwhatever for a Dahlgrenequipped Niagara ineither sailing qualities or firepower had they evermet m battle.

But, of course, they met only in friendship.Indeed the entire 1857 attempt to lay the Atlanticcable was nearly as much an exercise indiplomacy between the two countries directlyinvolved as it was a technological andcommercial undertaking. When the Niagaraarrived in the Thames estuary ofFGravesend onMay 14, the first major American warship inmany years to do so, she was mobbed by visitors.Among them was Lady Franklin, widow of theBritish Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin. She had

come to thank the U.S. Navy for the twoexpeditions it had mounted to search for herhusband, whose last expedition had vanishedafter it set out in 1845 in search of the NorthwestPassage.*

When the Agamemnon appeared and sightedthe Niagara, the captain ordered the crew to manthe yards in salute and give three cheers, whichwere returned in kind. The Niagara had beenassigned to take on the segment of the cable tobe loaded at

* Although twelve years had passed, his fatewas still unknown, and it would be another twoyears before yet another search expeditiondiscovered that he had perished with all his menin 1848.

Greenwich, up the Thames from Gravesend,while the Agamemnon would load the half thatwas waiting at Birkenhead, across the RiverMersey from Liverpool. But the Niagara provedtoo large for the dock at Greenwich, so the two

ships switched assignments and the Niagaramade for Birkenhead, stopping first atPortsmouth to have still more of her bulkheadsremoved to accommodate the cable. There shewas also fitted with an iron cage over the screwto prevent the cable from becoming entangled init if the ship had to back for any reason. The cagewas promptly dubbed a "crinoline," after thelady's undergarments that were made of ironbands and used to hold out the hoop skirts thathad exploded into fashion the previous year.

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The Niagara arrived at Birkenhead on June22 and was again nearly mobbed by curiousvisitors while the labor of loading the cablebegan. It required thirty men at a time, workingfor three weeks, to accomplish this, as the cablehad to be coiled layer upon layer (these werecalled "flakes") with great care so as not to kinkor become tangled. But while the sailors labored,the officers that could be spared were feted againand again in Liverpool. The mayor gave a dinner,as did the Chamber of Commerce. On the Fourth

of July the city's American community, whichwas considerable given the volume of Anglo-American trade—largely American cotton andBritish manufactures—entertained them.

The Agamemnon was simultaneously takingon her half of the cable at Greenwich and, whenthe job was completed, her officers and crew,along with many others interested in theundertaking, were entertained at an outdoorparty at the house of Sir Culling Eardley, Bart.,the tents and food provided by Glass, Elliot &tCo., which had manufactured that half of thecable.*

As always, there were numerous speeches andtoasts (The Times of London noted that thesailors soon exhausted their allotted three pintsof beer drinking the toasts). Besides Sir Culling,Samuel Morse also spoke, and Cyrus Field read aletter from President James Buchanan invitingQueen Victoria to send the first message throughthe cable should it prove successful.

There was keen anticipation among the pressand the public in Britain regarding the cable,made all the keener because the first state, andU.S. senator, and one of the great orators of hisage, spoke of it at a dedication ceremony.

*The Times of London reported on the partyextensively, including the careful arrangement ofthe seating to reflect Victorian notions of class."By an admirable arrangement," it noted, "theguests were accommodated at a vast semicirculartable, which ran round the whole pavilion, whilethe sailors and workmen sat at a number of longtables arranged at right angles with the chord, sothat the general efFect was that all dinedtogether, while at the same time sufficientdistinction was preserved to satisfy the mostfastidious."

I hold in my hand a portion of the identicalelectric cable, given me by my friend Mr.[George] Peabody, which is now in progress ofmanufacture to connect America with Europe.

Does it seem all but incredible to you thatintelligence should travel for two thousandmiles, along those slender copper wires, far downin the all-but-fathomless Atlantic, never beforepenetrated by aught pertaining to humanity, savewhen some foundering vessel has plunged withher helpless company to the eternal silence anddarkness of the abyss? Does it seem, I say, all buta miracle of art, that the thoughts of living men— the thoughts that we think up here on theearth's surface, in the cheerful light of day—about the markets and the exchanges, and theseasons, and the elections, and the treaties, andthe wars, and all the fond nothings of daily life,should clothe themselves with elemental sparks,and shoot with fiery speed, in a moment, in thetwinkling of an eye, from hemisphere tohemisphere, far down among the uncouthmonsters that wallow in the nether seas, alongthe wreck-paved floor, through the oozydungeons of the rayless deep . . . ?5*

*The nineteenth century was one of the

golden ages of oratory, but because the speechescould not be recorded in other than written form,the orators, like the actors of that era, are largelyforgotten today unless remembered for otherreasons, such as Daniel Webster. But EdwardEverett, the greatest American orator of his time,achieved a sort of perverse immortality with hisspeechmaking. It was his odd fate to deliver themam address at the dedication of the NationalCemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, onNovember 15), 1863. His now utterly forgottentwo-hour speech immediately preceded—andserved as the perfect foil for—the two-minutespeech of President Abraham Lincoln that hassince been read and memorized by uncountablemillions.

WHEN THE NIAGARA AND THEAGAA^BMJVON were loaded with 1,250 miles ofcable each, they rendezvoused at Queenstown(now Cobh) on the southern coast oflreland,then (and still) that country's leadingtransatlantic port. There, the two mam ships

anchored about a third of a mile apart, and oneend of the cable on the Niagara was ferriedacross to the Agamemnon. The two halves werespliced temporarily together. A telegraphtransmitter was attached to one end and agalvanometer—an instrument for measuringelectric current—to the other. Doubtless toeveryone's relief, the current flowed perfectlythrough all 2,500 miles of the Atlantic cable.

Besides the two major ships Niagara andAgamemnon, the fleet consisted of their escorts,USS Susquehanna and HMS Leopard, both side-wheelers. There were also three smallersteamers, HMS Advice, HMS Willing MinJ, andHMS Cyclops, under Captain Dayman, who hadsurveyed the route the previous spring andwould be in charge of any more soundings thatmight be required.

As the armada approached Valentia Bay,crowds of people could be seen standing on thehills to witness the most exciting thing to come

to County Kerry in decades. Valentia Bay, thoughideally suited as the European anchorage for theAtlantic cable, is located in one of the mostremote corners of the British Isles. County Kerrywas still largely Gaelic speaking in the 1850s. Italso has some of the most majestic scenery in allEurope, where peninsulas that rise to Ireland'shighest mountains run far out into the seabefore dropping off sometimes in sheer cliffs forhundreds of feet to meet the great Atlanticrollers that crash at their feet.

Once anchored, the cable fleet was greeted bythe lord lieutenant of Ireland, George Howard,Earl of Carlisle, who had come down fromDublin, and by Sir Peter Fitzgerald, Knigbt ofKerry, the major local landowner .*

The first task was to bring the end of the cableashore. The fleet arrived too late on the eveningof August 4 to begin work, and the next morningthere was too much wind, but finally theoperation got under way about two in the

afternoon. The shore ends of the cable— ten miles on the Irish side and fifteen on

the Newfoundland side —were much moreheavily armored than the oceanic part of thecable, to protect them from waves, rocks,currents, and errant anchors. As a result theyweighed fully nine tons per mile, and wrestlingthe end out of the Niagara's hold, onto a launch,and into shore was no easy task.

The diplomatic aspect of the entire operationcan be easily seen in the fact that it had beendeliberately arranged for American sailors tohaul the cable ashore in Ireland, where it wouldbe officially presented to the lord lieutenant asthe queen's representative. On the other side ofthe Atlantic, British sailors brought the cableashore.

The lord lieutenant stood on the beach withhis staff and other dignitaries while Valentia Bay,a reporter wrote,

"was studded with innumerable small craft,

decked with the gayest bunting—small boatsflitted hither and thither, their occupantscheering enthusiastically as the worksuccessfully progressed. . . . [A]nd when at lengththe American sailors jumped through the surgewith the hawser to which it was attached, hisExcellency was among the first to lay hold of itand pull it lustily to the shore. "^

*The earl of Carlisle was of the great Howardfamily, among whom are numbered the dukes ofNorfolk and the earls of Suffolk and Eifingham.A poet and political reformer, he was deeplyinterested in helping what today would be calledjuvenile delinquents. He built a modelreformatory on the grounds of one of his estates.His principal residence was Castle Howard, inYorkshire, one of Britain's most famous statelyhomes, best known today, perhaps, as the settingfor many scenes in Brideshead Revisited.

Sir Peter Fitzgerald was of an Anglo-Irishfamily, one even more ancient than the Howards

and which dominated southwestern Ireland forcenturies. In the middle of the thirteenthcentury, one of his ancestors dubbed three of hissons hereditary knights, the only hereditaryknighthoods in British history. Sir Peter was verypopular with his tenants, for, unlike many Irishlandlords in the nineteenth century, he lived onhis estate on Valentia Island and builtsubstantial homesteads for many of thesetenants.

A minister said a prayer and then the lordlieutenant spoke of his hopes for what the cablemight accomplish. "I believe the great work nowso happily begun will accomplish many great andnoble purposes of trade, of national policy, andof empire." But he also noted both a morehuman dimension to the cable's potential andthe great calamity that had befallen Ireland inthe previous decade when the potato crop hadfailed. Two million people— a quarter of thepopulation—had died in those terrible years ofstarvation or disease, or been forced to emigrate

to escape them. The earl continued, You areaware—you must know, some of you, from yourown experience— that many or your dear friendsand near relatives nave left their native land toreceive hospitable shelter in America. . . . If youwished to communicate some piece ofintelligence straightaway to your relatives acrossthe wide world of waters — if you wished to tellthose whom you know it would interest in theirheart of hearts, of a birth, or a marriage, or, alas,a death, among you, the little cord, which wehave hauled up to the shore, will impart thattidings quicker than the flash of lightning. Let usindeed hope, let us pray that the hopes of thosewho have set foot on this great design, may berewarded by its entire success; and let us hope,further, that this Atlantic Cable will, in all futuretime, serve as an emblem of that strong cord oflove which I trust will always unite the Britishislands to the great continent of America. 7

When Carlisle had finished, he said that theusual three cheers were entirely insufficient for

this occasion and asked for at least a dozen,which echoed off the green, surrounding hills.

Cyrus Field then took his turn and spokebriefly. "I have no words," he confessed, "toexpress the feelings which fill my heart tonight—it beats with love and affection for every man,woman, and child who hears me. I may say,however, that, if ever at the other side of thewaters now before us, any one of you shallpresent himself at my door and say that he tookhand or part, even by an approving smile, in ourwork here today, he shall have a true Americanwelcome. I cannot bind myself to more, and shallmerely say: 'What God has joined together, let noman put

' "8 asunder. Not surprisingly, perhaps, CyrusField found that he couldn't sleep in his cabin onthe Niagara that night, and went up to pace thedeck beneath a cloudless sky and a myriad ofstars. Running the length of the deck was thepaying-out machinery designed to control the

speed at which the cable moved from the cabletier in the front of the ship to the large wheel atthe stern over which it

passed before it slipped into the sea. Menwere to be stationed along its length to see thatthe cable ran smoothly and not too fast, andbraking mechanisms were at the ready to slow itdown if necessary.

At dawn the next morning, the fleet of threeBritish (Agamemnon, Leopard, and Cyclops) andtwo American ships (Niagara and Susquehanna)got under way, the cable trailing out behind theUSS Niagara. But before the fleet had proceededfive miles, the heavy shore cable caught in themachinery and parted. There was nothing to dobut return to Valentia Harbor and start over.Boats from the Wiliing Mind ran a hawser underthe cable to lift it to the surface, and the WillingMind then proceeded seaward, lifting the cableas she went until the broken end was reached.This was then spliced to the cable on the Niagara

and the expedition began again, moving at nomore than two knots.

Brights 1858 paying-out gear.When the end of the shore cable was reached,

it was spliced onto the ocean cable and the splicewas lowered by hawser to the ocean floor, whilebuoys marked the point. The Niagara slowlyincreased its speed as it began paying out thelighter ocean cable, and the paying-outmachinery groaned and rumbled with a "dull,heavy sound." But the sound was a reassuringone, telling everyone that the project wasproceeding as planned. "If one should drop tosleep," Matthew Field noted, "and wake up atnight, he has only to hear the sound of' the oldcoffee-mill,' and his fears are relieved, and goes

to sleep again."? The cable was allowed to payout a little faster than the ship was moving sothat it could follow the contours of the seabottom dropping away toward the ocean abyss.

The weather on Saturday, August 8, wasperfect and spirits were high. Communicationbetween the Niagara and Valentia was nearlycontinuous, with Dr. Whitehouse onshore andSamuel Morse, Cyrus Field, and WilliamThomson on board, although Morse was soonincapacitated by seasickness. By midnight,Saturday, eighty-five miles of cable had been laidand the depths of the water was a little over twohundred fathoms. The next morning the switchfrom the cable coiled on the aft deck to the onecoiled forward was made without incident andthe ship's speed was increased to five knots.

On Monday morning, beginning about 4:00A.M., the ship began passing over the steepincline where the sea bottom plunged from 500to 1,750 fathoms within eight miles. The paying-

out machinery continued to function, althoughthe cable more than once was thrown off thewheels, owing to the fact that the groove in thewheels where the cable was supposed to run wasbadly designed and not large enough. Tar fromthe cable also tended to build up in thesegrooves, reducing the room still further.

When this happened, the ship had to behalted and the cable clamped until it could befitted back into place. As Charles Bright, theengineer in charge, reported, if nothing else, atleast this laying to in deep water without payingout more cable, while tons of it hung from thestern proved that such an operation was possible.The cable, of course, has been designed towithstand the strain of such a weight. Still, it wasa relief to determine that it could actually do so.

As a longer and longer length of cable hungfrom the back of the Niagara, it was necessary toapply the brakes more firmly to prevent the cablefrom paying out too fast. Charles Bright noted

that while seven hundred pounds of brakingpressure had been sufficient at first to keep thespeed of the cable at the right rate, at this point itbecame necessary to increase the brakingpressure to fifteen hundred pounds while theship and the cable ran at five and five and a halfknots respectively.

The principle of the brake used on me came.

At noon on Monday, the Niagara was 214miles from shore and had payed out 255 miles ofcable. The breeze began to freshen and a swell toget up. The ocean floor was now some twothousand fathoms below and the brakingpressure had been increased to two thousandpounds.

Then, at nine o'clock that evening, the cablesuddenly ceased to function. There had been anongoing stream of messages between the shipand the shore since the flotilla had departedValentia Bay, but now there was nothing. SamuelMorse, miserably seasick, was nonethelessroused from his bed, but he was unable to makethe cable come alive again, despite two and a halfhours of effort. All seemed lost and the engineerswere preparing to cut the cable and attempt tobring it back on board until the flaw could befound, an operation for which there was littleprecedent.

Suddenly the cable came back to life andbegan to function in a perfectly normal fashion.No one, then or since, has a satisfactoryexplanation for what happened. Morse himselfsuggested that in the course of the cable'sjumping out of its wheeled track and beingplaced back in it, it had been strained and thathad opened a breach in the gutta-perchainsulation, allowing seawater to short out the

circuit. Then when the cable reached the bottom,the seam had reclosed, either because of how itlay or because the water pressure forced theseam closed.

Regardless, the cable was once again working,and as John Mullahy, of the New York Tribune,one of several reporters on board the Niagara,wrote, "The glad news was soon circulatedthroughout the ship, and all felt as if they hadnew life."10

That evening, the speed of the cable slowlybegan to gain on the speed of the ship, and bynine o'clock Monday night, it was still runningout at the rate of five and half knots while theship had slowed to three knots. Bright orderedthe strain to be increased to twenty-five hundredpounds. It was not enough. As Bright stated inhis official report to the directors of thecompany, with "the wind and sea increasing, anda current at the same time carrying the cable atan angle from the direct line of the ship's course,

it was found insufficient to check the cable,which was at midnight making two and a halfknots above the speed of the ship, andsometimes imperiling the safe uncoiling in thehold."11 He increased the braking force to threethousand pounds at two A.M., and then to thirty-five hundred pounds.

Once the cable had mysteriously come back tolife, Cyrus Field went to bed in his cabin. But at aquarter to four, just as dawn was beginning tolighten the eastern horizon, he heard a suddenrush of voices from on deck, including theominous "Stop her! Back her!"12

Within seconds, Charles Bright was at hisdoor. "The cable's gone," he told him.13 Likemany disasters, this one had come about throughsimple bad luck. Charles Bright reported,

I had up to this attended personally to theregulation of the brakes, but finding that all wasgoing well, and on it being necessary that Ishould be temporarily away from the machine —

to ascertain the rate of the ship, to see bow thecable was coming out of the bold, and also tovisit the electrician's room—the machine was forthe moment left in charge of a mechanic whohad been engaged from the first in itsconstruction and fitting, and was acquaintedwith its operation.

In proceeding towards the fore part of theship I heard the machine stop. I immediatelycalled out to relieve the brakes, but when Ireached the spot the cable was broken. Onexamining the machine—which was otherwise inperfect working order—I found that the brakeshad not been released, and to this, or to thehand-wheel of the brake being turned the wrongway, may be attributed the stoppage andconsequent fracture of the cable.14

The stern of the Niagara had been in thetrough of a wave. As the ship rose, the strain onthe cable increased and the brake should havebeen eased to compensate, as Bright had been

doing all day. The sudden combination ofincreased strain and continued braking was toomuch, and the cable parted with a sound like apistol shot. The end of the cable vanished m aninstant and plunged to the depths of the sea,nearly two and a half miles down.

Field wasted no time on regrets. He orderedthe other ships to be signaled to heave to and fortheir captains to come on board the Niagara.Captain Hudson, commanding the Niagara,wrote that the disaster "made all hands of usthrough the day like a household or family whichhad lost their dearest friend, for officers and menhad been deeply interested in the success of theenterprise."5 Someone lowered the Niagara'sflag to half-mast and the other ships quicklyfollowed suit.

Field asked that the Agamemnon, Niagara,and Susquehanna remain at the site for a fewdays "to try certain experiments which will be ofgreat value to us. These included splicing the two

halves of the cable together while at sea andlaying it from both ships simultaneously. Whenthe experiments or, perhaps more accurately, thepractice runs were completed, the fleet was toproceed to Plymouth. Fie asked the Cyclops'scaptain to take precise soundings, which he didand then left for Valentia Bay. Meanwhile, Fieldboarded HMS Leopard and made for Portsmouthimmediately, where he intended to call a specialmeeting of the board of directors of the AtlanticTelegraph Company.

The directors quickly decided that it wouldnot be possible to make a second attempt thatyear. Four hundred miles of cable had beenirretrievably lost and there was not enough timeleft to manufacture more and remount theexpedition before the gales of autumn made theattempt too hazardous. When the Niagara andthe Agamemnon arrived in Plymouth, they wereordered to unload the remaining cable andreturn to duty in their respective navies.

No one directly connected with the enterprisewas discouraged by this failure, regrettable as itwas. As with any new technology, there wasmuch to learn and many failures to be expectedas engineers worked their way up the learningcurve. Already three things were clear. First, thepaying-out machinery, which had been hastilydesigned and built without taking into accountthe far greater weights involved in the Atlanticcable, needed to be redesigned and safetymechanisms employed to make it more difficultfor human error to come into play. Second, thevarious maneuvers involving the ships and thecable needed to be rehearsed thoroughly. Andthird, the crew needed to be better trained in thetechniques of cable laying. The chief engineercould not monitor it all by himself.

But while those directly involved weresanguine about the eventual outcome, publicopinion began to shift due to the accident. The I-told-you-sos, of course, were having a field dayand a parody of "Pop Goes the Weasel!" began

making the rounds:Pay it out! Oh, pay it outAs long as you are able:For it you put the damned brake on,Pop goes the cable!

7. AND LAY THE ATLANTIC CABLE IN AHEAP

IT WAS FORTUNATE that the AtlanticTelegraph Company had raised the £100,000 inadditional capital needed among its ownstockholders in Britain, for there would be nocapital available in the United States. As theNiagara and Agamemnon were attempting to laythe cable, a financial hurricane swept throughboth New York and the American economy.When Cyrus Field returned to New York in mid-September, it was blowing more fiercely thanever.

The American economy, which had endured asevere depression from 1837 to 1843, had begun

to expand again in the mid-1840s. Thisexpansion was greatly helped by the demands ofthe Mexican War, which erupted in 1846. Arapidly growing and increasingly assertive UnitedStates sought to reach the Pacific Ocean underthe doctrine of "manifest destiny." When it wasunable to negotiate the purchase of Mexico'svast, nearly empty northern provinces, bothcountries declared war. After a brilliant campaignto seize the Mexican capital led by ZacharyTaylor, who would be elected president in 1848because of it, Mexico had no choice but to seekterms. In 1848, in exchange for $15 million andthe assumption of American claims againstMexico, the latter ceded what is today roughlythe southwest quarter of the continental UnitedStates.

Even before the peace treaty had been ratified,however, gold was discovered east of SanFrancisco. As gold miners rushed in from all overthe world, a flood of gold, then legal tenderthroughout the world, was added to the

American economy. In 1847 the country hadproduced only 43,000 ounces of gold, mostly as aby-product of other mining. The next year,however, gold production reached 484,000ounces and the year after that, as miners floodedinto California by the tens of thousands, outputwas 1,935,000 ounces.

This flood of new wealth set off one of thecountry's great economic expansions. Productionof pig iron, a good measure of the economy asthe Industrial Revolution developed, increasedfrom 63,000 tons in 1850 to 883,000 tons onlysix years later. Coal production more thandoubled; railroad trackage tripled. Nearly asmany corporations were formed in the 1850s ashad been formed in the previous half century.

The exuberant boom had made possible theinitial funding of a project so fraught withuncertainty as the Atlantic cable. The sky was thelimit in 1854. By 1857 the situation had changed.

The American economy at this time lacked a

fundamental institution of a modern economy, acentral bank, one of the primary functions ofwhich is to provide a sound monetary systemand to guard the national economy againstexcesses of the business cycle by discipliningother banks as necessary.

President Andrew Jackson, however, aJeffersonian Democrat when it came toeconomic policy, hated all banks. He had killedthe Second Bank of the United States in 1835 byvetoing a renewal of its charter. There would notbe a successor institution until 1913, when theFederal Reserve was created. With state bankssubject only to the erratic control of stategovernments, they tended to make too manyloans in good times and issue too much papermoney. In bad times they tended to fail in largenumbers.

Thus economic booms in the United States inthe nineteenth century tended to run out ofcontrol, producing more goods and services than

could be absorbed by the economy. Thisoverproduction inevitably ended in catastrophiccrashes, followed by deep and long-lastingdepressions.

By August 1857, after nine years of rapidexpansion, the signs of economic trouble wereeverywhere. Six thousand textile looms in NewEngland were idle, and shipping crowded thecountry's harbors for lack of cargo. On August24, when a New York bank suddenly closed itsdoors in insolvency, prices on Wall Street beganto decline sharply. By September the weakerbanks and brokerages were collapsing. And whenit was learned that the steamer Central America,on its way from Panama with four hundredpassengers and, of more concern to Wall Street,millions in California gold, had sunk with fearfulloss of life off Cape Hatteras, Wall Streetcrashed.

Despite the fact that communication toEurope still required a minimum often days, the

panic soon spread to Europe, where the Banks ofFrance and England jacked up interest rates toprotect their currencies, and European investorsbegan pulling out of American securities.American banks were forced to suspendpayments in gold. The American economy wouldbe mired in depression for another four years.

Field arrived home just in time to learn thathis own paper firm, Field and Company, was inextremis, with $600,000 in debts and no way topay them because many of its accountsreceivable were temporarily uncollectible. Fieldimmediately called his creditors together andoffered them notes paying 7 percent interest. Thereputation for straight shooting that Field hadacquired when he paid off the debts of Root andCompany although he was not legally obligatedto do so now stood him in good stead. Hiscreditors accepted his proposal readily.

And it must have come as a slightly cheeringfact that when he arrived at his offices, he found

them full of men who were not there to collectmoney but desperate to utilize the services of theline to St. John's, Newfoundland, in hopes ofgetting word to or from London a few daysquicker. This powerfully confirmed Field'sprediction that there was a strong market forinstant transatlantic communication.

His personal affairs back in order, at least forthe moment, Field went to Washington andasked the secretary of the navy for two things,the use of the Niagara and Susquehanna in thenext attempt, and to have the engineering officerof the Niagara, William E. Everett, released fromhis naval duties so that he could work full-timeon the project. Everett, who had helped to designthe engines of the Niagara, had watched theoriginal paying-out machinery being installed onthe ship and had taken professional notice ofhow inadequate it was. He found it too complex,and with a braking system that applied pressuretoo abruptly. Everett had very clear ideas on howto improve matters and Field wanted his

undivided assistance.William Everett

Fortunately, the government was cooperativeand Secretary Isaac Touchy was able to handField an official letter, saying, "There, I havegiven you all you asked."1 A week after gettingTouchy's response, Field and Everett boarded theCunard liner Persia, built in 1855 and the largestand fastest transatlantic steamer of the time,capable of crossing the Atlantic in a little over

nine days.In London, William Everett was named chief

engineer of the company and proceeded to theengineering firm of Eston and Amos inSouthwark, across the Thames from Londonproper, where he spent six months designing andsupervising the construction of new paying-outmachinery. Its most innovative feature was anew brake system based on a design by J. G.Appold, a wealthy amateur mechanic.* The newbrakes could be set with a maximum brakingpressure according to circumstances and thebrakes would automatically release if the strainexceeded that limit, preventing the cable frombreaking and being lost. Demonstrated to Field,to Charles Bright, the chief engineer of theproject, and to a group of outside engineers,including Isambard Kingdom Brunel, thegreatest of British engineers who was later toplay a major part in making the Atlantic cablesuccessful, the new brake "seemed to have theintelligence of a human being, to know when to

hold on, and when to let go."2

The entire apparatus weighed only one-fourthwhat the previous machinery did and took uponly one-third the deck space. How well WilliamEverett did his job can be measured by the factthat the paying-out machinery of cable-layingships ever since has followed his brilliant design.

*In mid-Victorian times the gentlementinkerer, nearly extinct today, was still a commonphenomenon.

Everett's paying-out machine.William Thomson had also been striving to

improve matters for the next attempt, along withmaintaining his full workload at the Universityof Glasgow. \t was financially impossible to scrap

the entire cable and build a better one designedto his specifications, as too much had alreadybeen invested in it. But he carefully measuredthe electrical conductivity of the new cable andrejected any portions that were not up to thehighest level.

Thomson had also been thinking long andhard about the speed with which messages couldbe transmitted across a very long submarinecable. The electric impulses that make up thedots and dashes-of Morse code tend to smear outas they travel—the dots, in effect, turning intodashes and the dashes into longer dashes. Thismade it necessary to transmit fairly slowly. Thesolution of Dr. Whitehouse to this problem wasto force as strong a pulse of electricity as possibledown the wire. Dr. Whitehouse was still thecompany's head electrician, although Cyrus Fieldwas listening to him less and less and wasworking to have him removed from his position.He had already bought out Whitehouse'sfinancial interest in the company for $8,000.

Whitehouse, whose personality brooked nodissent, bitterly resented being edged out andrailed at "the frantic fooleries of the Americansin the person of Mr. Cyrus W. Field."

Thomson tried the opposite approach, a moresensitive device to receive the signal, capable ofreacting even to very faint ones. One dayThomson happened to be twirling his monoclearound its chain and he observed how it sent aspot of light dancing around the walls of theroom. In a classic "eureka moment," he had theanswer: the mirror galvanometer, a device thathas been fundamental to submarine telegraphyever since.

A galvanometer, first devised in 1802, is aninstrument for detecting electric current. Asimple galvanometer consists of a needle that isdeflected in the presence of a magnetic fieldinduced by current, much as a compass needle isdeflected by the earth's magnetic field. Thestronger the current, the greater the deflection.

But in a long submarine cable, immersed in aconducting medium— saltwater—the current isoften very low, sometimes no more than tenmicroamperes. (The current in a standardincandescent lightbulb is about 100,000 times asgreat.) The standard galvanometers thenavailable were often inadequate to detect a signalcoming through a cable that would be twothousand miles long. So Thomson—halfEinstein, half Edison—developed a much betterone. He took a very small magnet and attached atiny mirror to it. Both together weighed no morethan a grain.* He suspended the magnet from asilk thread and set it in the middle of a coil ofvery thin insulated copper wire.

When the faint current flowing through thecable was allowed to flow through the coppercoil, it created a magnetic field. This caused themagnet, with its attached mirror, to deflect.Thomson simply directed a beam of light from ashaded lamp onto the mirror and allowed itsreflection to hit a graduated scale. As the varying

current in the copper coil caused the magnet andmirror to deflect, the variations were greatlymagnified by the reflected beam of light and,using Morse code, could be read easily by anobserver at rates up to twenty words per minute,ten times the old rate. It was universallyacknowledged as a brilliant piece of appliedphysics. James Clerk Maxwell, the greatesttheoretical physicist of the age, even wrote apoem about it:

The lamplight falls on blackened walls,And streams through narrow perforations;The long beam trails o'er pasteboard scales,With slow, decaying oscillations.Flow, current, flow!Set the quick light-spot flying!Flow, current, answer, light-spot!Flashing, quivering, dying.3*WHEN FIELD HAD FIRST RETURNED to

England, the Atlantic Telegraph Company had

offered him the post of general manager of thecompany at the handsome salary of £1,000 ayear. Field declined the salary but accepted thepost.

The directors obviously did not share Dr.Wutehouse's opinion of Field. "The directorscannot close their observations to theshareholders," they wrote in a report, "withoutbearing their warm and cordial testimony to theuntiring zeal, talent, and energy that have beendisplayed on behalf of this enterprise by Mr.Cyrus W. Field, of New York, to whom mainlybelongs the honor of having practicallydeveloped the possibility and of having broughttogether the material means for carrying out thegreat idea of connecting Europe and America bya submarine telegraph. "4

*Maxwell's poem, which is several stanzaslong, is a parody of one of the lyrics found inTennyson's The Princess: A Medley, firstpublished in finished form in 1853. Tennyson, an

enormously popular poet in an age when poetrywas still widely read, had been named PoetLaureate in 1850 on the death of Wordsworth.Thirty years later, The Princess would serve asthe source of Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida,which Gilbert, typically, called "a respectfuloperatic perversion" of Tennyson's poem.

As spring approached, the second expeditionto lay the Atlantic cable began to lumber intoaction. The Niagara and the Agamemnon arrivedin Plymouth and began to take on the cable thathad been off-loaded the previous autumn and totake on as well the new cable that had beenmanufactured. The cable tiers of the two ships,large round spaces designed to hold the endlesscoils, had been fitted with cast-iron cones tomake stowing the cable easier and safer for thecable. The process took all of April and half ofMay to accomplish, as only about thirty miles ofcable could be stowed per day in each ship, forty-man crews working around the clock.

In late May, Field got word that the crew ofthe Susquehanna had been struck with yellowfever in the West Indies, and the ship wasquarantined. Field immediately called on SirJohn Pakington, first lord of the admiralty,* andasked for help. Although the Royal Navy was sopressed for ships itself that it was charteringsome, Pakington promised to see what he coulddo and within a few hours Field learned thatHMS Valorous, under Captain

W. C. Oldham, had been dispatched to takethe place of the Susquehanna.

After the cable had been loaded, the fleetproceeded in late May to deep water in the Bay ofBiscay. There it practiced the various techniquesof cable laying that the previous year's attempthad shown needed work: splicing the two halvesof the cable together while at sea, layingsimultaneously from both ships, and switchingfrom one coil to another. Because the two halvesof the cable had been armored with iron wires

having different lays—one spiraled to the right,the other to the left—an ordinary splice was notsufficient because the armoring would tend tountwist. So an elaborate wooden and ironcoupling device was created to ensure that thesplice would hold together. It was no small affair,being some twelve feet long and weighing threehundred pounds.

*The equivalent position m the Americangovernment would be secretary of the navy.

This time Cyrus Field had decided to followthe advice of his engineers, rather than hiselectricians, and lay both halves simultaneously.On Thursday, June 10, back from its successfulpractice run-through, the fleet of four vessels —USS Niagara, HMS Agamemnon., HMS Gorgon,and HMS Valorous — set off from Plymouth fora point in the mid-Atlantic, 52°2' N, 33°i8' W,from which the cable laying would begin.William Everett was on board the Niagara andCharles Bright and Samuel Canning on board

Agamemnon, as was William Thomson,substituting again for Edward Whitehouse, whohad, once again, pled illness. Samuel Morse wasabsent, having preferred to remain in New Yorkrather than face the certain seasickness to whichhe was so subject. His place was taken by C. V. deSauty, who had helped lay the cable across theBlack Sea during the Crimean War.

June has a reputation, not always deserved,for having the Atlantic's finest weather. And asthe fleet departed it could hardly have beenbetter. "Never did a voyage begin with betteromens," Henry Field reported. "The day was oneof the mildest of June, and the sea so still, thatone could scarcely perceive, by the motion of theship, when they passed beyond the breakwateroff Plymouth harbor into the channel, or into theopen sea. At night, it was almost a dead calm.The second day was like the first. There wasscarcely wind enough to swell the sails. "5

The third day, too, was fair and mild. But on

Sunday, June 13, the wind picked up and thebarometer began to fall. The cable fleet wassailing into the heart of one of the worst stormsin the history of the north Atlantic. Gorgon andValorous, small, nimble, and well founded, couldexpect to deal with even the worst of weather.But Niagara and Agamemnon were eachburdened with 1,500 tons of cable, tremendousloads for ships of only 5,200 and 3,500 tonsrespectively.

Indeed, the Agamemnon had had to store 250tons of the cable on its forward deck, high abovethe ship's center of gravity. This not only broughtthe ship down by the head but reduced herstability as well. And the cable stored below haddiminished the size of the ship's coal bunkers, so160 tons of coal had been stored in sacks on themain and gun decks, toward the stern to helpbalance the weight of the cable forward. Thesegreat and concentrated masses made sailing theAgamemnon, not a good sailor in the best ofcircumstances, extremely tricky.

As the storm strengthened, the shipsshortened sail and spread out to give each othersea room. Gorgon and Valorous were soon lostto view amid the deepening gloom of "a wretchedmist—half rain, half vapor"" and the increasinglytowering waves. But Niagara and Agamemnonwere to sight one another occasionallythroughout the ordeal.

On Saturday, June 12, the Agamemnon hadsailed under a cloud of canvas. By Sundayevening, however, she was under only close-reefed top sails and foresails. As the wind blewthe foam off the waves, the sea soon resembled"one vast snow drift, the whitish glare fromwhich—reflected from the dark clouds thatalmost rested on the sea—had a tremendous andunnatural effect, as if the ordinary laws of naturehad been reversed. "7

As the wind howled through the rigging andwater hissed beneath her keel, the Agamemnonadded the great variety of noises made by a large

wooden ship in a heavy sea. As Nicholas Woods,a reporter from The Times of London, noted,"The massive beams under her upper deck coilcracked and snapped with a noise resemblingthat of small artillery."8 As the ship worked, themassive weight of the coil of cable on her deckheld the seams of the planking open and allowedwater to pour into the ship. Sailors were soon setto the backbreaking labor of manning the pumps,which added their mournful, steady clanking tothe cacophony of sounds.

"The sea," Woods continued, "kept strikingwith dull, heavy violence against the vessel'sbows, forcing its way through the hawse-holesand ill-closed ports with a heavy slush; andthence, hissing and winding aft ... in some five orsix inches of dirty bilge," which soakedeverything, until "the ship was almost as wetinside as out."

"Such was Sunday night," the reporter noted,"and such was a fair average of all nights

throughout the week, varying only from bad toworse."

The next morning, although the barometerwas lower still and the wind and seas higher, thesun suddenly appeared and shone brilliantly forhalf an hour. But "during that brief time [thewind] blew as it had not often blown before. Sofierce was this gust that it drowned out everyother sound, and it was almost impossible to givethe watch the necessary orders for taking in theclose-reefed foresail, which, when furled, almostleft the Agamemnon under bare poles, thoughstill surging through the water at speed."

On Tuesday the barometer rose somewhat, to29.3 inches, and there was enough sun to allowan officer to take a sextant reading anddetermine that the ship was 563 miles from themid-Atlantic rendezvous. But during theafternoon, "the Agamemnon took to violentpitching, plunging steadily into the trough of thesea as if she meant to break her back and lay the

Atlantic cable in a heap."The Agamemnon was now rolling steadily

thirty degrees to either side of vertical, oftenmore. The masts, cutting arc after arc across theleaden sky, worked their wire shrouds loose, andit was possible to see the masts bending at everyoscillation. Under the circumstances, there wasnothing to be done, but everyone on board knewwhat the loss of the masts would mean. Theyacted as a counterweight to dampen theAgamemnon's wild rolling, and if the mastswent, the ship would certainly capsize. Otherthings were also coming loose. The ship's largestboat, stored on her main deck, had partly brokenfree of its restraints and swung from side to sideof the ship as she rolled, threatening to crusheveryone on deck as the crew wrestled the multi-ton vessel into submission.

For six days the storm raged around the cablefleet before diminishing. On Saturday, June 19,"the barometer seemed inclined to go up and the

sea to go down; and for the first time that mom-ing since the gale began, six days previous, thedecks could be walked with tolerable comfortand security." It was not to last, and "during acomparative calm that afternoon the glass felllower, while a thin line of black haze towindward seemed to grow up into the sky, untilit covered the heavens with a somber darkness,and warned us that the worst was yet to come.There was much heavy rain that evening, andthen the wind began, not violently, nor in gusts,but with a steadily increasing force, as if the galewas determined to do its work slowly but do itwell."

On Sunday, June 20, the storm unleashed afury such as few sailors ever see and even fewerlive to teE about. The captain feared that the coilon the deck, working against its restraints, mightbreak lose and smash through the side,undoubtedly causing the ship to founder. Heordered that the coil's restraints be reinforced.

But the 250 tons of cable on deck still soughtfreedom like some chained beast as the shiprolled from side to side, straining the timbersthat supported her (and held the ship together)to the breaking point. One of the beamssupporting the lower deck cracked under thestrain and had to be shored up with jack screwsby the ship's carpenters. As the stormrelentlessly deepened, everyone not activelyemployed jammed themselves in corners or heldon to beams to prevent being flung about likedice in a cup. The reporter wrote,

At ten o'clock, the Agamemnon was rollingand laboring fearfully, with the sky gettingdarker, and both wind and sea increasing everyminute. At about half-past ten o'clock three orfour gigantic waves were seen approaching theship, coming slowly on through the mist nearerand nearer, rolling on like hills of green water,with a crown of foam that seemed to double theirheight. The Agamemnon rose heavily to the first,and then went down quickly into the deep trough

of the sea, falling over as she did so, so almost tocapsize completely on the port side. There was afearful crashing as she lay over this way, foreverything broke adrift, whether secured or not,and the uproar and confusion were terrific for aminute, then back she came again on thestarboard beam in the same manner, onlyquicker and still deeper than before.

The off-watch officers in the ward roomrushed to the ward room door, leading to themain deck. "Here," the reporter continued, "foran instant, the scene almost defies description.

Amid the loud shouts and efforts to savethemselves, a confused mass of sailors, boys, andmarines, with deck-buckets, ropes, ladders, andeverything that could get loose, and which hadfallen back again to the port side, were beinghurled again in a mass across the ship tostarboard. Dimly, and only for an instant, couldthis be seen, with groups of men clinging to thebeams with all their might, with a mass of water,which had forced its way in through ports anddecks, surging about."

Then, in the midst of this chaos, "with atremendous crash, as the ship fell still deeperover, the coals stowed on the main deck brokeloose, and smashing everything before them,went over among the rest to leeward."

Many of the sacks in which the coal wasstored ripped open and choking coal dust blottedout what feeble light there was. "But the crashingcould still be heard going on in all directions, asthe lumps and sacks of coal, with stanchions,

ladders, and mess-tins, went leaping about thedecks, pouring down the hatchways, andcrashing through the glass skylights into theengine-room below." As the Agamemnon lurchedonce more sickeningly to port, the coal stored onthe gun deck gave way as well.

Captain Preedy ordered hands to bring theship onto the other tack. It was a perilousmaneuver, at best, in such conditions, but theship would ride more easily on that course. Itwould also take them away from the rendezvous,but he had no choice. Hundreds of tons of coaland debris were surging back and forthbelowdecks as the ship rolled from side to side atup to forty-five degrees. Not even the mighty oaksides of a ship of the line could take that for long.

The Niagara, far larger and better designed,fared better in the storm and would suffer onlymoderate damage. But those on board werepowerless to help the Agamemnon and couldonly look on when she was in sight.

Preedy thought also of cutting loose the cableon deck and wrestling it over the side. From thebeginning of the storm, that had been CyrusField's worst nightmare, and every time theNiagara sighted the Agamemnon, he looked withgreat anxiety to see if the cable — and thus allhope for a successful expedition — still rode onAgamemnon's deck. Jettisoning the cable wouldhave increased the speed with which the shiprolled, but lessened the amplitude. Preedydecided to wait on that fateful step, at least fornow.

The officers shouted orders to the crew withprecision and the crew tried to obey, but theconditions made it almost impossible. "Theofficers were quite inaudible," the reporterwrote, "and a wild, dangerous sea, runningmountains high, heeled the great ship backwardand forward so that the crew were unable to keeptheir feet for an instant, and in some cases werethrown clear across the decks in a fearfulmanner." Yet somehow the maneuver was

accomplished and the Agamemnon steadied onher new course.

Officers went below to tend to the manyinjured and to get the coal and other looseobjects under control. Although the cable storedon the deck had held fast, the cable in the holdhad not. "The top kept working and shifting overfrom side to side, as the ship lurched, until someforty or fifty miles were in a hopeless state oftangle, resembling nothing so much as a cargo oflive eels, and there was every prospect of thetangle spreading deeper and deeper as the badweather continued."

Once matters were under some sort of controlbelowdecks, Captain Preedy decided to return tothe port tack, on course for the rendezvous. Butas the ship went about, she "fell into the troughof the sea again, and rolled so awfully as to breakher wastesteampipe, filling her engine room withsteam, and depriving her of the services of oneboiler when it was sorely needed."

"The sun set," the reporter continued, woefulbut undaunted, "upon as wild and wicked a nightas ever taxed the courage and coolness of asailor. . . . [Of all on board none had ever seen afiercer or more dangerous sea than ragedthroughout the night and the following morning,tossing the Agamemnon from side to side like amere plaything among the waters."

The next morning it had become increasinglyclear that the Agamemnon was nearing the endof her endurance. "The masts were rapidlygetting worse, the deck coil worked more andmore with each tremendous plunge, and, even ifboth these held, it was evident that the ship itselfwould soon strain to pieces if the weathercontinued so."

There were three possibilities available toCaptain Preedy. He could return to the starboardtack, and risk broaching to (presenting the sideof the ship to the waves and putting her in greatdanger of capsizing) in the process. Or he could

attempt to run before the storm, placing thewind at his stern. This would greatly ease themotion of the ship, but it was a dangerouscourse. Unless very carefully handled — andperhaps even then—a wave might stave in thestern galleries and send hundreds of tons ofwater surging along the decks, driving the shipunderwater to her doom. Finally, he couldjettison the deck coil, an expedient he wouldadopt only to save his ship from certaindestruction.

He ordered the Agamemnon over onto thestarboard tack, and while the head came about,the ship wallowed in the trough of a wave and"all the rolls which she had ever given on theprevious day seemed mere trifles compared withher performance then. . . . It really appeared asthough the last hour of the stout ship had come,and to this minute it seems almost miraculousthat her masts held on. Each time she fell over,her main chains went deep under water. Thelower decks were flooded, and those above could

hear by the fearful crashing—audible amid thehoarse roar of the storm—that the coals hadgotten loose again below, and had broken intothe engine room, and were carrying all beforethem."

Providentially, the Agamemnon rallied andcame onto the starboard tack. The wisp of sailshe was showing filled and she regained her way,but her motion remained as bad as on the oldtack. Preedy then "succumbed to the storm hecould neither conquer nor contend against. Fullsteam was got on, and with a foresail and a fore-topsail to lift her head the Agamemnon ranbefore the storm, rolling and tumbling over thehuge waves at a tremendous pace."

ALL STORMS MUST END, and finally, as theAgamemnon galloped before the wind, this one,too, began to moderate. By 4:00 A.M. Tuesday,the weather had abated enough to allow theAgamemnon to resume course toward therendezvous, now some two hundred miles

farther away than it had been Sunday morning.It was Friday, June 25, sixteen days since

leaving Plymouth, when the Agamemnon arrivedat ^i°i N, 33°i8'

W. "As we approached the place of meeting,"the relieved and doubtless exhausted reporter forThe Times of London reported, "the angry seawent down.'The Valorous hove in sight at noon;in the afternoon the Niagara came in from thenorth; and at even the Gorgon from the south:and then, almost for the first time since starting,the squadron was reunited near the spot wherethe great work was to have commenced fifteendays previously—as tranquil in the middle of theAtlantic as if in Plymouth Sound."

Cyrus Field had a boat lowered and rowedover to the Agamemnon. He found the deck ashambles, the white planking on which the RoyalNavy had so long prided itself black with coaldust. While miraculously no one had been killed,forty-five men were in sick bay with injuries

ranging from broken arms to temporary insanity,and a hundred miles of the cable was in alaoconian tangle. But by the next afternoon, theweather now cold and foggy but calm, the twoships were ready to begin the cable laying.

They maneuvered stern to stern and theNiagara's cable was brought aboard theAgamemnon, where the two halves were spliced.A bent sixpence was placed in the splicing devicefor luck and it was lowered over the side. Buthardly had the two ships begun to move apartwhen, as Captain Hudson recorded in theNiagara's log, "the cable, being hauled in thewrong direction, through the excitement andcarelessness of one of the men, caught andparted in the Niagara's machinery. "9

The loss of cable was insignificant, and thetwo halves were soon respliced and the layingbegan again. Field estimated that in five days thetwo ships would reach their respectivedestinations and the job would be done. But the

next morning at 3:30 A.M., when each ship hadlaid about forty miles of cable, ProfessorThomson came out onto the deck of theAgamemnon to say that the line had gone dead.At nearly the same instant, Field and C. V. deSauty, the electrician on board Niagara,announced the same thing. It was assumed thatthe cable had parted somehow, but each shipassumed that the problem must be on the othership, as everything was normal as far as theycould see. Following Field's orders, both shipsreturned to the rendezvous. When they came insight of each other, Niagara ran up the signal,"How did the cable part?"10

"This was astounding," Nicholas Woodsreported. "As soon as the boats could be lowered,Mr. Cyrus Field, with the electricians from theNiagara, came on board, and a comparison oflogs showed the painful and mysterious fact that,at the same second of time, each vesseldiscovered that a total fracture had taken place at

a distance of certainly not less than ten milesfrom each ship: in fact as well as can be judged,at the bottom of the ocean."11

But while the cause was — and remains — anutter mystery, there was no time for thoroughinvestigations. Supplies were running short.Field called the engineers and electricians —Bright, Canning, and Thomson from theAgamemnon, and Everett and de Sauty from theNiagara—to a conference on board the Niagara.They agreed to the following proposal, writtendown by Field: "Should any accident occur topart the cable before the ships have run ahundred miles from rendezvous ... the ships shallreturn to rendezvous and wait eight days, when,if the other ships do not appear, then proceed toQueenstown."12 Everyone signed the agreement.

The cable was spliced between the two shipsonce more — the eighty miles that had been laidwere lost when each ship returned to therendezvous — and again the two ships parted.

And at first all went well. "The scene at night wasbeautiful," someone on the Niagara reported,"Scarcely a word was spoken; silence wascommanded, and no conversation allowed.Nothing was heard but the strange rattling of themachine as the cable was running out. The lightsabout the deck and in the quarter deck circleadded to the singularity of the spectacle; andthose who were on board the ship describe thestate of anxious suspense in which all were heldas exceedingly impressive.” 3

On the Agamemnon, too, all went well. "Atnine o'clock by ship's time" on Tuesday evening,Nicholas Woods reported, "when 146^ miles hadbeen payed out and about 112 miles' distancefrom the rendezvous accomplished, the last flakebut one of the upper deck coil came in turn to beused."14

This meant that the transfer from the deckcoil to the main coil would have to be effected inthe middle of the night. But the maneuver had

been rehearsed in the Bay of Biscay and therewas every confidence that it would go without ahitch. The ship and the paying-out machinerywere slowed in anticipation, the screw beingreduced from thirty revolutions per minute totwenty while the paying-out machinery slowedfrom thirty-six to twenty-two. There was barely aton of strain registering on the Agamemnon'sdynamometer when, near midnight, the cablesuddenly snapped and the end vanished over thestern.

On board the Niagara, they knew at once thatthe cable had parted and that this time the breakwas very near the Agamemnon. Field waited fora while, hoping against hope that the signalwould return, as it had returned the previousyear. When it did not, he reluctantly ordered theNiagara to make for Queenstown, in accordancewith the agreement, as both ships had gone morethan one hundred miles from the rendezvous.Captain Preedy made a different decision,deciding that as he was only fourteen miles over

the hundred-mile limit, he would seek torendezvous once again. He headed back to therendezvous point and searched for the Niagarafor a week, often in thick fog, until he, too, madefor Queenstown, arriving a week after theNiagara.

It would turn out that the lowest section ofthe cable in the deck coil, lying directly on thedeck, had been damaged by the violent stormthat had nearly cost the Agamemnon her life. Itwas this that was paying out when the ruptureoccurred. The storm had gotten in its final lickafter all.

Cyrus Field, though certainly discouraged,was not dismayed. It was, for all thedisappointment, only a technical misfortune thathad robbed him of success, not some basic flawin the scheme itself. He was determined to tryagain, but he needed to persuade the directors.

8. Lightning Through

Deep Waters

ONCE THE AGAMEMNON RETURNED toQueenstown, Field, Thomson, and Bright leftimmediately for London to meet with the boardof directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company.The news of the second failure had, of course,reached London ahead of them. The board,which had been in high hopes in the spring, wasnow sunk in gloom and defeat. Henry Field, whoundoubtedly heard directly from his brother,reported that "the feeling— to call it by themildest name—was one of extremediscouragement. They looked blankly in eachother's faces. With some, the feeling was onealmost of despair."1

The chairman of the board, Sir WilliamBrown, a prominent Liverpool merchant deeplyinvolved in transatlantic trade and founder of the

great banking house of Brown, Shipley, had beenunable to attend the board meeting in London,but he sent a downbeat message. "We must alldeeply regret our misfortune," he wrote, "in notbeing able to lay the cable. I think there isnothing to be done but dispose of what is left onthe best terms we can."2 He then wanted to paythe bills, distribute what was left over to thestockholders, and liquidate the corporation.

Field protested this unbridled pessimism butfound diat it was seconded by the vice chairmanof the board, T. H. Brooking, who was presentand who had until this last setback been amongthe enterprise's most ardent supporters. Heannounced that he was "determined to take nofurther part in an undertaking which had provedhopeless, and to persist in which seemed mererashness and folly."3 Brooking then walked outof the meeting and sent in his resignation thenext day, as did Brown.

Field, staggered by these defections,

addressed the rest of the board and called on allhis considerable ability as a salesman topersuade them to carry on for one more try. Hepointed out that while three hundred miles ofcable had been lost in the most recentexpedition, enough still remained to do the job.He also pointed out that the ships and crewswere in Queenstown, the cable loaded. Theyneeded only coal and supplies and some repairsto the battered Agamemnon to be ready foranother attempt. Bright and Thomson backedhim strongly, pointing out that valuableexperience had been gained from the previousfailures, making success more probable thistime.

Realizing that there was little to lose, except acouple of thousand miles of submarine telegraphcable of dubious resale value, the board wentalong with Field and his technical staff Field andSamuel Gurney, a board member, then wentimmediately to the admiralty and orders weretelegraphed to the cable fleet to get ready to sail

as soon as possible. Field, Thomson, and Brightreturned to Queenstown, and on Saturday, July17, the fleet sailed out of the Cove of Cork to tryonce more.

This time there were no cheers from shore.Indeed, as Nicholas Woods of The Times ofLondon noted, "There was apparently no noticetaken of their departure by those on shore or inthe vessels anchored around them. Everyoneseemed impressed with the conviction that wewere engaged in a hopeless enterprise; and thesquadron seemed rather to have slunk away onsome discreditable mission than to have sailedfor the accomplishment of a grand nationalscheme."4 THE EXPEDITION WASEXPERIENCING THE EFFECTS of one of themost important but least recognizeddevelopments of the Industrial Revolution,public opinion. The rotary steam press, inventedin the 1820s, had made possible newspapersprinting thousands, and soon tens of thousands,

of copies an issue. When this capability wascombined with the idea of politicallyindependent newspapers appealing to a massaudience in the next decade, the modern mediawere born.

In the 1805, the telegraph made it possible fornewspapers throughout a wide area to cover thesame story in real time, both powerfully moldingpublic opinion and expressing it in such devicesas letters to the editor. It was soon almostimpossible to imagine a world without this newforce. "The daily newspaper," wrote the NorthAmerican Review in 1866, "is one of those thingswhich are rooted in the necessities of moderncivilization. The steam engine is not moreessential to us. The newspaper is that whichconnects each individual with the general lire ofmankind.' 5

Many people, deeply disappointed at the latestfailure and influenced by the pessimism of manymembers of the board, had decided that the

Atlantic cable was a wild-goose chase. Evenmany on board the ships thought "they weregoing on a fool's errand; that the company waspossessed by a kind of insanity, of which theywould be cured by another bitter experience.""

The voyage to the rendezvous was relativelyuneventful, with periods of both dead calm andstiff breeze. "Indeed," wrote Nicholas Woods,"until the rendezvous was gained, we had such asuccession of beautiful sunrises, gorgeoussunsets, and tranquil moonlit nights as wouldhave excited the most enthusiastic admiration ofany one but persons situated as we were. "7

The Agamemnon did not reach therendezvous until Wednesday, July 28, five daysafter the Niagara got there. The next day wasperfect for making the splice. Cyrus Field, notgiven to flights of language, recorded the detailsand the task ahead in his journal.

Thursday, July 29, latitude fifty-two degreestwenty-seven minutes west, longitude thirty-two

degrees twenty-seven minutes west. Telegraphfleet all in sight; sea smooth; light wind from SEto SSE; cloudy. Splice made at one P.M. Signalsthrough the whole length of the cable on boardboth ships perfect. Depth of water fifteenhundred fathoms; distance to the entrance ofValentia harbor eight hundred and thirteennautical miles, and from there to the telegraph-house the shore end of the cable is laid. Distanceto the entrance of Trinity Bay, Newfoundland,eight hundred and twenty-two nautical miles,and from there to the telegraph-house at thehead of the bay of Bull's Arm, sixty miles,making in all eight hundred and eighty-twonautical miles. The Niagara has sixty-nine milesfurther to run than the Agamemnon, TheNiagara and Agamemnon have each elevenhundred nautical miles of cable on board, aboutthe same as last year.

The Agamemnon and Niagara.

Later he described his own mood. "When Ithought of all that we had passed through, of thehopes thus far disappointed, of the friendssaddened by our reverses, of the few thatremained to sustain us, I felt a load at my heartalmost too heavy to bear, though my confidencewas firm and my determination fixed."?

The splice, weighted with a thirty-two-poundcannonball after its lead sinker fell off, waslowered over the stern of the Agamemnon, andafter 210 fathoms of cable was payed out, the twoships began their journeys. The ships stayed in

constant contact with an exchange of currentsent every ten minutes, alternately by each ship.In addition, every time ten more miles of cablehad been payed out by one ship, the informationwas conveyed to the other, via the cable, as weremessages regarding momentary slowdowns orstoppages to allow for switching coils or splicing.

Within a few hours the ships increased theirspeeds, the Agamemnon moving at about fiveknots while the cable payed out at six knots.Shortly after the speed was increased, a "verylarge whale"10 appeared off the Agamemnon'sstarboard bow, apparently making directly forthe cable. "Great was the relief of all," Woodswrote, "when the ponderous living mass wasseen slowly to pass astern, just grazing the cablewhere it entered the water— but fortunatelywithout doing any mischief"11

At eight o'clock that night, the first crisisoccurred. A damaged portion of the cable wasdiscovered just a mile or two from what was

being payed out at that instant, and it would beonly about twenty minutes until it vanished overthe side. Workmen frantically tried to repair thebad spot, for everyone was most reluctant to stopeither the ship or the cable, for fear of causing abreak. But then the cable suddenly stoppedtransmitting.

The engineers immediately assumed that thedamaged part must be responsible, and orderedit cut out and a splice begun. The ship wasstopped and no more cable was payed out thanabsolutely necessary to prevent its breakingwhen the Agamemnon's stern rose in a swell.The Times of London reporter wrote,

The main hold presented an extraordinaryscene. Nearly all the officers of the ship and ofthose connected with the expedition stood ingroups about the coil, watching with intenseanxiety the cable as it slowly unwound itselfnearer and nearer the joint, while the workmenworked at the splice as only men could work who

felt that the life and death ol the expeditiondepended upon their rapidity. But all their speedwas to no purpose, as the cable was unwindingwithin a hundred fathoms; and, as a last anddesperate resource, the cable was stoppedaltogether, and for a few minutes the ship hungon only by the end. Fortunately, however, it wasonly for a few minutes, as the strain wascontinually rising above two tons and it wouldnot hold much longer. When the splice wasfinished the signal was made to loose thestoppers, and it passed overboard in safety.12

The signal from the Niagara, however, did notreturn. The fault, after all, lay elsewhere betweenthe two ships. Field, on board the Niagara, wastold by de Sauty that the cable was sound butthat the current was just not coming through.There was nothing to do but wait and hope. Areporter on board from the Sydney MorningHerald wrote, "The scene in and about theelectrical room was such as I shall never forget.

The two clerks on duty, watching, with thecommon anxiety depicted on their faces, for apropitious signal; Dr. Thompson, in a perfectfever of nervous excitement, shaking like anaspen leaf, yet in mind keen and collected,testing and waiting. . . . Mr. Bright, standing likea boy caught in a fault, his lips and cheekssmeared with tar, biting his nails and looking tothe professor for advice.... The eyes of all weredirected on the instruments, watching for theslightest quiver indicative of life.":3

And life returned. Just as had happened theprevious year, the cable suddenly beganfunctioning again, as mysteriously as it stopped.It was later determined that the problem lay withone of the batteries aboard the Niagara.

The next morning another crisis hit as asextant reading showed that the Niagara waspaying out more cable than the distance coveredwould warrant. At that rate, there would not beenough cable to reach Newfoundland. This time,

there was both a simple explanation and an easysolution. The tons of iron that made up thearmoring of the cable was affecting the compassreadings and the Niagara was seriously offcourse.* Field ordered HMS Gorgon to run aheadof the Niagara and lead the way.

On the Agamemnon the chief problem wasfuel. The ship had used more fuel than expectedon its way out to the rendezvous, owing toheadwinds, and now encountered them againwhile traveling in the opposite direction. "Duringthe evening," Nicholas Woods reported,"topmasts were lowered, and spars, yards, sails,and indeed everything aloft that could offerresistance to the wind, were sent down on deck.Still the ship made but little way, chiefly inconsequence of heavy sea, though the enormousquantity of fuel-consumed showed us that if thewind lasted, we should be reduced to burning themasts, spars, and even the decks, to bring theship into Valentia."1^

^Although the Earth's magnetic field is verylarge—eight thousand miles between positiveand negative poles—it is very weak. An ordinaryhousehold magnet is stronger. As ironincreasingly replaced wood in ship construction,means had to be devised to shield the compassfrom the efFects of the ship's own magnetic field.These means would be developed in the 1870s by—who else?—William Thomson.

But the next day the wind came around tosouthwest and allowed the ship to conserve fuelby hoisting some sail. The southwest wind, alas,promptly blew up into a full gale and Bright,Canning, and the other engineering staff had tobe on constant vigil to see that the brakes wererelieved at the right moments to prevent thecable from snapping. Everyone on board halfexpected to hear the gun announcing disaster atany moment. After all, as Nicholas Woodsexplained, the cable "in comparison with the shipfrom which it was payed out, and the giganticwaves among which it was delivered, was but a

mere thread. "J5 But the thread held, "onlyleaving a silvery phosphorescent line upon thestupendous seas."1"

By this point the ships were well past thepoint of no return; there was not enough cableremaining for another try if it broke again.

The Niagara was having an easier time of it,and Field's journal records steady progress, withhardly anything more exciting than sighting aCunard liner en route from Boston to Liverpooland exchanging greetings by signal flag. TheAgamemnon also encountered a ship, but sherequired rather more emphatic communications."About three o'clock on Tuesday morning[August 3]," Woods wrote, "all on board werestartled from their beds by the loud booming of agun. Everyone — without waiting for theperformance of the most particular toilet —rushed on deck to ascertain the cause of thedisturbance."

It was not, as many must have feared, that the

cable had parted yet again. Instead, HMSValorous had rounded to and was firing gun aftergun across the bow of an American bark steeringa course that would take her directly astern ofthe Agamemnon and across the cable. Thisquickly got the attention of those aboard theAmerican vessel, which put the sails aback andhove to until the cable expedition was lost tosight.

"Whether those on board her considered thatwe were engaged in some filibusteringexpedition," Nicholas Woods wrote, "or regardedour proceedings as another outrage upon theAmerican flag, it is impossible to say."1?*

As the Agamemnon's escort was fending offthe American vessel, the ship to which she wastethered by a line now some sixteen hundredmiles long was approaching North America. TheNiagara sighted icebergs later that day, some ofthem a hundred feet high and wreathed m "acorona of fleecy white clouds."1® The icebergs

confirmed what sextant readings indicated: theywere near the Grand Banks, the great fishinggrounds off Newfoundland. A sounding wastaken and bottom was found only two hundredfathoms down. The Niagara had reached thecontinental shelf Sixteen hundred miles away, atfive o'clock that evening, ship's time, theAgamemnon reached the steep rise from thetelegraph plateau, and at ten o'clock she alsofound bottom on the continental shelf

With a far shorter length of cable hangingfrom the sterns of the two ships, and thus muchless weight, the danger of its suddenly snappingwas greatly reduced, and hope began to growquickly on each ship that success was, at last, athand.

Nicholas Woods wrote,By daylight on trie morning of Thursday, the

jth, the bold rocky mountains which entirelysurround the wild and picturesque neighborhoodof Valencia rose right before us at a few miles

distance. Never, probably, was the sight of landmore welcome, as it brought to a successfultermination one of the greatest, but at the sametime most difficult, schemes which was everundertaken. Had it been the dullest and mostmelancholy swamp on the face of the earth thatlay before us, we should have found it a pleasantprospect; but as the sun rose behind the estuaryof Dingle Bay, tinging with a deep, soft purplethe lofty summits of the steep mountains whichsurround its shores, illuminating the masses ofmorning vapor which hung upon them, it was ascene which might vie in beauty with anythingthat could be produced by the most floridimagination of an artist. *9

*The War of 1812, which had largely beencaused by the refusal of the Royal Navy torespect the American flag at sea, was still wellwithin living memory in the late 1850s.

A day earlier, on Wednesday, August 4, theNiagara made landfall at Newfoundland. "Made

land off entrance to Trinity Bay at eight AM,"wrote Cyrus Field in his journal. "Entered TrinityBay at half-past twelve.... At five PM saw HerMajesty's steamer Porcupine coming to us."20

All on board the Niagara were quite as movedby the sun setting behind Newfoundland asthose on the Agamemnon were by the sunriseover Ireland. "All who have visited Trinity Bay,"wrote James Mullahy of the New York Herald, ".. . with one consent allow it to be one of the mostbeautiful sheets of water they ever set eyes upon.Its color is very peculiar—an inexpressiblemingling of the pure blue ocean with the deepevergreen woodlands and the serene blue sky. Itsextreme length is about eighty miles, its breadthabout thirty miles, opening boldly into theAtlantic on the northern side of the island. At itssouthwestern shore it branches into the Bay ofBull's Arm, which is a quiet, safe, and beautifulharbor, about two miles in breadth and nine orten in length, running in a direction north-

west."21

Captain Otter of the Porcupine came aboardthe Niagara to act as pilot as the ship made herway up Trinity Bay, and at 1:45 A.M., Thursday,August 5, the ships anchored at the head of Bull'sArm Bay. Although it was the middle of thenight, Field immediately had a boat lowered andhad himself rowed ashore, where he wentlooking for the telegraph house about a mileinland. More or less lost in the dark, he finallyfound it and walked into the pitch dark house,where he could hear the quiet breathing of mensleeping.

He shouted for them to wake up, yelling, "Thecable is laid!"22 A light was lit and the menstared at him in astonishment. They weremaintenance men and no operator able to send amessage was present. The nearest point on theline where that was possible was fifteen milesaway and Field asked for a volunteer to go there,taking messages. The first was to his wife, Mary.

"Arrived here yesterday. All well. The Atlantictelegraph cable successfully laid. Pleasetelegraph me here immediately."3 Next he sentmessages to his father and to the AssociatedPress and Peter Cooper, giving brief details and,characteristically, sharing the credit widelyamong the captain of the Niagara, theelectricians and engineers; "and, in fact, everyman on board the telegraph fleet has exertedhimself to the utmost to make the expeditionsuccessful. By the blessing of Divine Providenceit has succeeded."4 Finally he telegraphedPresident Buchanan, telling him of the success,that a message from Queen Victoria would soonbe sent and afterward the line would be heldopen for his reply.

"At a quarter-past five AM," Field wrote in hisjournal, with remarkable lack of emotion,"telegraph cable landed. At six, end of cablecarried into the telegraph-house, and receivedvery strong currents of electricity through the

whole cable from the other side of the Atlantic.Captain Hudson, of the Niagara, then readprayers and made some remarks. At one PM, herMajesty's steamer Gorgon fired a royal salute oftwenty-one guns."5

Remote as Valentia Bay is from the rest ofIreland, it was metropolitan compared with thenearly uninhabited wilderness of Trinity Bay,Newfoundland. And when HMS Valoroussteamed ahead and fired a gun to alert thepopulation to the arrival of the telegraph fleet,"there was a general desertion of the place, andhundreds of boats crowded around us," NicolasWoods reported. The knight of Kerry was absentin Dingle, across Dingle Bay from Valentia, buthe soon arrived in a Royal Navy gunboat. Theend of the cable was loaded into boats from theValorous and brought ashore.

"The end was seized by the jolly tars," wroteWoods, "and run off with." But they were not tohave the honor of bringing to land the Atlantic

cable uncontested, and a good-humored scuffletook place for possession of the cable, betweenmen from the ship and men from on shore,including the knight of Kerry, who waded intothe surf and promptly fell. Finally the cable wasbrought ashore by Charles Bright, SamuelCanning, and the drenched knight of Kerry, andlaid in a prepared trench.

Even before the cable was attached to thelandlme awaiting it, Charles Bright telegraphed amessage to the board of directors in London, amessage instantly passed on to the press. "TheAgamemnon has arrived in Valentia, and we areabout to land the cable. The Niagara is in TrinityBay, Newfoundland. There are good signalsbetween the ships."

A WORLD-TRANSFORMING EVENT hadtaken place and, thanks to that event, the entireWestern world, from the Missouri River in NorthAmerica to the Volga in Russia, learned of itnearly simultaneously. The reaction was titanic.

George Templeton Strong, the New Yorkdiarist and Field's neighbor on Gramercy Park,was much given to viewing the glass as halfempty. But he wrote in his diary on August 5 that"all Wall Street stirred up into excitement thismorning, in spite of the sultry weather, by thescreeching newsboys with their extras.

The Niagara has arrived at Trinity Bay withher end of the telegraph cable in perfect workingorder. But the Agamemnon has not yet linkedher end at Valentia. . . . The transmission of asingle message from shore to shore will bememorable in the world's history for though Idare say this cable will give out before long, itwill be the first successful experiment in bindingthe two continents together, and thecommunication will soon be permanentlyestablished."2^

Five days later he reported, "Everybody allagog about the Atlantic Cable. Telegraph officesin Wall Street decorated with flags of all nations

and sundry fancy pennons besides, suspendedacross the street. Newspapers full of the theme,and of demonstrations the event has producedfrom New Orleans to Portland. . . . Newspapersvie with each other in gas and grandiloquence.Yesterday's Herald said that the cable (orperhaps Cyrus W. Field, uncertain which) isundoubtedly the Angel in the Book of Revelationwith one foot on sea and one foot on land,proclaiming that Time is no longer. Moderatepeople merely say that this is the greatest humanachievement in history. "7

An 1858 Leslie s cartoon of Father Neptunereceiving a shock from the cable.

Field's brother David wired, "Your family is allat Stockbridge and well. The joyful news arrivedhere Thursday, and almost overwhelmed yourwife. Father rejoiced like a boy. Mother was wildwith delight. Brothers, sisters, all were overjoyed.Bells were rung, guns fired; children let out ofschool, shouted, 'The cable is laid! The cable islaid!' The village was in a tumult of joy. My dearbrother, I congratulate you. God Bless you."28

In London, The Times, not a newspaper easilycarried away or noted for a pro-American stance,wrote that "since the discovery of Columbus,nothing has been done in any degree comparableto the vast enlargement which has thus beengiven to the sphere of human activi ty. . . . TheAtlantic is dried up, and we become in reality aswell as in wish one country.... The AtlanticTelegraph has half undone the declaration of1^776, and has gone far to make us once again,in spite of ourselves, one people."2?

When Queen Victoria heard the news she

forthwith conferred a knighthood on CharlesBright, only twenty-six, and said that she wouldhave knighted Cyrus Field as well had he been aBritish subject. Because the queen was thenabroad, the dubbing ceremony was performed bythe earl of Carlisle as lord lieutenant of Ireland.President Buchanan telegraphed Field in TrinityBay to congratulate him "with all my heart uponthe success of the great enterprise with whichyour name is so honorably connected. "3°Besides the president, Field was inundated withmessages from governors, bishops, the governorgeneral of Canada, and even one from an oldacquaintance whom he had met long before onhis travels in western New York State sellingpaper for his brother Matthew: "Beech Tree,chief of Oneida tribe, honors the white manwhom the great spirit appoints to transmit hislightning through deep waters. "31

And, of course, the success had to be markedwith banquets, balls, parades, oratory, and much

bad poetry.In St. John's, Field was feted with all of this,

while Bright, Thomson, and the others weretreated equally in Dublin and then London.

The great American preacher Henry WardBeecher astutely noted the fact that the Atlanticcable was an achievement of (he age in which helived and could have been accomplished in noother. "We are gathered to express our joy," hetold his congregation, "at the apparentconsummation of one of those enterprises whichare peculiar, I had almost said to our generation— certainly to the century in which we live. Doyou reflect that there are men among youtonight, men here, who lived and were not veryyoung before there was a steamboat on ourwaters? Ever since I can remember steamboatshave always been .11 hand. There are men herewho lived before they beat the water with theirwheels. And since my day railroads have been invented. "32

The public, naturally, was wild for news andmessages to begin moving across the cable, butField, as early as August y, tried to dampenedexpectations. "We have landed here in thewoods," he wired the Associated Press, "and untilthe telegraph instruments are perfectly adjusted,no communications can pass between the twocontinents; but the electric currents are receivedfreely. You shall have the earliest intimationwhen all is ready, but it may be some days beforeeverything is perfected. The first throughmessage between Europe and America will befrom the Queen of Great Britain to the Presidentof the United States, and the second his reply."33

Fireworks at City Hall in honor of theAtlantic telegraph.

Finally, on August 16, Queen Victoria'smessage was received.

To the President of the United States,Washington:

The Queen desires to congratulate thePresident upon the successful completion of thisgreat international work, in which the Queen hastaken the deepest interest.

The Queen is convinced that the Presidentwill join with her in fervently hoping that theelectric cable [. . .] will prove an additional linkbetween the nations, whose friendship isfounded upon their common interest andreciprocal esteem.

The Queen has much pleasure in thuscommunicating with the President, and renewingto him her wishes for the prosperity of theUnited States.

The President replied in kind.When the news of the messages was released,

still more public rejoicing erupted. A hundredguns were fired at New York's City Hall at dawnand again at noon. Flags flew everywhere. Thatnight a great fireworks display was launchedfrom the roof of City Hall, with unfortunateresults. "Here in New York," George TempletonStrong wrote in his diary, "the triumphantpyrotechnics with which our city fatherscelebrated this final and complete subjugation by

man of all the powers of nature— space and time included—set City Hall on

fire, burned up its cupola and half its roof, andcame near destroying tbe County Clerk's officeand unsettling the titles to half the property inthe city."34*

A piece of the cable sold Letter by Fieldattesting to the to Tiffany and Company.authenticity of the cable.

*Happily, the building—one of themasterpieces of early-nineteenth-century

American architecture—was restored and itremains the seat of government for the City ofNew York.

The next day the Niagara arrived in New Yorkbearing the hero of the hour, Cyrus Field, andthe remaining part of the cable. Field promptlysold this to Tiffany and Company, which cut it upinto short lengths, bound them in brass, and soldthem as souvenirs at a handsome profit.

In all the hoopla, however, what the publicwasn't told was that Queen Victoria's ninety-nine-word message had taken sixteen and a halfhours to be transmitted, a rate that averaged tenminutes per word. The fact of the matter wasthat the cable was not working well at all. OnAugust n, the entire day's traffic had consisted ofthe following:

Repeat, please.Please send slower for the present.How?How do you receive?

Send slower.Please send slower.How do you receive?Please say if you can read this.Can you read this?Yes.How are signals?Do you receive?Please send something.Please send V's and B's.How are signals?Still, the day after Queen Victoria's message

was delivered, the first commercial message wastransmitted to Europe, regarding a minorcollision involving a Cunard liner: "Mr. Cunardwishes telegraph Mclver Europa collision Arabia.Put into St. Johns. No lives lost."

On August 23, the first news dispatch cameover the cable: "Emperor of France returned to

Paris Saturday. King of Prussia too ill to visitQueen Victoria. Her majesty returns to EnglandAugust 3ist. Settlement of Chinese question.Chinese empire opens to trade; Christian religionallowed; foreign diplomatic agents admitted;indemnity to England and France. Gwaliorinsurgent army broken up. All India becomingtranquil."35 Although the news from China, theTreaty of Tientsin, was two months old, the newsfrom Europe was that day's news. The world hadshrunk by an order of magnitude.

On Wednesday, September 1, Cyrus Fieldreceived an official hero's welcome in New YorkCity, with services at Trinity Church and a paradeup Broadway to the outskirts of the city at Forty-second Street. He rode with the mayor in acarriage drawn by six white horses. The nextnight, he was tendered a banquet at the city'sforemost hotel, the Metropolitan, at Broadwayand Prince Street, featuring, in typical Victorianstyle, seven courses, twenty entrees, forty

desserts, and endless speeches.But that afternoon he had been told by de

Sauty, who had remained in Trinity Bay, that thesignals coming through the cable were so weakas to be nearly unintelligible. At the banquetitself, Field had received a message saying, "C.W. Field, New York: Please inform .. . .government we are now in position to do best toforward—" The rest was blank. The cable wasdead.

FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, while thecompany did its best to conceal matters, theelectricians did their best to revive it. But therewas little they could do beyond adjustingbatteries, trying different signal strengths, andhoping against hope.

A few feeble signals were received, butnothing more, and finally the company had nochoice but to admit the situation. The publicjubilation quickly turned to scorn. The BostonCourier claimed that the whole thing had been

merely a stock swindle to allow Field to unloadworthless shares on the public.

The newspapers, which had fallen all overthemselves to lionize Field and his technicians,now lampooned them.

C. V. de Sauty, who had missed the brief glorydays by staying at Trinity Bay, was ridiculed forhis name:

Thou operator, silent, glum,'Why wilt thou act sonaughty? Do tell us what yourname is — come!De Santy or De Sauty? Don'tthink to humbug any more,Shut up there in your shanty,But solve the problem once forall —De Sauty or De Santy.36There were even claims that the entire

undertaking had been a fraud, that there was noAtlantic cable and Queen Victoria's message hadactually been sent by ship.+ These rumors weresufficiently widespread that Matthew Fielddevoted an entire chapter of his history of theAtlantic cable to demonstrating that the actualexistence and brief functioning of the cable werebeyond doubt.

By the end of the year, when all hope of thecable's coming back to life had long ended, manyold friends and partners in the enterprise wereavoiding Field. Only Peter Cooper was as staunchas ever. "We will go on,"37 he told his friend,partner, and neighbor.

*In fact, in the month of August 1858, Fieldsold exactly one share of stock in the AtlanticTelegraph Company, taking a loss of $500.

+ A hundred and eleven years later, therewere persistent rumors that the landing on themoon had been bogus and that the whole thinghad been elaborately staged in a New York

television studio.Cooper may have been simply displaying the

indomitable optimism that had taken him, aswell as Cyrus Field, so far in life. But there wasalready evidence that he was correct. On August27, the British government, realizing that theIndian Mutiny was nearly over, had used thecable to countermand orders for two regimentsto board ship at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and sail forIndia. By carrying those new orders, the cablehad saved the government between £50,000 and£60,000, more than one-seventh the totalinvestment that now lay useless beneath theAtlantic. With such potential to save money,there could be no doubt that the desire of theBritish government to have a functioningAtlantic cable had been only whetted.

9. "Here's the Ship”

THE LATE 1850s AND EARLY 1860s were not

a good time for submarine telegraphy. Not onlyhad the Atlantic cable failed after only a fewweeks of fitful operation but the cable laid in theRed Sea the following year as the first segmentof a line to India had likewise failed. In fact, by1861, although 11,364 miles of submarine cableshad been laid worldwide, only about 3,000 mileswere still operating. The debacle of the Indiancable had cost £800,000, and the Britishgovernment, anxious to have instantcommunication with its Indian Empire since themutiny of 1857-58, had guaranteed the intereston that sum regardless of the results. That meantthat the Exchequer would be paying £35,000 ayear for twenty years for nothing.

With these two spectacular failures, therewere loud calls for a commission of inquiry andone was set up to hear evidence, with fourmembers appointed by the Board of Trade andfour appointed by the Atlantic TelegraphCompany. They were a distinguished group,including Professor (later Sir) Charles

Wheatstone, one of the earliest pioneers oftelegraphy. Together with William Cooke, he hadtaken out a patent on an electric telegraph asearly as 1837, and had helped develop numerousother electrical devices, including Wheatstone'sbridge for measuring electrical resistance.*Another member was George Parker Bidder, adistinguished engineer who, however, is todayremembered chiefly for his astounding ability toperform mathematical calculations in his head.+

The committee's report, somewhat longerthan the Bible, drew numerous conclusionsregarding what had gone wrong in submarinetelegraphy up to that point. It led to significantadvances both in submarine telegraphy andelectrical engineering in general.

One point made was that there were as yet noagreed-upon units with which to measure suchmatters of fundamental importance as currentand resistance. Even these terms were not yetstandardized, and such vague terms as intensity

and tension were used as well. This made itnearly impossible for a scientific literature onelectricity to develop. Not long after the reportwas published, Sir Charles Bright and LatimerClark submitted a paper to the BritishAssociation for the Advancement of Science,suggesting a systematic basis for electricaltesting, employing a precise vocabulary.

In the next few years, such terms as watt,volt, ohm, and ampere came into use, eachrigorously defined. The terms were based on thenames of early pioneers in science andengineering, the British James Watt (17361819),the Italian Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), theGerman Georg Ohm (1787-1854), and the FrenchAndre

*He also invented the concertina, and helpeddevelop the stereoscope, the immensely popularVictorian parlor entertainment. For his "soundmagnifier" he coined the word microphone.

+ At the age of ten he had been asked how

many times a wheel five feet ten inches indiameter would revolve on a journey of800,000,000 miles. In less than :i minute hegave the correct answer, "704,114, 285, 704 timeswith twenty inches left over." This capacity neverleft him. Because Bidder—unlike many lightningcalculators—was a highly intelligent andeducated man, he was able to give valuableinsights into how he performed his calculatingfeats, information that has been utilized bypsychologists ever since.

Mane Ampere (1775-1836). It was the firstinstance of the scientific community honoring itsown in this way.

A second point was that it was necessary totest thoroughly the cable before it was laid, notonly for electrical conductivity, but also for theintegrity of the insulation. In laying the cablefrom the Persian Gulf to India in 1863-64, Brightand Clark developed a system for subjecting thecable to hydraulic pressure equal to what it

would experience when laid, in order to test itunder realistic conditions.

With regard to the Atlantic cable, theconclusion was inescapable: the AtlanticTelegraph Company had been much too hasty inattempting to manufacture and lay a cable in1857. This could be laid at the feet of Cyrus Field,whose impetuosity and drive were at once hisgreatest virtues and his worst defects as anentrepreneur. Dr. Edward Whitehouse, thecompany electrician, testified that Field wouldn'tlet him have the time necessary for someexperiments. "Mr. Field," he told the committee,"was the most active man in the enterprise, andhe had so much steam that he could not wait solong as three months. He said, 'Pooh, nonsense,why, the whole thing will be stopped; the schemewill be put back a twelve-month.' "*

But the main blame fell on Dr. Whitehousehimself, who had been fired even before thecable had failed completely. The directors had

explained his dismissal in a letter to Thomson,referring to the recipient in the third person forsome reason.

Mr. Whitehouse has been engaged someeighteen months in investigations which havecost some £12,000 to the company and now,when we have laid our cable and the whole worldis looking on with impatience. . . . [W]e are, afterall, only saved from being a laughing-stockbecause the directors are fortunate enough tohave an illustrious colleague [ProfessorThomson]. . . whose inventions produced in hisown study—at small expense — and from hisown resources are available to supersede theuseless apparatus prepared at great labor andenormous cost. . . . Mr. Whitehouse has runcounter to the wishes of the directors on a greatmany occasions — disobeyed time after timetheir positive instructions — thrown obstacles inthe way of everyone, and acted in every way as ifhis own fame and self-importance were the only

points of consequence to be considered.2

Whitehouse, in Valencia, had disconnectedThomson's exquisitely sensitive mirrorgalvanometer and hooked up his own patentedrelay device, which was supposed to write downthe messages automatically. He had also insistedon using his giant induction coils, which werecapable of generating thousands of volts, insteadof the much more modest voltage of batteriesthat could be read by the mirror galvanometer. Itis the best guess, and it can never be more thanthat, that the ultimate failure of the cable wasdue to the fact that Dr. Whitehouse burned it outwith voltage beyond what it was capable ofcarrying.

The problem with his relay device was, simplyenough, that it didn't work. Professor Thomsontestified that "I find altogether two or threewords and a few more letters that are legible, butthe longest word which I find correctly given isthe word 'be.' "3

Dr. Whitehouse defended himself furiously atthe hearings, producing clouds of experimentaldata to justify his theories and refusing to admitthat he had erred in any significant way. Howwell his arguments fared in the court of historymay be judged by the fact that today he is utterlyforgotten while William Thomson, Lord Kelvin,lies in Westminster Abbey.

When the hearings finally ended, thecommittee had no hesitation in its conclusions."The failures of the existing submarine lineswhich we have described have been due tocauses which might have been guarded againsthad adequate preliminary investigation beenmade into the question. And we are convincedthat if regard be had to the principles we haveenunciated in devising, manufacturing, layingand maintaining submarine cables, this class ofenterprise may prove as successful as it hashitherto been disastrous.""**

Determining what went wrong, however, and

getting investors to risk their money on anotherattempt to lay the Atlantic cable were two verydifferent things. As the secretary of the AtlanticTelegraph Company testified at the hearings, "Imyself have personally waited upon nearly everycapitalist and mercantile house of standing inGlasgow and in Liverpool, and some of theDirectors have gone round with me in Londonfor the same purpose. We have no doubt induceda great many persons to subscribe, but they do soas they would to a charity, and in sums ofcorresponding amount."?

As THE DIRECTORS of the Atlantic TelegraphCompany had been struggling to lay the cableand then to raise money for a third attempt,another product of mid-nineteenthcenturytechnology that would turn out to be crucial tofinal success had been astonishing the world. Itwas a ship named the Great Eastern, and shewas far more than twice as large as theAgamemnon and the Niagara combined.

There is a reason that ships, alone amonginanimate things, are often accorded a personalpronoun in the English language. Oceangoingvessels are almost always built one at a time,often with a wholly or partially unique design,and thus each is as idiosyncratic as an individualhuman being. And each vessel inevitably has aunique history, a life story so to speak, just ashumans do, histories that can be as filled withtriumph and tragedy as our own.

*Committees such as this one have frequentlybeen employed since, following othertechnological calamities. The Titanic disaster in1912, the early crashes of the De HavillandComet—the first commercial jet airliner—in theearly 1950s, and the Challenger explosion in1986, are three examples in the twentiethcentury. Such inquiries have proved a verypowerful tool in determining not only what wentwrong but also how to do things right in thefuture.

Perhaps no ship in human history was sonearly unique as the Great Eastern. By the timeshe was laid down in 1857 on the Isle of Dogs,across the River Thames from Greenwich, east ofLondon, steamships had taken over thetransatlantic passenger business from the oldsailing packets. But sailing ships, far lessexpensive to operate, still carried the world'scargo. Only in the twentieth century would themajority of the world's ocean freight move bysteam.

But, unassisted, steamships could not yetreach India, the Far East, or Australia in the1850s. The reason was fuel capacity. Coal at thattime was mined on an industrial scale only in"Western Europe and the United States. And novessel was capable of carrying enough to reachhalfway around the globe under steam poweralone without refueling. So, for a ship to steamto Australia, coal had to be expensively carried bysailing ships, called colliers, ahead of time tosuch way stations as Cape Town, South Africa,

and Ceylon. The greatest engineer of thenineteenth century, an Englishman namedIsambard Kingdom Brunel, wanted to changethat.

Brunel came from an engineering family. Hisfather, Marc Isambard Brunel, was born in 1769in the French province of Normandy, where hisparents held a substantial tenant farm andoperated a coach station. A younger son, Marcwas destined for the church but rebelled againstthat fate and joined the French navy instead,where his antipathy to classical studies was nodefect and his passion for drawing, mechanics,and mathematics a great advantage. After sixyears he left the navy and found himself inRouen, a royalist stronghold, as the Revolutionraged in Pans. In Rouen he met Sophia Kingdom,an English girl who had come to the city toperfect her French.

Isambard Kingdom BrunelAs the political situation in revolutionary

France deteriorated rapidly, Brunel decided toflee to America and spent six years in New York,becoming both an American citizen and chiefengineer of the port. In 1798 a chance encounterat dinner with another French Emigre' changedhis life.* He learned that ships' blocks for theRoyal Navy were made under an exclusivecontract by a firm called Messrs Taylor of

Southampton. Ships' blocks are the wooden (or,now, often metal) casings that hold one or morepulleys. Used in the running rigging to allow thesailors, using the pulleys mechanical advantage,to trim the immensely heavy yards, these blocksare vital to the working of a sailing ship.

*There were about 25,000 French emigres inthe United States in the 1790s, includingTalleyrand, who returned to France to becomeforeign minister under the Directory andNapoleon.

A seventy-four-gun ship of the line of thattime needed no fewer than 1,400 of them. Withthe Royal Navy maintaining a fleet of hundredsof ships on active duty in the war against France,it purchased more than 100,000 a year. The costof ships' blocks was no small portion of thenavy's budget.

Brunel saw an opportunity and quickly devised greatly improved machinery formanufacturing ships' blocks. He sailed to

England, where he sought out and marriedSophia Kingdom and presented his ideas to theadmiralty. When finally constructed — no smalltask, as it pushed the limits of mechanicalengineering— his machinery was a great success,able to manufacture blocks with only one-tenthof the personnel previously required, and thuseffectively at one-tenth the cost. The Royal Navypaid Brunel £17,000, a modest fortune by thestandards of the day, for his work. This work soimpressed Czar Alexander I of Russia, whovisited the shipyard, that Alexander presentedBrunel with a large ruby set with diamonds andgave him a standing invitation to come to Russia.Before his machines were even up and running,his wife presented him with his only son,Isambard Kingdom Brunel, born in 1806.

Marc Brunel soon became one of Britain'smost noted engineers, and his son showed everysign of following in his father's footsteps. Hedemonstrated a marked talent for drawing atfour and had mastered plane geometry by the

time he was six. While still a boy Isambarddemonstrated the greatest gift an engineer canpossess, an intuitive sense of what is structurallysound. When a new building was underconstruction across the street from his school,Isambard predicted that it would collapse, and itsoon did.

His father saw to it that he received a first-class education in engineering, both in Britainand in France, after the Napoleonic Wars ended,where he attended the Lycee Henri-Quatre, thenfamous for its mathematics instruction. At theage of seventeen he went to work in his father'soffice. By the time he was only twenty-four, hisreputation was such that he was elected a fellowof the Royal Society.

Marc Brunel's greatest project was theconstruction of a pedestrian tunnel under theThames, begun in 1825, a project on which hisson was soon named resident engineer. Therehad been a previous, disastrous attempt to

tunnel under the Thames in the early decades ofthe nineteenth century. But there was nosuccessful precedent for a large underwatertunnel, other than the extension of some of theCornish tin mines out under the seabed.* Toaccomplish the task, the elder Brunel designedhis most famous invention, the tunneling shield,patented in 1818. It has been the basictechnology of deep tunnel construction eversince. The idea had come to Brunel when henoticed the armored heads of teredo worms, amarine pest that plagued wooden ships by boringinto their hulls in great numbers.

The tunnel, located east of Tower Bridge (andnow long part of the London subway system),would take eighteen years to complete, withnumerous disasters, both financial andstructural, in the course of construction. Indeed,the younger Brunel was very nearly killed whenone wall of the tunnel was breached underpressure from the water outside. The tunnelrapidly filled with water and Brunel was trapped

by a fallen timber. By a great effort he freedhimself and then had the good fortune to catch awave that shot him up the shaft of the visitors'stairway, allowing Brunel to escape the fate of sixother workers in the tunnel, who drowned.

*The need to find an efficient means to pumpout the water that inevitably leaked into thesemines prompted Thomas Newcomen to devisethe first practical steam engine in 1712. JamesWatt's radical improvement of Newcomen'sengine, patented in 1769, then sparked theIndustrial Revolution.

Like his father, Isambard Brunel was themaster of all forms of engineering, from docks,to suspension bridges, to water towers, toprefabricated field hospitals, to tunnels, torailways, to ship design. His was the lastgeneration of engineers who could spreadthemselves so wide, and Brunel proved himself agenius in each of these engineering fields. In1910, the magazine The Engineer said of him,

simply, that "in all that constitutes an engineerin the highest, fullest, and best sense, Brunel hadno contemporary, no predecessor. If he has nosuccessor, let it be remembered that . . . theconditions which call such men into being nolonger have any existence.""

His Great Western Railway, which ranoriginally from London's Paddington Station(which he designed, of course) to Bristol, isconsidered his masterpiece. He designed almostevery aspect of it. The Box Tunnel, inGloucestershire, the longest in the world at thetime at 1 7/8 miles, was considered a wonder andis a perfect example of the extraordinarily closeattention Brunel paid to every aspect of his work.Taking advantage of its fortuitous geographicorientation, he deliberately sited the tunnelprecisely so that the rising sun shone along itsentire length on April 9 every year. April 9 wasBrunel's birthday.

Such touches also reveal Brunel's great

weakness: a near total inability to delegate,which led him to drive himself relentlessly to (hepoint of exhaustion. During a crisis in theconstruction of the Thames Tunnel, he workedfor ninety-six hours straight. In the midst ofconstruction of the Great Western Railway,Brunel wrote that "it is harder work than I like. Iam rarely much under twenty hours a day at it."7

The Great Western Railway led Brunel intoship design. The port of Bristol had been losingbusiness to Liverpool, which was much closer tothe industrial centers of Birmingham andManchester, which exported to the world. Localmerchants hoped to use the railroad, with itsquick access to London, to capture thetransatlantic passenger business. They intended,in effect, to extend the Great Western Railwayclear across the Atlantic by means of steamships,a revolutionary concept in the 1830s.

Although the Savannah had first crossed the

Atlantic in 1819, her engine was only auxiliary,designed for use in calm weather and adversewinds. Many felt that an all-steam crossing ofthe Atlantic from England to New York wasinherently impossible. The science writer andmathematician Dionysius Lardner thought thatpeople "might as well talk of making a voyagefrom New York or Liverpool to the moon."8

Brunel knew better, and in 1838 designed a1,34O-ton ship called the Great Western, the firstpurpose-built transatlantic steamer and by farthe largest steamer yet constructed. Built ofwood but with many iron elements, the GreatWestern was highly innovative, as might beexpected of Brunel. On her maiden voyage shesmashed the transatlantic speed record, crossingin only fifteen days and five hours. From thenon, transatlantic passenger ships carried sailsonly for use in the event (a not infrequent one,to be sure) that the engines broke down.

Like many engineers at the time, notably the

Swedish John Ericsson, who designed the USSMonitor in 1861 and thereby revolutionizednaval warfare, Brunel was soon deeply interestedin screw propulsion. The screw had severaladvantages over paddle wheels. Being safelytucked below the waterline, it was much lesssubject to damage from the vagaries of wind,wave, or enemy action. And because a screw iscast as a solid piece of bronze— still the metal ofchoice—it was much less fragile than the largewooden paddle wheels. At the time, however, ascrew, needing a much higher rpm than paddlewheels to produce the same forward motion, putgreat demands on the design of the engines thatdrove it.

In 1843 Brunel's second ship, the GreatBritain, was launched by Prince Albert. Ironhulled and screw driven, it was in many ways thefirst modern passenger ship and the first suchship to cross the Atlantic. She also clearlyshowed the possibilities for size that iron madepossible. With a length of 322 feet, a beam of 50

feet finches, and a displacement of 3,500 tons,she was not only larger than any steamship builtbefore, she was larger than any purely woodenship could be.*

With iron construction, there was littlephysical limit to the size of a ship. And a decadeafter Brunel conceived of the Great Britain, greatsize was suddenly more fashionable than ever.Characteristically, he seized the moment andcreated the most extraordinary ship the worldhas ever known.

IN 1851, THE GREAT EXHIBITION held inthe Crystal Palace

— the first world's fair, organized by PrinceAlbert—was opened in Hyde Park in London. Itelectrified the imagination of the world with itsdisplay of the fruits of the Industrial Revolution.The devices and manufactures from manycountries brought 6.2 million visitors, who paid ashilling and up to see them.*

*The Great Britain ended her days when she

was severely damaged in a gale on Cape Horn in1885. Condemned as unseaworthy, she was usedas a store ship until 1933 in the Falkland Islands.Afterward, she was beached and allowed to rotuntil 1570, when she was brought back to Bristol,the city of her birth, and restored. She may beseen, and visited, today in the dock where shewas built.

But the Crystal Palace itself was the biggestdraw. Designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, a gardendesigner who had built a very large greenhousefor the Duke of Devonshire, it was constructed ofcast- and wrought-iron structural members and254,000 panes of glass. At 1,550 feet long and450 feet wide, it was no less than three times thelength of St. Paul's Cathedral and yet wasconstructed in only nine months, thanks to itsprefabricated parts. Also thanks to these parts,this enormous building, after the GreatExhibition closed, was easily dismantled and re-erected in Sydenham, in South London, where itwas the center of an amusement park until it was

destroyed by fire in 193(5.The Crystal Palace was as influential as it was

innovative. The possibilities of both scale andscope opened up by the Industrial Revolutionwere manifest, and thinking big became verymuch in fashion in the 1850s.

In this quintessentially Victorian atmosphereof bigger and better, Brunel, who had headed thesection on civil engineering of the GreatExhibition, wrestled with the problem ofsteaming to the Orient. Deeply experienced inthe design of unprecedented-ly large vessels, hewas well aware that while the energy required todrive a ship through the water increased,roughly, as the square of her dimensions, hercarrying capacity increased as the cube.Therefore, if a ship were large enough, she couldcarry coal sufficient to steam anywhere. Brunel'sgenius lay in having the courage to design a shipfully five times the size of any ever built before."Nothing is proposed," wrote Brunel, trying to

attract investors,*The proceeds were used to purchase land in

Kensington, where today the Victoria and Albert,Science, and Natural History Museums arelocated.

"but to build a vessel of the size required tocarry her own coals on the voyage" toTrincomalee, Ceylon, and return, a distance of22,000 miles.9*

Brunel argued that this would be a payingproposition, because the ship would capturemuch of the trade between Britain and Britain'sEastern empire. Indeed, he calculated that hisgreat ship would earn 40 percent on herinvestment per year. Brunel, a persuasive man aswell as a great engineer, induced a group ofinvestors to put up the then enormous sum of£600,000 to build her.

Just how colossal she was still staggers theimagination nearly 150 years after her launching.At 693 feet long with a beam of 120 feet

(including the paddle wheels), she would nothave been able to utilize the Panama Canal,finished more than half a century later. At22,500 tons displacement, she held the sizerecord for nearly half a century, until long aftershe had been broken up. Not until the ill-fatedLusitania slid down the ways in 1907 did a largervessel than the Great Eastern float upon water.Throughout her life, no matter what harbor shewas in, from Baltimore to Bombay, the GreatEastern dwarfed all other vessels, looking a bitlike a rowboat in a pond full of ducks.

*There was to be a curious echo of thereasoning behind the design of the Great Easterna hundred years later. During World War II, theU.S. Army Air Corps wanted the capacity totransport troops in large numbers overseas byair, protecting them from submarine attack. Itcommissioned Hughes Aircraft Company andHenry Kaiser to design a craft capable of carryinglarge numbers of troops. Kaiser soon droppedout of the project, but the obsessive Howard

Hughes continued even after the contract hadbeen canceled with the end of the war. The resultwas a seaplane built of wood (whence itsnickname, the Spruce Goose) that was, fordecades, the largest airplane ever constructed. Itstill holds the record for number of pistonengines (eight) and wingspan. At nearly 320 feet,the wingspan of the Spruce Goose exceeds that ofa Boeing 747 by more than one hundred feet. Theplane flew only once, for about 1,000 yards.Today it is on exhibit in McMinnville, Oregon.

The Great Eastern (second from the bottom)compared in approximate scale to (from top tobottom) an average 1800s sailing ship, the GreatWestern, the Great Britain, and a typical oceanliner built nearly a hundred years after theGreat Eastern.

Almost every aspect of her was an innovationor a record. She was the first ship built withoutribs, deriving her structural strength from adouble iron hull. She featured the first watertightcompartments, the first powered steering gear.So great was the demand she created forwrought-iron plates — she needed 30,000 ofthem, each averaging a third of a ton in weight—that it significantly drove up the cost of iron onthe world market.

Although the River Thames is about athousand feet wide at Greenwich, the GreatEastern had to be built parallel to the river andlaunched sideways — the first major ship solaunched. Had she been launched stern first, hernearly seven-hundred-foot length would havemade it impossible to check her way in such anarrow space in time to avoid the opposite shore.

The engines were, by far, the largest and mostpowerful ever built to that date. And althoughBrunel had been the first to abandon the fragile,

cumbersome, and dangerous paddle wheels infavor of screw propulsion in the Great Britain,he employed both paddle wheels and a singlescrew in the Great Eastern. The reason is that itwas not then possible to apply sufficient powerto a single engine shaft to propel so large a vesselat a good speed. And at that time engines werestill too bulky to allow two of them to be placedparallel to drive twin screws.

As a result there were two completelyseparate power plants. The paddle wheels, whichmeasured fifty-eight feet in diameter, were thelargest ever built for a ship. They were designedto turn at an astonishing 17 rpm, powered byengines that produced up to 3,800 horsepower.The screw, which measured twenty-four feet indiameter, and resembled, one contemporary said,"the bone blades of some pre-Adamite animal,"10

was powered by engines producing 6,200horsepower.* The two engines together, it wassaid, could have powered all the cotton mills in

Manchester. While that might have beenhyperbole, there is no doubt that the twosystems could move the Great Eastern at speedsapproaching twelve knots, a very good speed mthe 1850s.

*The blades on the Great Eastern's screwwere nearly flat, like the blades on a ceiling fan.Later, much more sophisticated design, involvingvery complex mathematics, would allow ships tohave smaller screws while producing the sameforward motion per revolution. This saved bothconsiderable weight and considerable expense,for bronze is very expensive. Not until the adventof nuclear submarines—whose massive, slow-turning, multibladed screws allow extremelyquiet operations and great propulsive force at thesame time— would a vessel have a larger screwthan the Great Eastern.

In addition to her steam engines, the GreatEastern also sported no fewer than six masts(five of which served as funnels for auxiliary

engines, yet another innovation). They couldcarry up to an acre and a third of canvas. Withher five funnels (no other steamship has everhad more than four), six masts, and two paddlewheels turning once every 3.5 seconds at fullspeed, the Great Eastern was a magnificent sightas she steamed. Although she appears strange toour eyes because she lacked the superstructurethat soon became standard on passenger ships,her handsome lines have long been admired bynaval architects.

And, like the Atlantic cable and the CrystalPalace that in part inspired her, she fascinatedthe people of her day. Composers wrote popularsongs in her honor. She was called "the floatingcity" and the "crystal palace of the sea." Currierand Ives published no fewer than fivelithographs of her before she ever put to sea.Longfellow wrote a poem about her.

A Currier and Ives lithograph of the GreatEastern.

At her scheduled launching on November3,1857, thousands of spectators appearedonshore and in the river to watch the largestmovable object yet constructed move for the firsttime. Their conversation made it nearlyimpossible for Brunel to communicate withthose controlling the hydraulic rams (to pushher) and windlasses (to check her) onshore andthe steam tugs to pull her into the river.

The launch was a disaster. The ship, groaninglike some vast awakening beast, began to slidedown the ways, but when the windlass crewstried to check her speed, the ship shuddered to astop and would not move again. Slowly, over the

next two months, Brunel was able to get herhalfway down the ways. On January 5, havingassembled no fewer than twenty-one hydraulicrams, he tried again to launch her. The shipmoved three inches before the rams began toburst with the effort. Finally, on January 31,1858, with the help of a spring tide, the GreatEastern finally floated-in the filthy water of theThames and was towed across to the far shore tobe completed. The launch from where she wasbuilt to where she floated, it is estimated, hadcost £120,000, about £1,000 a foot, at a timewhen £1,000 was an upper-middle-class annualincome.

The ship, thanks partly to her launch, had costtwice as much to build as originally estimatedand drove the shipyard owner into bankruptcy.The corporation formed to finance the ship wasalso broke and the Great Eastern was sold to anew syndicate for £165,000, less than a third ofher projected construction costs, before she eversailed.

Hard luck as well as failure would stalk herthroughout her life. On her shakedown cruiseshe suffered an explosion that demolished thegrand saloon and the forward smokestack andkilled five members of the crew. Rounding thetip of Long Island on her way to Flushing Bay,she ripped an eighty-three by nine-foot gash inher hull on a previously uncharted rock—stillknown as Great Eastern Rock. The accidentwould have sunk any other ship in the world in afew minutes, but the Great Eastern's inner hullheld and she was able to continue on to FlushingBay, although listing heavily to starboard.

The Great Eastern being launched broadside.No dry dock in the world could accommodate

her, and because of her flat bottom, she couldnot be careened onshore to reach her bottom. Awhole new technology, developed by the NewYork engineer Edward S. Renwick, had to beemployed so that she could be repaired whileafloat.*

Perhaps the hardest luck to befall the GreatEastern was the fact that she killed her creator.Brunel worked himself beyond endurance as he

wrestled with the endless complexities ofbuilding so revolutionary a ship. Only fifty-onewhen she was finally launched, his friendsnoticed how he had aged over the course of theproject. His once thick brown hair had mostlyfallen out. Always notably short (he was oftencalled "the little giant"), he now walked with astoop.

*His brother James, an architect, designed St.Patrick'sCathedral in New York and theSmithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

John Scott Russell, Lord Derby, andIsambard Kingdom

BrunelOn the day before his great ship was to begin

her sea trials, Brunel climbed painfully aboard tohave a final look at her and intended to sail withher. Standing before the mainmast, he wasphotographed with Scott Russell, in whoseshipyard she had been built, and Lord Derby,

who had been prime minister until a few monthsearlier. Hours later, Brunel collapsed with astroke. Although his mind was clear, he wasparalyzed. A week later, shortly after hearing ofthe explosion in her forward funnel, he died.

But while the Great Eastern was still on theways and the hopes and dreams of her ownersand builder had not yet been dashed upon therocks of economic reality, Brunel had his lastgreat engineering insight.

Cyrus Field had met Brunel by chance on arailroad returning from Valentia to London.Brunel instantly saw the synergistic possibilitiesin their two dreams and invited Field to visit theyard at the Isle of Dogs to see the great shipunder construction. As Brunel showed Fieldaround, the engineer told him, "Here is the shipto lay your cable, Mr. Field."11

Indeed she was. It is by no means the least ofher ironies that the one thing the Great Easternturned out to be good for— indeed perfect for—

was perhaps the only use her creator had notforeseen from the beginning.

10. A NEW CABLE, A NEWATTEMPT

BY THE TIME THE COMMITTEE hadreleased its report, the American Civil War wasraging across half a continent, greatlycomplicating any attempt to lay the cable. TheCivil War was by far the greatest war fought inthe Western world in the nineteenth century. Itssize was unprecedented, with a front rangingfrom Virginia to Texas and with armiesnumbering in the millions. So were its costs,both in money (the American national debt rosefrom $65 million to $2.8 billion) and in humanlives (nearly 3 percent of the male populationdied in uniform over the four years it lasted).

But wars are always costly in both treasureand lives. What made the American Civil War sounprecedented was that it was the first great warof the industrial era. This allowed not onlygreatly increased production of the materiel ofwar but a revolution m command and control aswell. Railroads and steamboats made possiblethe rapid movement of large numbers of troops,and the telegraph enabled the entire war to bedirected from Washington and Richmond in realtime. When President Lincoln, on April 15, 1861,called for 75,000 volunteers after Confederateforces attacked Fort Sumter in Charlestonharbor, the call reached the most distant parts ofthe Union states almost immediately. Theextraordinary reaction — an outpouring of men,and offers of help from bankers, manufacturers,and wholesalers — powerfully affected publicopinion in the North, a public opinion thatreinforced itself as it was communicated throughthe telegraph system.

The war also greatly complicated relations

with the United Kingdom. Heavily dependent onimports of Southern cotton to keep its vasttextile industry running, Britain was sympatheticto the Confederacy. It quickly declared neutralityand granted the South the status of a belligerentpower. It also turned a blind eye to theconstruction of Confederate commerce raiders,most notably the CSS Alabama, in British yards.*

The most serious dispute between Britain andthe United States, the so-called Trent affair, ledto the brink of war. Captain Charles Wilkes,commanding the USS San Jacinto., had stoppedthe British merchant ship Trent in internationalwaters and removed two Confederate agents.When the news of this flagrant violation ofinternational law reached Britain, the nationexploded in anger and the government orderedtroops to Canada and naval preparations.Lincoln, quickly deciding on "one war at a time,"1

ordered the release of the agents and disavowedWilkes's action, +

The seizure of the Confederate agentsoccurred on

November*This would lead to the Alabama arbitration

in 1871 to settle the dispute between Britain andthe United States over claims for compensationresulting from the actions of the CSS Alabama.The arbitration had an enormous impact on thedevelopment of international law and become apowerful precedent for settling internationaldisputes peacefully.

+In the Trent affair, Prince Albert performedhis last great service for the country that hadnever learned to appreciate or even like mm. Hetoned down the ultimatum written by EarlRussell, the foreign minister, and provided anout for the American government by includingthe suggestion that 'Wilkes had been actingwithout orders, which, in fact, he had been.Already mortally ill, Albert died two weeks later.

8, but news of it did not reach England until

November 27. Prince Albert's memo was draftedon December 1, and the American governmentreleased the agents shortly after Christmas.Everyone was aware that if the Atlantic cable hadbeen in place, the entire crisis would have playedout very differently, although no one was surehow. The young Henry Adams, serving as anunpaid secretary to his father, Charles FrancisAdams, U.S. minister to Great Britain, thoughtthat the cable would have made war certain,because there would not have been time fortempers to cool. The Times of London, however,wrote that "we nearly went to war with Americabecause we had not a telegraph across theAtlantic."2

Cyrus Field moved at once to exploit thesituation. He wrote to George Saward, secretaryof the Atlantic Telegraph Company, that "now isthe time ... to act with energy and decision, andget whatever guarantee necessary from theEnglish government to raise the capital to

manufacture and lay down without unnecessarydelay between Newfoundland and Ireland a goodcable."3

He wrote to William Seward, Lincoln'ssecretary of state, "The importance of the earlycompletion of the Atlantic telegraph can hardlybe estimated. What would have been its value tothe English and United States governments if ithad been in operation on the 3Oth of November .. . ? A few short messages between the twogovernments and all would have beensatisfactorily explained. I have no doubt that theEnglish government has expended more moneyduring the last thirty days in preparation for warwith this country than the whole cost ofmanufacturing and laying a good cable betweenNewfoundland and Ireland."4

Seward met with Field and wrote CharlesFrancis Adams in London, instructing him toseek action from the British government on thecable. Field sailed again for England and met

with Earl Russell and Lord Palmerston, theprime minister. Palmerston asked numerousquestions but made no specific promises beyondagreeing to increase the guarantee minimumgovernment cable usage to £20,000 a year,provided, of course, that the cable worked.

Field then embarked on a public relationscampaign in hopes of reviving interest in thecable, including holding a "telegraphic soiree" atthe house of Samuel Gurney, one of the directorsof the Atlantic Telegraph, at Prince's Gate, nearHyde Park. The purpose was "to spreadinformation on the subject among all classes, butchiefly among educated and intelligent persons."5 Wires were brought in connecting the houseto every telegraph system in Europe, and theguests viewed various types of telegraphequipment and cables and were treated todemonstrations. The earl of Shaftesbury, thegreat social reformer, sent a message to St.Petersburg inquiring about the health of the czar,and in four minutes back came the news that the

czar was well.Back in the United States after yet another

ten-day voyage, Field traveled widely trying tointerest investors. But raising money was a veryslow process after the great failure of 1858.Henry Field remembered his brother'sdescription of a meeting he had with "the solidmen of Boston." They "listened with an attentionthat was most flattering to the pride of thespeaker, addressing such an assemblage in thecapital of his native state. There was nomistaking the interest they felt in the subject.They went still farther, they passed a series ofresolutions, in which they applauded theprojected telegraph across the ocean as one ofthe grandest enterprises ever undertaken byman, which they proudly commended to theconfidence and support of the American public,after which they went home, feeling that theyhad done the generous thing in bestowing uponit such a mark of their approbation. Rut not aman subscribed a dollar! °

"Other cities," Henry Field wrote, "wereequally gracious, equally complimentary, butequally prudent. "7 Only in New York, whereCyrus Field was known personally by most of themen of means and very well liked, did he find itpossible to raise money for a new attempt.Altogether, Field raised about $550,000 in NewYork, but "even those who subscribed," hisbrother wrote, "did so more from sympathy andadmiration of his indomitable spirit than fromconfidence in the success of the enterprise."8

Field's own finances were now precarious. In1860 he had suffered a disastrous fire at hiswarehouse. His losses amounted to $120,000,only two-thirds covered by insurance. By the endof that gloomy year, as the Union unraveled andthe American economy remained mired indepression, he figured that he had lost a total of$130,000. Once more he asked his creditors toaccept a settlement, paying them twenty-fivecents on the dollar until better times arrived. He

mortgaged nearly everything he owned,including his furniture and his pew at theMadison Avenue Presbyterian Church.

At least that year saw the consolidation of hisinterests in domestic telegraph lines with thoseof Samuel Morse. In the very early days oftelegraphy, there were hundreds of separatecompanies, whose lines did not interconnect.Consolidation was inevitable and Peter Cooper,together with Field and others involved in thecable, had formed the American TelegraphCompany to further this. Morse had at firstgreatly resented it and there was a breach in thefriendship between Morse and Field. But in1860, Morse agreed to align his interests withthe American Telegraph Company, whichbecame dominant in the eastern United States.

That year also, Field brokered a deal with theAssociated Press, one of the American TelegraphCompany's most important customers, to meetships off Cape Race, Newfoundland, and use the

facilities of the New York, Newfoundland, andLondon Telegraph Company to get the news toNew York two days sooner than the ships couldcarry it there themselves. It was the originalconception of Frederick Gisborne in action.

The Civil War ended the depression of the late1850s, and Field was able to pay off his creditorsand soon decided to liquidate the paper firm sothat he could devote himself full time to thecable and his telegraph interests. All his eggswere now in the basket of the Atlantic cable.

He did better in England, where the need foran Atlantic cable was more obvious and wherethe technology was more familiar. The report ofthe Committee of Inquiry, which was publishedin July 1863, made it clear that a cable wastechnologically well within reach. And theAmerican Civil War had demonstrated thatBritain needed fast communications with theUnited States and its American possessions,especially Canada. The directors of the Atlantic

Telegraph Company by this point had raised£220,000. However, even with what Field hadmanaged to raise in the United States, he stillhad less than half the sum needed. Matters wereat a standstill.

But, as Matthew Field wrote, "It is a longnight which has no morning."? In January 1864,Cyrus Field returned to England once more, histhirty-first trip across the Atlantic, and there hemet Thomas Brassey.

Brassey, born in 1805, had begun lifeapprenticed to a surveyor. As he reachedmanhood, the railroad was becoming a practicaltechnology and Brassey became a railroadcontractor, building a portion of the GrandJunction Railway in 1835. He proved himself amaster of dealing with enterprises of onceunimaginable size. The London andSouthampton Railroad involved capital of no lessthan four million pounds and a workforce ofthree thousand.

He was soon operating on a global scale and atone time was busy with projects in Europe,India, Australia, and South America, employingnearly seventy-five thousand men. By the 1860she was immensely rich.

Armed with an introduction, Field called onBrassey and asked him to invest. Brassey was notan easy sell. "In attempting to enlist him in ourcause," Field remembered, "he put me throughsuch a cross-examination as I had never beforeexperienced. I thought I was in the witness-box.He inquired of me the practicability of thescheme— what it would pay, and everythingconnected with it; but before I left him, I had thepleasure of hearing him say that it was a greatnational enterprise that ought to be earned out,and, he added, I [Brassey] will be one often tofind the money required for it. From that day tothis he has never hesitated about it, and when Imention his name, you will know him as a manwhose word is as good as his bond, and as for his

bond, there is no better in England."10

Brassey's wealth, prestige, and reputationallowed him to do what Peter Cooper had doneten years earlier when the enterprise had been inits infancy: give Cyrus Field the credibility heneeded to raise money from others. "I met with arich friend from Manchester," Field reported,"Mr. [later Sir] John Fender, and I asked him ifhe would second Mr. Brassey, and walked withhim from 28 Pall Mall to the House ofCommons, of which he was a member. Before wereached the House, he expressed his willingnessto do so to an equal amount."11

In April 1864, the Gutta Percha Company,which had manufactured the core of the firstcable, merged with Glass, Elliott &L Company,which had provided the sheathing of that cable.The new firm, the Telegraph Construction andMaintenance Company, would dominate thefield of submarine telegraph manufacture for thenext century, turning out about 90 percent of all

the cable laid in that time. The new companyquickly arranged to supply the rest of therequired capital, £315,000, and agreed to takeshares in the Atlantic Telegraph Company, oncethe cable was working, as their profit.

One of the directors of the TelegraphConstruction and Maintenance Company wasDaniel Gooch, chairman of the board of theGreat Western Railway.* Gooch formed asyndicate that was the third owner of the GreatEastern, purchasing the vessel for a mere£25,000. Gooch, like Brunel, thought that theAtlantic cable and the Great Eastern "seemed tohave been made for one another."12 Goochoffered to provide the ship, which wasconspicuously idle in any event, for nothing,provided dial, upon success, the syndicate receive£50,000 in Atlantic Telegraph stock. Field wasdelighted to accept, saying, "In all my businessexperience I have never known an offer morehonorable. "13

AFTER six LONG YEARS, since the failure of1858, the financing was now once more in place.All that remained was to design and build 2,600miles of new cable and have cable tanks builtinto the Great Eastern's innards.

Much had been learned since the first cablehad been designed in such haste in 1857. WithDr. Whitehouse no longer involved, WilliamThomson and Charles Bright were the dominantfigures in its design. The core of the new cableonce again consisted of seven strands of copperwire twisted together, but it was almost threetimes as heavy, weighing 300 pounds to the mile,instead of 107. And the copper was to be as pureas possible to ensure good conductivity. Further,the core was subjected to hydraulic tests to makecertain that it would work in conditions to befound at the bottom of the Atlantic.*

*In 1842, at the age of twenty-one, whenGooch was locomotive superintendent of therailroad, he and Brunel had been at the controls

when Queen Victoria rode on a tram for the firsttime, traveling from Windsor to London andputting the royal stamp of approval on therevolutionary new form of transportation.

Surrounding the core were to be four, notthree, layers of gutta-percha, and this time thegutta-percha would be supplemented with a newsubstance, called Chatterton's compound, afterits inventor, John Chatterton, an employee of theTelegraph Construction and MaintenanceCompany. This was applied over the wires andbetween the layers of gutta-percha. Theinsulation of the new cable weighed 400 poundsto the mile, where the old cable's insulation hadweighed only 261 pounds.

The armor for the cable was also increased.The technology of wire manufacture hadimproved in the years since the first cable hadbeen manufactured. In 1858 Sir Henry Bessemerhad introduced his process for making steel,greatly reducing the price of what had previously

been a luxury metal whose use was restricted tosuch high-value items as sword blades andrazors. Now a form of steel called charcoal ironwas cheap enough to be used in the Atlanticcable. But first, the core was wrapped in hempimpregnated with pitch and each strand of thearmor was also wrapped in pitch-soaked hemp.

The hemp served three purposes. It protectedthe iron wire from contact with seawater, itincreased the flexibility of the cable, and it addedbulk without adding much weight. The old cablehad weighed a total of 2,000 pounds per mile;the new cable weighed almost twice as much,3,575 pounds per mile. But the new cable was somuch larger in diameter—1.1 inches instead of5/8 of an inch — that it weighed much less inwater than the old cable had. This, in turn, meantthat it would descend into the sea at a less acuteangle and be much less likely to break inconsequence. Also, its breaking point was verymuch higher. It was estimated that ten miles ofthe new cable could hang vertically in water

before it would snap from its own weight. As theroute between Ireland and Newfoundland was nomore than two and a half miles deep at anypoint, that would never come about.

*The water in which it was tested was atseventy-five degrees. The temperature of themuch colder water of the deep Atlantic actuallyimproved the insulating properties of the gutta-percha.

Old 1838 cable (top) and the new 1865 cable(bottom).

WITH THE MONEY IN HAND and the cabledesign decided, Field returned once again to the

United States, where the directors of the NewYork, Newfoundland, and London TelegraphCompany hailed him as a hero, noting that "tohim is due the credit, and to him this companyand the world will be indebted. "'14

One matter still had to be settled on the NorthAmerican side of the Atlantic: where to bring thecable ashore. Bull's Arm, where the first cablehad been landed, was too far up Trinity Bay forthe Great Eastern—which drew thirty-four feet,greater even than the largest of World War Ibattleships built half a century later—to reach.

Field traveled to Newfoundland once againand surveyed Trinity Bay with Captain Orlebar ofthe British survey ship Margaretta Stevenson,searching for a new spot. Field would often goashore to reconnoiter and to gather biologicalspecimens such as seashells and dead birds.These he packed and sent to Professor LouisAgassiz, the founder of the Harvard Museum ofComparative Zoology and the greatest American

naturalist of his day. Field and Orlebar finallysettled on a place on the eastern side of TrinityBay to bring the cable ashore. No doubt it wasselected for its geographic qualities of proximityto deep water and gently shoaling beach. But it ishard not to believe that Field was also attractedby its name: Heart's Content.

Field, ever restless, spent the rest of thesummer traveling around the northeast,reorganizing the telegraph lines that connectedwith those of the New York, Newfoundland, andLondon Telegraph Company. He wrote GeorgeSaward in London that he had traveled by nearlyevery conveyance imaginable: "By railway, over3280 miles. By steamers, over 2400. By openwagon, over 500 miles. By stage-coach, over 150miles. By fishing-boats about 100 miles."1?

Back in New York he held a series of dinnerparties, engaged in what today would be callednetworking. At one party in early October, amonghis guests were General John A. Dix, who

commanded the Department of the East, whichincluded New York and New England, and LordLyons, the British minister to the United States.During dinner, General Dix was brought amessage that Confederate troops, disguised ascivilians, had entered Vermont from Canada,changed into uniform, and seized the town of St.Albans, fifteen miles south of the border. Therethey had killed one townsman, robbed the localbanks of about $200,000, and set severalbuildings on fire.

Dix was a no-nonsense general. As secretaryof the treasury in the waning days of theBuchanan administration, Dix had sent a famoustelegram to a treasury agent in New Orleans afterthe captain of a revenue cutter had refused toturn over command of his vessel. The telegramended, "If anyone attempts to haul down theAmerican flag, shoot him on the spot."1^ Dix leftthe room and ordered federal troops stationed inBurlington, Vermont, to go after the rebels, even

into Canada if necessary, "and destroy them."1?Dix took Field aside and told him what had

happened and what he had ordered. Field wasappalled. He knew that American troops enteringCanada, even m pursuit of rebel soldiers, wouldmake the Trent affair that had brought Britainand the United States to the brink of war threeyears earlier pale by comparison.

Britain was then at the height of its relativepower in the world and the British public wouldnever stand for such an insult to Britishsovereignty. Field immediately asked GeneralDix and Lord Lyons into another room to discussthe matter, and Dix soon countermanded hisauthorization to enter Canadian territory.

Cyrus Field was genuinely in favor of closerelations between his native country and one hehad grown to love. And, of course, he wanted nofurther delays in laying the Atlantic cable, whicha war between Britain and the United Stateswould have made impossible. Thanks to his

quick action, what might have turned into a darkday in the history of the nineteenth centurybecame merely a footnote, the northernmostmilitary action of the American Civil War.

Coiling the cable in one of the tanks on boardthe Great Eastern.

Relations between Britain and the UnitedStates were not good at this point in any event.The United States Navy refused to lend warshipsto assist in what would be the fourth attempt tolay the cable. It noted that the "twenty-four-hour

rule," which forbade warships of belligerentpowers from staying more than twenty-fourhours in a neutral port, was in effect, making itimpossible for American warships to assist onthe west coast of Ireland.

The following March (1865), Field returnedonce more to England and then proceeded toEgypt. There he represented the New YorkChamber of Commerce at a conference ofchambers of commerce on the uses of the SuezCanal, which was nearly completed, and would,like the Atlantic cable, shrink the worldenormously.

Back in England, the Great Eastern wasmaking ready. With too deep a draft to reach thecable factory at Morden Wharf, she was dockedat Sheerness, twenty miles downriver, and thecable was ferried to her as sections werecompleted. When Field returned to England onMay i, the task was nearing completion and thelast mile of cable was manufactured on May 30,

18^5. When it had been stowed on the GreatEastern, the Prince of Wales, later King EdwardVII, came aboard to inspect the ship. Fieldinvited him to send a message through the 2,700miles of cable. "I wish success to the Atlanticcable," the prince asked to be signaled, and it wasreceived at the other end of the cable in less thana minute.

Including the crew, there were to be fivehundred people on board the Great Eastern forthe cable laying. C.

V. de Sauty was the chief electrician, assistedby William Thomson and Cromwell Varley. Thechief engineer was Samuel Canning, who, longbefore, had been the engineer in charge of layingthe cable across the Cabot Strait. The onlyAmerican on board was Cyrus Field. Indeed,except for Field, the fourth attempt to lay thecable was entirely British. Only British shipswere involved. Ninety percent of the capital wasBritish, as was nearly all the technical expertise.

The cable itself had been designed andmanufactured in Britain.

And yet, when The London Illustrated Newshad accused Field of taking too much credit,Cromwell Varley, assistant electrician on theproject, had leaped to his defense, writing, "Onthe contrary he seems to have given a fair share,indeed I may say the lion's share of the credit tohis English associates. . . . As an Englishman Iam especially grieved that my countrymenappear to give less credit to Mr. Field than isundoubtedly his due."18

Although many newspapers, both British andAmerican, had applied to send correspondentsalong on the expedition, only one, WilliamHoward Russell, of The Times of London, wasgranted permission to come. By this time Russellwas as famous as any newspaperman in theworld. With his dispatches from the field duringthe Crimean War, Russell had virtually inventedthe job of war correspondent.* Bringing the

unvarnished reality of war to i he breakfasttables of Britain in a way that officialcommuniques never could (or would), thesedispatches not only helped bring down thegovernment of Lord Aberdeen in 1855 but led tothoroughgoing reform of the British army.Russell was thus one of the most importantfigures in making the new mass media a majorforce in politics. After the Crimea, he reportedfrom the Indian Mutiny and the American CivilWar (where his early, brilliantly evocative, andhighly influential dispatches earned him thenickname "Bull-Run Russell"). In later years hewas one of the first journalists to be knighted.

Besides the crew and the technical staff, theGreat Eastern carried live animals to providefood. Refrigeration was then in its infancy andthe first refrigerated ship would not be built until1869. William Howard Russell thought that"such a freight had not been seen since Noah'sArk was stranded on Mount Ararat."1? Cyrus

Field, who loved to make lists, noted that theGreat Eastern was carrying 10 bullocks, i milkcow, 114 sheep, 20 pigs, 29 geese, 14 turkeys, and500 other fowl all housed on the upper deck inan impromptu barnyard. Their assorted soundsadded a strangely bucolic note to the mechanicalsounds of the ship and the cable-layingmachinery and the noise of wind and water.

Finally, on July 15, all was ready and theGreat Eastern

— which was carrying, including her ownmachinery, a total load of 21,000 tons—aboutwhat the entire fleet that fought under Nelson atTrafalgar, only sixty years earlier, could havecarried—set sail for Ireland. She soon took thesteamer Caroline, carrying the heavy shore cable,in tow. At Valentia, a new landing spot for thecable had been selected, Foilhummerum Bay onValentia Island, where steep cliffs fell to the seain a scene of wild beauty. Once again there was alarge crowd to greet the expedition, with the

knight of Kerry again presiding over what lookedmuch like a county fair.

*Indeed, his tombstone would describe him as"the first and greatest of war correspondents."

ALTHOUGH A GREAT DEA L HAD BEENLEARNED about the technology of cable laying,and this fourth attempt was a much moreprofessional affair, amateurs were still verymuch in evidence. A long line of boats, mannedby volunteers, had been arranged like a pontoonbridge to bring the cable ashore. Those onshorewanted to help and clambered into the water to

grab the end and haul it in. They didn't realize,however, that enough cable had to be broughtashore to reach up the cliffs and across a coupleof fields to the telegraph house. When the endreached the shore, the crowd let out a cheer andthe men on the boats, thinking the deed wasdone, threw the rest of the cable into the water.As a result, the entire operation had to be doneagain, once the immensely heavy shore cable hadbeen retrieved from the bottom. When all wasready the knight of Kerry gave a speech and thecrowd joined him in singing the Doxology. TheCaroline steamed out to meet the Great Eastern,which waited (much to the disappointment ofthe crowd at Valentia) far offshore, due to itsdeep draft. When the splice was made, a task thattook several hours, the Great Eastern, on July23, 18(35, headed for Heart's Content,Newfoundland, as evening approached.

"Happy is the cable laying that has nohistory," wrote William Russell, and at first allseemed to go well.

As tne sun set a broad stream of golden lightwas thrown across the smooth billows towardstheir bows as if to indicate and illumine the pathmarked out by the hand of Heaven. The brakewas eased, and as the Great Eastern movedahead the machinery of the paying-out apparatusbegan to work, drums rolled, wheels whirled, andout spun the black line of the cable, and droppedin a graceful curve into the sea over the sternwheel. The cable came up with ease from theafter tank, and was payed out with the utmostregularity from the apparatus. The system ofsignals to and from the ship was at once in playbetween the electricians on board and those atFoilhummerum.20

Unlike the early years of the project, therewas now a very businesslike atmosphere aboardship, with everyone either attending to theirduties or staying out of the way, thinking only ofgetting the job done. Even the captain, JamesAnderson, who had been especially chosen by

Field and lent to the expedition by the CunardLine, wrote later that "I had no mind, no soul, nosleep, that was not tinged with cable."21

Only Cyrus Field had no specific duties. Thecable laying was officially a project of theTelegraph Construction and MaintenanceCompany, and Daniel Gooch was on board tomake any decisions needed. Field spent part ofhis time on the bridge with the captain, and partsimply walking "Oxford Street," as the crew haddubbed the main deck, two and a half city blockslong, where twin rows of light providedillumination at night. And he spent much time inthe test room, where blackout curtains excludedall outside light so that the dancing light fromthe mirror galvanometer could be seen clearly,telling Thomson and de Sauty that all was well.They had established a schedule for sending testsignals to Ireland and receiving them back, onceevery half hour.

Outside the test room was a brass gong. At the

first sign of a faltering signal, someone on dutyin the test room was to ring it. Shortly aftermidnight, when the Great Eastern had payed outa mere eighty-four miles of cable, the gong wasrung and Captain Anderson ordered the enginesto a full stop, although her way carried her aconsiderable distance farther. The galvanometerindicated that the signal had faltered. It was nota complete break, but a fault in the cable wasallowing much of the current to leak out into thesea. Because the resistance of each mile of thecable was known, it was theoretically possible todetermine the distance to the fault. But fivedifferent people calculated five differentdistances, ranging from nine to sixty miles.

There was nothing to do but haul up the cableuntil the fault was located, which was no easymatter. The Great Eastern could not maneuverin reverse and, in any event, there was too muchchance of fouling the cable in the screw. So thecable had to be cut, and its end laboriouslytransferred to the bow of the ship, around

shrouds, paddle wheels, and lifeboats, a processthat took many hours.

When the task was finally accomplished, theywere able to retrieve the cable at the rate of onlyone mile per hour as the machinery, adapted forpaying out the cable, was not well designed tohaul it in. Instead, a small steam engine, called adonkey engine, was used. Russell wrote that thehuge ship daintily picking up the cable "put onein mind of an elephant taking up a straw in itsproboscis."-22

Finally, ten hours and ten miles after theretrieval began, the fault was found. It wasominous. A small piece of wire no larger than aneedle had penetrated to the core. Russell, in hisnotes, called it "flagrant evidence of mischief,"23and Daniel Gooch wrote in his diary that thenews of this could cause company shares to fallin London. But it could easily have been ahappenstance, some momentary carelessnessduring the eight months it had taken to produce

the cable.The faulty piece of cable was cut off, the end

of the cable once more laboriously maneuveredaround to the stern and spliced, and the GreatEastern once more set off heading west. But thesignal again faltered within half a mile. "Even thegentle equanimity and confidence of Mr. Fieldwere shaken in that supreme hour," Russellwrote, "and in his heart he may have shelteredthe thought that the dream of his life was indeedbut a chimera.” 24

Then, just as suddenly as it had disappeared,the signal returned, as strong as ever. Perhaps, asin 1857, the cold at the bottom of the ocean hadsealed whatever fault there was. The GreatEastern again increased speed and was soonpaying out the cable at a steady six knots. Theship could not have been more suited to the task."Throughout the voyage," Henry Field wrote,"the behavior of the ship was the admiration ofall on board. While her consorts on either side

were pitched about at the mercy of the waves,she moved forward with a grave demeanor, as ifconscious of her mission, or as if eager tounburden her mighty heart, to throw overboardthe great mystery that was coiled up within her,and to cast her burden on the sea."25 Cyrus Fieldwas particularly grateful for the steadiness thatthe Great Eastern derived from her huge size.For the first time he did not get seasick. But theheavy weather caused the relatively small HMSSphinx to fall behind and be lost to sight. Bysome unaccountable oversight, she had the onlysounding equipment for the expedition. HMSTerrible could handle the duty of warningpassing ships to steer clear, but the want ofsounding gear was to prove costly.

THIS EXPEDITION PRODUCED yet anotherfirst for the Great Eastern, the first ship'snewspaper. Written largely by Russell withdrawings by The Times of London's artist, RobertDudley, it was written out in longhand. TheAtlantic Telegraph printed news and stock prices

from Europe received through the cable as wellas schedules of the day's activities aboardship,including "From daylight till dusk— Looking outfor the Sphinx. (Through the kindness andliberality of the Admiralty, this amusement willbe open to the public free of charge.)"2"

All went well for four days, until shortly afternoon on Saturday, July 29, when the dreadedgong rang once more and the mighty engines ofthe Great Eastern halted. The line wascompletely dead. Again the cable had to be cutand hauled around to the bow and retrieved. Itwas much more difficult this time because therewere now over 2,000 fathoms under the ship'skeel rather than a few hundred. Four tons ofcable were trying to break free. But the crew wasalso more practiced, and by ten o'clock that nightthey had reached the fault. The cable was cutagain and the end spliced to the cable in the hold.

It was not until Monday that the miles ofcable that had been cut, and which were covered

in ooze from the sea bottom, were carefullyexamined. Once again, a wire had been driveninto the heart of the cable, shorting it out. Allagreed at once that this was clearly sabotage. Thewire was exactly the same length as in theprevious fault, and the same cable-handling crewhad been on duty. Further, sabotage in such acase was not without precedent. A few yearsearlier, a cable laid across the North Sea toHolland had been sabotaged by having a naildriven through it in order to affect stock priceson the London Exchange.

The crew was summoned and they all, to aman, agreed that it looked like foul play and theyfurther agreed that watches must be set to keepan eye on the men handling the cables.

Again the ship headed for Newfoundland andby Wednesday, August z, was within six hundredmiles of her goal. The Great Eastern had paid outtwelve hundred miles of cable, and it wasworking so well that technicians in Valentia were

even able to tell when the ship rolled, alteringthe tiny, whispering effect the earth's magneticfield had on the current in the cable. But thatmorning, as Cyrus Field was in the cable tier, agrating sound was heard, as of a wire scraping onmetal. The crew shouted for men on deck to lookout for the cause, but the warning was not heardand the spot passed over the stern and into thewater. Immediately a fault was reported in theline. The cable was still functioning, but at areduced capacity. They could have carried on, butCanning insisted on retrieving the cable.

The matter was considered so minor that theexpedition did not bother to inform Valentia thatthey were going to cut the cable. As thisdiscussion was going on, a workman who hadbeen in the cable tier came up and produced apiece of wire he had found amid the cable thatexactly matched the pieces responsible for thetwo previous faults. It had come from the brittlecharcoal iron sheathing. There had been nosabotage after all.

Again the ship slowed to a stop, again thecable was cut and laboriously passed up to thebow and attached to the little donkey engine thatwould pull it slowly on board. But the donkeyengine needed time to get up steam and in themeantime a breeze came up, causing the vastbulk of the Great Eastern to drift over the cable,chafing it. When the hauling in began, just as thedefective part was coming over the bow, thecable suddenly snapped. It "flew through thestoppers and with one bound leaped over theintervening space and flashed into the sea,"Russell reported. "The cable gone! Gone foreverdown in that fearful depth! There around us laythe placid Atlantic, smiling in the sun, and not adimple to show where lay so many hopes buried."27

A little after noon, most men not engaged inthe recovery had gone down to lunch. "SuddenlyMr. Canning appeared in the saloon," Russellwrote, "and in a manner which caused every one

to start in his seat, said, 'It is all over! It isgone!'"28

The sudden cessation of signals from theGreat Eastern, news of which reached all overthe British Isles within hours, caused a frenzy ofspeculation as to the cause. Theories rangedfrom magnetic storms to the sudden founderingof the Great Eastern after hitting an iceberg.

On the Great Eastern there were really onlytwo choices: abandon the expedition and returnto Britain with their tails between their legs, orgrapple for the cable and try to fish it out of thesea. Samuel Canning had fished cables out ofdeep water before and was determined to tryagain. But this was far deeper water than he hadworked in previously. As Henry Field explained,"It was as if an alpine hunter stood on thesummit of Mont Blanc and cast a line into theVale of Chamonix. Yet who shall put bounds onhuman courage?"29

Fortunately, the weather had been brilliantly

clear at noon, just before the accident, andCaptain Anderson had taken an excellent sextantreading of the sun, so they knew where the cablehad been lost to within half a mile. Theypositioned the ship to the south of where thecable lay and a few miles east of where its endwas calculated to be.

A length of five miles of wire rope was onboard, ready in case it had been necessary tobuoy the cable in a bad storm. To this wasattached a grappling hook, which looked a bitlike an anchor, but with five arms, each taperingto an end shaped like a shovel. Russell describedthem as "the hooks with which the Giant Despairwas going to fish from the Great Eastern for atake worth, with all its belongings, more than amillion. "30

Thrown overboard about three in theafternoon, it took fully two hours for the grappleto reach the bottom. Because there was nosounding equipment on board, the depth couldonly be guessed at. With the grapple on thebottom, the ship began sailing northward,searching for the cable. Near morning, the ropequivered and the head of Great Eastern wastugged slightly around. They had hookedsomething, but was it the cable? The answer wassoon clearly yes. Had it been a piece of debris oran old wreck, the weight would have diminished

when the wire rope shortened as they hauled itup. But the strain steadily increased as thegrapple rose and more and more cable was liftedoff the bottom. Also, the contact had been madeexactly where Captain Anderson's sightingindicated the cable lay.

The wire rope, unfortunately, was notcontinuous. Instead, it was made of hundred-fathom lengths shackled together. The shacklesproved to be the weak points. One broke but thebrake-man was able to clamp it before the endvanished into the sea, but not before twoworkmen were severely lacerated by the end,which acted like a steel bullwhip. Then, whenthey had raised the cable about three-quarters ofa mile from the bottom, another shackle brokeand the cable plunged back into the depths,taking two miles of rope with it. A secondattempt succeeded in hooking the cable, but thistime a shackle broke when it had raised it a mile.In a third attempt, a fluke caught on the rope, afact discovered only when the rope was raised

after failing to catch the cable. A final attemptwas made on Friday, August 13. Again, afterpulling in about eight hundred fathoms, ashackle gave way.

There was now not enough rope left to make afifth attempt. There was nothing to do but returnonce more to Britain in failure.

As the Great Eastern s engines began topound, the Terrible signaled, "Farewell!"

"Good-by. Thank you," the melancholy shipsignaled back.

11. The Great EasterLooms All Glorious

CYRUS FIELD EXPECTED to return to theBritish Isles once more the object of derision. Hewas, therefore, pleasantly surprised to findhimself instead almost a hero. The New Worldhad had no news of the latest expedition for

many days and did not even know when it mightlearn what was happening. Indeed, not untilHMS Terrible reached St. John's, Newfoundland,did it learn both that the expedition had sailedfrom Ireland and of the latest failure.

But the Old World, connected to the GreatEastern by a telegraph cable that worked toperfection, had followed the progress of theexpedition with keen interest and increasingexpectations of success. Then, suddenly, on themorning of August 2, silence, and the silencecontinued for two long weeks as the GreatEastern fought to wrestle the cable back to thesurface and only then sailed sadly for home.

In the absence of any solid information,speculation, of course, ran rampant. The GreatEastern, too big to be structurally sound, hadhogged on an Atlantic swell, broken her back,and plunged to the bottom with all hands. Shehad struck an iceberg in the Labrador Currentand similarly foundered. Only on the sixteenth

day of silence, as the Great Eastern approachedthe small Irish port of Crookhaven, at thesouthwest tip of the island, was the truthlearned, when an enterprising local journalistsailed out to meet them. "We thought you wentdown,"1 he yelled when he got within hailingdistance. When he came aboard, he heard thewhole dramatic story and hastened back toCrookhaven to relay it by telegraph, while theGreat Eastern sailed on to the Nore in theThames Estuary.

Besides the relief of learning that fivehundred men— including some of Britain's mostdistinguished — and her greatest ship had notvanished without a trace, it was immediatelyclear that success had been fully within reachbefore simple bad luck intervened. Field andothers had spent the time between the finalfailure and reaching England drawing up a newprospectus. It made twelve points, including,

That the 1858 cable had proved that it was

possible to lay a cable across the Atlanticand to send telegraph signals through it.

That the Great Eastern, "from her sizeand constant steadiness, and from thecontrol over her afforded by the joint use ofpaddles and screw, renders it safe to lay anAtlantic Cable in any weather."2

That the cable, if lost, can be located and,with proper equipment, raised to thesurface.

"All who were on that voyage," Henry Fieldwrote, "felt a confidence such as they had neverfelt before."3 Field was delighted to discover thatthe company directors in London were of thesame opinion. Indeed, they quickly decided thatsuccess the next year was so certain and thebusiness potentially so large, that they should laya whole new cable the next year and then returnto midocean, raise the cable lost in 1865, andcomplete it.

The Telegraph Construction and MaintenanceCompany again offered to lay the new line,estimated to cost £500,000, and take their profitin Atlantic Telegraph stock at the rate of 20percent of the cost of laying the line.

The Atlantic Telegraph Company decided toraise £600,000 by issuing 120,000 shares ofpreferred stock, to pay the junk-bond rate of 12percent, at £5 per share. Everything seemed ontrack for a successful expedition the next yearand Field returned to the United States inSeptember. A fellow passenger wrote, "We feltthe deepest sympathy for him, and to oursurprise he was the life of the ship and the mostcheerful one on board."

Field explained his cheerfulness by tellinghim, "We've learned a great deal, and nextsummer we'll lay the cable without a doubt."4Whether his fellow passengers, certainly awareof the many failures, believed him is a goodquestion.

Field was returning to New York because hewanted to be home for his daughter Isabella'smarriage in October. But there was little for himto do stateside other than to meet with his fellowdirectors of the New York, Newfoundland, andLondon Telegraph Company. The directorsagreed that the cable laid across the Cabot Straitback in 1855 should be replaced. It was showingsigns of faltering, and cable technology hadadvanced so much in the decade since it hadbeen laid. They decided to order ninety miles ofnew cable from the Telegraph Construction andMaintenance, to the same specifications as thenew Atlantic cable.

Ever restless, however, Field was soon back inEngland, arriving on Christmas Eve. There hefound that a new problem had befallen theAtlantic Telegraph Company.

This time it was not technological or financialbut legal. Two days earlier the attorney generalhad ruled that the company, which had been

created by private act of Parliament, as manycompanies still were at that time, rather than byregistration under the Companies Act of 1844,had no right to issue new stock without furtherParliamentary action. That was currentlyimpossible, as Parliament was in recess, and inany event the deadline for submitting privatebills in that session had passed.

In this case, there was nothing to do but stopeverything and return the money that hadalready been subscribed until the lawyers founda solution. Daniel Gooch, the chairman of theGreat Western Railway and the head of thesyndicate owning the Great Eastern, suggestedsimply establishing a new company, this oneunder the Companies Act, in order to get the jobdone, and straighten out the legal tangles later. Itwas to be capitalized at £600,000 and Goochoffered to subscribe £20,000 himself Fieldsubscribed £10,000. The new company wasnamed the Anglo-American Telegraph Company.Because the directorship of that company, as

well as those of the Atlantic Telegraph Company,the New York, Newfoundland, and LondonTelegraph Company, and the TelegraphConstruction and Maintenance Company,overlapped to a great extent, they operatedeffectively as one entity.

Thomas Brassey quickly agreed to invest up to£60,000 in the new company and variousdirectors of the other companies agreed to put up£10,000 each. So by the time the subscriptionwas opened to the public, there was a total of£230,500 already in the till, and the wholeamount needed was raised in a couple of weeks.Given the fact that the British economy was inrecession in the mid-1860s, the ease with whichthe money was raised diis time clearly indicatedthat there was now a wide perception that thiswas a proven technology. It was just a questionof getting the job done.

A NEW CABLE WAS ORDERED and theTelegraph

Construction and Maintenance Companybegan turning it out at the rate of twenty milesper day. Although it had the same dimensions asthe cable from the previous year, it was betterdesigned owing to the experience gained inlaying that one. The iron armoring was nowgalvanized, the wires being passed throughmolten zinc to produce a coating of zinc-ironalloy that made them impervious to rust andcorrosion. It also made them more ductile — ableto stretch further without breaking. The newcable could take nearly half a ton more strainbefore breaking.

The heavy shore end (top) and main oceancable used in 1865 and 1866.

Because the armor was now rustproof, thehemp did not have to be impregnated with pitch.This meant that the new cable was rope colored,not black, and was not sticky. Stray bits of ironwire were far less likely to adhere to it and cause

mischief It also weighed more than four hundredpounds less per mile.

The paying-out machinery was given morepower so that it could haul in, if necessary, aswell as pay out, and the tedious, risky business ofshifting the cable around to the bow wasobviated. And the Great Eastern was nowsupplied with adequate wire rope for haulingcables off the sea floor. Willoughby Smith, thehead electrician with the Telegraph Constructionand Maintenance Company, devised a means oftesting the insulation of the cable continuouslyso that a fault would show up instantly, ratherthan after as much as half an hour. Theequipment Smith developed was so sensitive thatit would detect faults, "even when they are sosmall that they would not weaken the signalsthrough the Atlantic cable one millionth part! "5

The Great Eastern herself was also altered.The stern was fitted with a "crinoline" to ensurethat the cable would not foul the screw, and the

paddle wheels were uncoupled, making itpossible to use just one at a time, thus greatlyincreasing the ability of the ship to steer whilesteaming in reverse. The great ship also had herbottom scraped, removing tons of marine growthand doubtless considerably increasing her topspeed, not that that was needed for a cable-layingoperation. This was, however, no easy task as theship could be neither dry-docked nor careened.But Captain Anderson devised a "simpleinstrument" by which she could be raked andscraped from the deck.

Taking no chances, the cable crews in the nextexpedition were to wear canvas suits thatfastened up the back and had no pockets, makingit nearly impossible to bring instruments forsabotage in close proximity to the cable.

The technicians were to be the same as theprevious year, except that Willoughby Smith wasthe official electrician,

"advised" by William Thomson. Field again

was the only American on board.Field's presence was well recognized as key to

the venture's success. After Field returned from atrip to New York in May, William Thomsonwrote him that "I am very glad to learn that youare again in this country. You are not come toosoon as the A.T.C. [Atlantic Telegraph Company]seems to require an impulse, and I am sure willbe much the better for your presence."" Earlier,Captain Anderson had written after Field's returnfrom an earlier trip, "I feel as if our watch hadgot its mainspring replaced, and had been tryingto go without it for the last three months. "7

The Great Eastern sailed from the ThamesEstuary on June 30, accompanied by thechartered vessels Albany and Medway. She wasso deeply laden that she barely cleared thesandbar at the Nore. The little lightship atMargate managed to produce an impromptuband that serenaded the Great Eastern with"Goodbye, Sweetheart, Good-bye!" as she

steamed majestically to sea, her great paddlewheels thrashing through the water.

On July 4, off Fastnet Rock on the southerncoast of Ireland, "the American Flag was hoistedand speeches made in compliment of Mr.Field."8 Then, with the Victorian love of amateurtheatrics, a makeshift theater called the GreatAtlantic Haul was organized and a satiric reviewpresented called "A Cableistic and EasternExtravaganza." Field was the butt of most of thejokes. Referring to the cable stowed below, thecharacter of Field was made to say

Oh! That I could shuffle off this mortal coil!(A la Hamlet) I've furrowed the Atlantic many

times,And 'mid such toil have held convivial

dinners.For me the sparkling wine cup nightly flowed,

Robert Dudley's painting of laying the shoreend at Foilhummerum Bay.

And often flowed in vain;While others to the joy of music clung,I plied the bottle, but 'twas then of ink.Prospectuses I drew; percentage showed,And e'en through worse times on 'changeCould lead grave, bearded menTo wander forth and museOn the triumphant joys I promised them.9On Friday, July 13, the shore cable was once

again hauled ashore at Foilhummerum Bay and

the cliffs there were alive with onlookers. HenryField, putting on his clergyman's hat, heldservices, praying for final success. The GreatEastern remained at sea, thirty miles out. Theweather was foggy and it took some time to findthe buoy that marked the seaward end of theshore cable, raise the cable, and get it spliced.The splicing itself was no small matter. As HenryField described it, "Quick, nimble hands tore offthe covering from some yards of the shore end ofthe main cable, till they came to the core; then,swiftly unwinding the copper wires, they laidthem together, twining them closely andcarefully as a silken braid. Thus stripped andbare this new-born child of the sea was wrappedin swaddling-clothes, covered up with manycoatings of gutta-percha, and hempen rope, andstrong iron wires, the whole bound round andround with heavy bands, and the splicing wascomplete."10

The line was tested through its whole length

and found to be in perfect working order. ThenHMS Terrible led the way, followed by the GreatEastern, which was flanked by the Albany andMedway.

The track of the 1866 expedition was somethirty miles south of the 1865 cable to ensurethat when they later grappled for the old cablethey did not accidentally foul the new one. TheGreat Eastern was able to maintain six knotseasily with only her paddle wheels, and her screwwas disengaged. The fog and ram of Friday, July13 (the superstitious consoled themselves withthe knowledge that Columbus had also sailed ona Friday), soon cleared and the weather becameperfect. "The sea like a mill-pond,"11 wrote JohnC. Deane, secretary of the Anglo-AmericanTelegraph Company in his diary. WilliamHoward Russell was not aboard this trip, becauseThe Times of London had sent him to cover theSeven Weeks' War between Prussia and Austria,and diaries of Deane and Gooch are the sources

of most details on the i&66 expedition.*The splice is made linking the Valentia end

and the ocean length of cable.

On Sunday a man fell overboard from theTerrible but was quickly rescued. Monday wasperfect. Indeed, Deane wrote in his diary that "itwas so calm that the masts of our convoy werereflected in the ocean, an unusual thing to see. Alarge shoal of porpoises gamboled about us forhalf an hour. A glorious sunset, and later, acrescent moon, which we hope to see in the

brightness of her full, lighting our way intoTrinity Bay before the days of this July shall haveended."12

Early Wednesday morning, however, the cablegot tangled in the after tank when a "foul flake"occurred. Fortunately, the ship's engines werestopped at once and then reversed to make

*The Prussians had paid close attention to theAmerican Civil War, sending many militaryobservers. They thus had learned firsthand themilitary uses of the telegraph and the railroad.Field Marshall Von Moltke was able toconcentrate his forces quickly by railroad,coordinating them from Berlin by telegraph. Theresult was the Battle of Koniggratz, in whichAustria's army was decisively defeated andAustria was forced to seek terms. Ironically, abreakdown in the telegraph nearly caused thePrussians to lose the battle when one army, forlack of orders, failed to move up. Only a message,delivered the old-fashioned way, by a dispatch

rider who galloped twenty miles, saved the day.sure that not too much strain was placed on

the cable. As Captain Anderson expertly kept theimmense ship stationary by slight adjustmentsof paddle wheels and screw, Samuel Canningcalmly directed the cable crew in disentanglingthe mess. "During all this critical time," Deanewrote in his diary, "there was an entire absenceof noise and confusion. Every order was silentlyobeyed, and the cable men and crew worked withhearty good-will. Mr. Canning has hadexperience of foul flakes before, and showed thathe knew what to do in the emergency. "13

The grotesquely amateur attempt to lay thecable across the Cabot Strait in 1855 — whilewomen in full skirts strolled the deck,Newfoundland dogs galumphed about, andSamuel Canning had been grateful not to havebeen sacked on the spot — had given way to coolcompetence and great professional skill.

On Saturday, July 21, the Great Eastern

passed the halfway point, where the Niagara andAgamemnon had twice seen the 1858 cable part.There was a growing sense of optimism amongthe technical staff and the crew alike, but thetension never abated. "I now hear the rumble ofthe cable over my head m the cabin," Goochwrote in his diary once the cable from the aftertank was exhausted and the forward tank wasbeing used, "and am constantly listening to it.This stretch of the nerves day after day is hardwork, and the mind has no change; morning,noon, and night it is all the same — cable, cable,cable."14

Field, as always, was indomitably optimistic.On Monday, July 23, he telegraphed to Valentiato get "the latest news from Egypt, China, India,and distant places for us to forward to the UnitedStates on our arrival at Heart's Content."15

Perhaps anticipating one of the major demandsfor the Atlantic cable, he also asked for the latestfinancial news, money rates, and cotton prices.

By Tuesday he estimated reachingNewfoundland on Friday and asked WilliamGlass, in Valencia, when ke thought the cablemight be opened for public business.

Glass's reply could only have been music toField's ears. "If you land the cable on Friday, Isee no reason why it should not be open onSaturday."'°

On Tuesday they passed the point where the1865 cable had parted, and still everything wentwell. "May we have three days more of suchdelightful monotony!" Deane wrote in his diarythat day.*7

As they neared Newfoundland the weatherdeteriorated into ram and dense fog.* Thetelegraph fleet rang with signal whistles— twofor the Terrible, three for the Medway, four forthe Albany, and one, by far the loudest, for theGreat Eastern — to ensure that they did notcollide.

The admiralty had ordered Sir James Hope,

admiral on the North American station, to placea ship thirty miles off the entrance to Trinity Bayto help guide the fleet in. On Thursday, July 26,the Albany was dispatched to look for her.

The next day, the fleet spotted two shipsbearing down on it. It was the Albany and HMSNiger, of the North American station. The foghung thick all night as the Great Eastern crepttoward the shore. Then, early the next morning,Deane noted that "good fortune follows us, andscarcely has eight o'clock arrived when themassive curtain of fog raises itself graduallyfrom both shores of Trinity Bay, disclosing to usthe entrance to Heart's Content."18

The meeting of the warm Gulf Stream and thecold Labrador Current makes the Grand Banksoff Newfoundland among the richest fishinggrounds on earth and also one of the foggiest.

The tiny hamlet had been dressed with flagsfor their arrival. Because there had been no newssince several days before the Great Eastern leftIreland, the reporters in Heart's Content had hadnothing to do but wait. For "the correspondentsof the American papers," Henry Field reported,only a long and anxious suspense, till themorning when the first ship was seen in theoffing. As they looked toward her, she camenearer—and see, there is another and another!And now the hull of the Great Eastern loomedup all glorious in the morning sky. They werecoming! Instantly all was wild excitement on

shore. Boats put oft to row towards the fleet. TheAlbany was the first to round the point and enterthe bay. The Terrible was close behind. TheMedway stopped an hour or two to join on theheavy shore end, while the Great Eastern, glidingcalmly in as if she had done nothing remarkable,dropped her anchor in front of the telegraphhouse, having trailed behind her a chain of twothousand miles, to bind the Old World to theNew.1?

If the iron soul of the Great Eastern thoughtshe had done nothing remarkable, The Times ofLondon disagreed. ' It is a great work," The Timesstated, "a glory to our age and nation, and themen who have achieved it deserve to be honoredamong the benefactors of their race."20 The newsof the success of the cable expedition received amore prominent place in the paper than theheadline "Treaty of peace signed between Prussiaand Austria!"

Queen Victoria also thought the

accomplishment memorable and showered thoseinvolved with honors. William Thomson, SamuelCanning, William Glass, and Captain Andersonall received knighthoods. Daniel Gooch andCurtis Lampson, deputy chairman of the AtlanticTelegraph Company, were created baronets.Again it was noted that Cyrus Field was nothonored by the queen only because he was not aBritish subject, but the British newspapersquickly dubbed him "Lord Cable," and Congressvoted him a gold medal (although, because of abureaucratic mix-up, it was several years beforehe actually received it). Constantino Brumidi,who painted the murals in the United StatesCapitol, depicted Venus holding the Atlanticcable on the interior of the dome, where it canstill be seen from the Rotunda.

Heart's Content was as frenzied as a fishingvillage of sixty houses and a church on the shoreof a wilderness could get. "There was the wildestexcitement I have ever witnessed," Daniel Goochwrote in his diary. "All seemed mad with joy,

jumping into the water and shouting as thoughthey wished the sound to be heard inWashington."21

someA gold medal awarded to Cyrus Field by

Congress in March

PREPARATIONS WERE MADE TO SPLICETHE CABLE that reached across the Atlanticonto the shore cable already laid, and Cyrus Fieldhad gone ashore. There he learned that the cableacross the Cabot Strait had broken down, "so thata message which came from Ireland in a momentof time," his brother reported, "was delayedtwenty-four hours on its way to New York."22

Field had, of course, anticipated this possibilityand had urged the New York, Newfoundland, andLondon Telegraph Company to keep the originalcable in repair so that it would serve until thenew one ordered in England could be laid.Instead, the company had decided to wait andsee how the Atlantic cable expedition fared.

Field immediately telegraphed to St. John's tocharter the steamer Bloodhound to fish up theold cable and get it working again. In themeantime, he also chartered the Dauntless torun back and forth between Newfoundland andNova Scotia carrying messages the old-fashionedway. It was quickly determined that the old cablehad been fouled by an anchor a few miles fromshore and broken. A piece of the new cable wasspliced onto both ends and service was quicklyrestored.

Because of the broken cable, it was not untilSunday,

July 29, that the news reached New York,

when Field's message to the Associated Pressarrived. "Heart's Content, July 27," it read. "Wearrived here at nine o'clock this morning. Allwell. Thank God, the cable is laid, and is inperfect working order. "23

With the cable across the Cabot Straitrepaired quickly, messages of congratulationsbegan to pour into Heart's Content, which was,momentarily, the center of the world. QueenVictoria and President Andrew Johnsonexchanged congratulations. Perhaps somemeasure of what he had managed to accomplishcame home to Cyrus Field when he received,nearly simultaneously, two messages, one fromSan Francisco and another from Ferdinand deLesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, who was inAlexandria, Egypt, each thousands of miles awayfrom Heart's Content, Newfoundland.

Commercial traffic also immediately began toutilize the Atlantic cable. Daniel Gooch, now amajor investor in the Anglo-American Telegraph

Company as well as head of the syndicate thatowned the Great Eastern, was delighted to notein his diary that "yesterday we had fiftymessages, paying us, I suppose not less thantwelve thousand pounds."24

While Daniel Gooch was happily counting hisprofits, the world was already beginning tochange. As early as August 16, 186(3, only twoweeks after the cable had opened for business,Harper's Weekly reported that "the monetaryquotations in this city and London are becomingequalized. "25

A market can never be larger than the area inwhich communication is effectively instant. Thatmeant that until the mid-nineteenth century,every major city had its own financial market. Inthe 1840s, the rapid spread of the telegraph onland had allowed the largest markets, such asLondon and Wall Street, to become dominant.Now, thanks to the cable, these two marketscould begin to act together.

IMMEDIATELY UPON SUCCESS, Field hadtelegraphed to his wife, who had stoicallyendured the many separations from herhusband, that "now we shall be a united family."But the very next sentence belied that hopefulstatement. "We leave in about a week to recoverthe cable of last year."2"

The Great Eastern, its fuel capacity greatlyreduced by the vast cargo of cable, had to take oneight thousand tons of coal sent over fromEngland by collier before proceeding. Also, thesix hundred miles left of the 1865 cable that hadbeen stored in the Medway was now transferredto the Great Eastern to be spliced on to the cablewhen it was raised from the ocean bed. Shedeparted Heart's Content on Thursday, August 9.

Banquet at the Metropolitan Hotel in honorof Cyrus Field.

The Albany and the Terrible had departedeight days earlier to search for the lost cable.They quickly found it, and succeeded in raising ita few hundred fathoms. But bad weather movedin and they had to buoy it. The weather then toreaway the buoy and the cable sank once more tothe bottom, taking two miles of wire rope with it.When the Great Eastern joined them on Sunday,August 12, everyone expected that the cablewould be quickly located again. It was not.

Despite repeated drags of the grapnel ("I oftenwent to the bow," Field reported, "and sat on therope, and could tell by the quiver that the grapnelwas dragging on the bottom two miles underus"27), the cable was only hooked on Thursday.It took fourteen hours to reel her in and it finallyappeared on the morning of August 20. "We hadit in full sight for five minutes," Field wrote, "along, slimy monster, fresh from the ooze of theocean's bed—but our men began to cheer sowildly that it seemed to be frightened, andsuddenly broke away and went down into thesea."28

Again and again the expedition hooked thecable only to have it break before reaching thesurface. Evidently the cable was weaker after itsyearlong immersion and could not bear its ownweight in such a deep part.

The final tactics adopted for picking up the1865 cable.

Finally, another approach was tried. The fleetmoved ninety miles east, where the water wasshallower by six hundred fathoms. They quicklyhooked the cable (it was the thirtieth time thegrapnel had been lowered), but this time broughtit only halfway to the surface and then buoyed it,still nine hundred fathoms below the surface.The Great Eastern then moved several milesfarther west, toward the cable's lost end, andhooked the cable again. The Med-way., stationedtwo miles farther west still, also hooked thecable. The two ships began to haul it in verycarefully. When the Medway had brought her towithin three hundred fathoms of the surface,while the Great Eastern's grapnel was still eight

hundred fathoms down, the Medwaydeliberately broke the cable to lighten the load.The eighty-odd miles of cable from this positionto where it had broken the previous year wereabandoned.

The Great Eastern began to haul the monsterin, and finally, at one o'clock on the morning ofSunday, September 2, the end came aboard andwas quickly secured. The cable was hooked up tothe testing room and a message was sent toValentia. Although Valentia had been expectingit, the signal was still thrilling when it came aftera year of silence.

The London Spectator reported from Valencia,Night and day, for a whole year, an electrician

has always been on duty, watching the tiny ray oflight through which signals are given, and twiceevery day the whole length of wire — onethousand two hundred and fifty miles — hasbeen tested for conductivity and insulation. . . .Sometimes, . . . wild incoherent messages from

the deep did come, but these were merely theresults of magnetic storms and earth-currents,which deflected the galvanometer rapidly, andspelt the most extraordinary words andsometimes even sentences of nonsense.Suddenly, one Sunday morning, while the lightwas being watched by Mr. May, he observed apeculiar indication about it, which showed atonce to his experienced eye that a message wasat hand. In a few minutes the unsteady flickeringwas changed to coherency . . . and the cablebegan to speak the appointed signals, . . ."Canning to Glass" must have seemed like thefirst rational words uttered by a high-feveredpatient, when the ravings have ceased and hisconsciousness returns.2^

On board the Great Eastern, jubilationerupted when contact with Ireland was made.Robert Dudley, the artist sent by The LondonIllustrated News, reported that "along the deckoutside, over the ship, throughout the ship, the

pent-up enthusiasm overflowed; and even beforethe test-room was cleared, the roaring bravos ofour guns drowned the huzzahs of the crew, and awhiz of rockets was heard rushing high into theclear morning sky to greet our consort-ships withthe glad intelligence."3°

For Cyrus Field, it was, perhaps, the suprememoment of his life.

Never shall I forget that eventful moment,when, in answer to our question to Valentia,whether the cable of 18^6, which we had a fewweeks previously laid, was in good workingorder, and the cable across the Gulf of St.Lawrence had been repaired, in an instant cameback those six memorable letters, "Both O.K." Ileft the room, I went to my cabin, I locked thedoor; I could no longer restrain my tears—cryinglike a child, and full of gratitude to God that Ihad been permitted to witness the recovery ofthe cable we had lost from the Great Eastern justthirteen months previous.31

The expedition laid the last of the 1865 cablewithout further trouble. Thus the secondtelegraph cable to cross the Atlantic Ocean wassoon in place and working only four weeks afterthe first cable had begun to operate. Besidesdoubling the capacity, the second cable was avaluable insurance policy, allowing continuousoperation of the system even if one cable wasdown for repair or maintenance.

As FIELD PREPARED to depart the GreatEastern for the last time, Captain Anderson criedout, "Give him three cheers!" The little harbor ofHeart's Content rang with them. "And now threemore for his family!" and again the pine-coveredhills echoed the heartfelt sentiments of all whowere present. Then "the wheels of the GreatEastern began to move, and the noble ship, withher noble company, bore away for England. "32

As The Times of London had said sixteenyears earlier, when the first submarine cable hadbeen laid across the English Channel, "The jest

of yesterday has become the fact of today."33Never again would North America be out ofinstant communication with Europe for morethan a few hours.

EPILOGUE: T HERE WERE T WO WORLDS LET T HERE BE 1

IT WAS NOT IN THE NATURE of Cyrus Fieldto rest on his triumph, but his days as anentrepreneur were largely over. World-famousand greatly admired on both sides of the Atlantic,he lent his name and efforts to many worthycauses, including the settling of the disputebetween Britain and the United States regardingthe Alabama.

In business, he was largely content to investin going concerns. The cable made him seriouslyrich once again and he was able to pay off hisdebts in short order. Soon he built a largecountry house on the Hudson River north ofNew York, naming it Ardsley after the town

where John Field, the astronomer, had beenborn in England.

But, like many entrepreneurs, Field was not agood investor. In the 188os he was a majorplayer on Wall Street, interested in suchcompanies as the Manhattan Elevated RailwayCompany. Indulging increasingly in speculation,often with his sons, Cyrus jr. and Edward, he wasnearly ruined when the market turned againsthim. On a single, ghastly day, June 24,1887, helost about $6 million.

His last days were ones of sadness. A daughterwas severely mentally ill and his favorite son,Edward, was found to have been engaged instock fraud. His beloved wife, Mary, died shortlyafter their fiftieth wedding anniversary, andCyrus followed her the next year.

Although his fortune had disappeared in thecutthroat Wall Street of the late nineteenthcentury, his fame, of course, endured. When hedied, on July 12, 1892, age seventy-two, a service

was held at Ardsley attended by hundreds,including the famous as well as the ordinary. Hisbody was then taken to Stockbridge,Massachusetts, where he had been born into avery different world, and after a brief service inthe church where his father had preached, hewas laid to rest beneath a tombstone that reads

Cyrus West FieldTo whose courage, energy and perseverance

the world owes the Atlantic telegraphIt is a simple monument, but all that is

necessary. For as a contemporary said, "Everymessage that flashes through the Atlantic cableis his eulogy." And that eulogy continuesunabated, and, indeed, far greater than Fieldcould ever have imagined.

ALTHOUGH THE SUCCESSFULCOMPLETION of two cables across the AtlanticOcean in i&66 proved the technical feasibility oflong-distance submarine telegraphy, itscommercial viability was not yet assured. There

is always a shakedown period in any newtechnology while the best ways to maximizeprofit are explored. This was quite as true of theAtlantic cable in the 1860s as it would be of theInternet in the 90s.

At first, the rates were set extremely high—$10 a word with a ten-word minimum. As $10was a good weekly wage for a skilled workman atthat time, these rates eliminated all but largebusinesses and the very rich from using thecable. Still, between July 28 and October 31,1867, the Atlantic cable transmitted 2,772commercial messages across the Atlantic, andthis produced enough revenue to be profitable,averaging $2,500 a day. At this rate, however,only about 5 percent of the cable's capacity wasbeing utilized. So the company cut the rate inhalf, charging $4^.80 for a ten-word message,and revenue increased to an average of $2,800 aday as many more people began to utilize thecable.

It was only when competition reared its headthat prices began to fall rapidly and usageexploded. In 1869 a new company, the Societe duCable Trans-Atlantique Francais, laid a cablefrom Brest, France, to the French island of St.Pierre, south of Newfoundland, and then on toMassachusetts. The Anglo-American Telegraphcompany, naturally, opposed this new enterprise,which was largely funded by British capital, buthad no means to prevent it. The Great Easternwas once again employed to lay it.

Prices continued to fall as more cables werelaid and ways were developed to lower costs. In1870, for instance, Horace Greeley of the NewYork Tribune spent $5,000 to transmit a singledispatch regarding the Franco-Prussian War. Thedemand of the public for up-to-the-minute newsfrom Europe forced the ferociously competitivemajor newspapers to incur such expenses. Butthey quickly agreed to form United PressInternational in order to share the costs.

By 1870, Wall Street, where knowledge of thelatest London prices could mean the differencebetween fortune and bankruptcy, was spending amillion dollars per year on cable charges andLondon brokers were spending similar sums.The ever-growing demand caused more andmore cables to be laid in different areas of theworld.

The Great Eastern laid a total of five cablesacross the

Atlantic in these years, and by 1500 merewould be a total of fifteen, including a cable toBrazil and Argentina. And the Atlantic was notthe only ocean beneath which a cat's cradle ofsubmarine cables was being laid. In 1869 SirJohn Fender, an investor in the Atlantic cable,organized the British Indian SubmarineTelegraph Company and laid a cable from Suez toBombay. This finally gave Britain a securetelegraphic link to its Indian empire. The originalBritish telegraphic link with India had been a

submarine cable from India only to the PersianGulf and from there went over land through theTurkish Empire and a number of Europeancountries. It often took a week for a message totravel the whole route and was frequentlygarbled as it was relayed over and over by clerkswho did not speak English.

Fender did not stop with India. By 1871Australia was reached, via Singapore, and linessoon stretched to China and Japan. In 1502 theglobe was at last girdled with submarine cableswhen a line was run from Vancouver, BritishColumbia, to Australia and New Zealand.

Thus, within a generation, submarinetelegraphy had made it possible for every majornation in the world to be in nearly instantcommunication with every other. These cableshad not only become vital parts of the modernworld—indeed, helped powerfully to bring themodern world into being—they had also becomeimportant national assets (and targets) in time of

war. Within hours of Britain's declaration of waragainst Germany, in August 1914, a British cable-laying ship, the Teleconia, was off the coast ofGermany in the North Sea. Methodically hercrew grappled for and raised the five Germantransatlantic cables. As each was raised, it wascut and allowed to slide back into the sea.

At a stroke, Germany was forced to use thenew wireless technology developed two decadesearlier by Guglielmo Marconi in order tocommunicate with the outside world, and Britishintelligence could intercept these messages anddecode them. In 1917, one of these messagesproved fatal to Germany. The "ZimmermanTelegram," which offered Mexico an alliance andpromised the return of her "lost provinces" fromthe United States, finally persuaded PresidentWoodrow Wilson to ask Congress to declare war.

WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY, the first practicaluse of the transient electrical currents thatWilliam Thomson had investigated in the 1850s,

quickly became an alternative technology tosubmarine cables, but never replaced them, evenfor nonsecret communications. Subject to stormsand magnetic disturbances, wireless could notprovide anywhere near the same reliability ascables. Even with the advent of satellites,transoceanic communication is still largely bycable. Satellites, subject to solar "weather,"account for only about 30 percent of globalcommunications.

The Atlantic cable system as of 1903.

Only in the dawning technology of telephonydid noncable means compete with cable, whenradiotelephony—utilizing radio to transmit

telephone calls—was developed in the 1920s.Transatlantic telephone calls first becamepossible by this method in 1526, and cost aprincely $75, in 1926 dollars, for three minutes.

The reason is that telephone signals must bemuch stronger than telegraphic ones in order tobe reliably converted back to a voice at the otherend. There was then no way to transmit a signalof sufficient strength through a transoceaniccable. The first telephone cable, laid in 1921, ranonly the ninety miles from Havana to Key West,and allowed only three calls simultaneously.

However, there are strict limits to the numberof radio frequencies that can be utilized byradiotelephony, and increased demand fortransoceanic communications quickly reachedthose limits. The problem of sending telephonesignals through submarine cables was finallysolved when AT&T developed the "regenerator,"a device that allowed the signal to be renewedperiodically on its journey through the cable. The

first transatlantic telephone cable was laid in1956, capable of transmitting thirty-two callssimultaneously. With the advent of theelectronics revolution, cable capacity grew byleaps and bounds. By 1988 cables were routinelycarrying ten thousand simultaneous calls, and by1996, a new trans-Pacific cable could carry320,000.

The increased capacity led to sharply lowerprices, resulting in much higher usage. In 1950 amillion overseas phone calls originated in theUnited States. By 1970 the number had risen to23.4 million. In 1980 it was 200 million. In 1997a staggering 4.2 billion overseas phone callsoriginated in the United States. The numberscontinue to surge as data transmissions andInternet usage add to demand. A new fiber-opticscable network between the United States andChina, now in the planning stages, will cost onebillion dollars. Allowing for inflation, that is,very, very roughly, ten times what the firsttransatlantic cable cost to build and install 136

years ago. But its capacity is billions of times asgreat.

It will have a total length of 18,750 miles andwill have a capacity of 80 gigabytes per second,enough to carry 4 million simultaneous phonecalls or transmit data equal to about 18,000encyclopedia volumes per second. Similar cablesare planned to run from the United States toBrazil and from the United States to Europe.

Today it costs less to make a phone call fromNew York to London than it did to call from NewYork to Philadelphia half a century ago.

UPON FIELD'S SUCCESS IN 1866, thedistinguished New York lawyer William MaxwellEvarts (whose father had once roomed withField's father at Yale) toasted him at one of theinevitable banquets. Evarts, who would benamed secretary of state in the Grantadministration, was already deeply concernedwith international affairs. He noted that on thestatue of Christopher Columbus in Genoa, Italy,

is the inscription "There was one world; he said,'let there be two,' and there were two." "Let usnow, then," said Evarts, "say of the Atlantic Cableand its author: 'There were two worlds; he said,'let there be one again,' and they were one."

This is far more true today. Cyrus Field, likeall entrepreneurs, sought only to succeed in hisparticular endeavor, laying a telegraph lineacross the Atlantic Ocean, and to create aprofitable enterprise by doing so. But becauseAdam Smith's "invisible hand" is ever at work, hedid much more than gain a fortune for himselfHe laid down the technological foundation ofwhat would become, in little over a century, aglobal village.

"An Enterprise Worthy of This Day of GreatThings"

1. A photocopy of the deed is in the possessionof the author. Thomas Nightingale happens to bethe present author's fifth great grandfather.

Quoted in Houghton, p. 183.

The phrase is in the novel zooi: A SpaceOdyssey.

Quoted in Bright, p. 19.Quoted in Carter, p. 209.

Cyrus FieldQuoted in Judson, p. 2.Quoted in Carter, p. 22.Quoted in Carter, p. 23.Quoted in Judson, p. 3.Quoted in Carter, p. 30.Quoted in Carter, p. 23.Quoted in Gordon, p. 30Harper s Monthly, June, 185^.Quoted in Judson, p. 19.Quoted in Judson, p. 23.Quoted in Judson, p. 25.Quoted in Voorsanger and Howat, p. 313.Judson, p. 3<£

Quoted in Carter, p. 79.Judson, p. 5^.

NewfoundlandQuoted in Field, pp. 7-8.Quoted in Field, p. 10.Field, p. 17.Quoted in Carter, p. yy.Quoted in Field, pp. 19-20. Italics in original.Quoted in Field, p.21.j. Quoted in Judson, p.62.Quoted in Field, p. 28.Quoted in Carter, p.101.10. Quoted in Field, pp. 3233.n. Quoted in Carter, p.

102.12. Quoted in Carter, p.104."How Many Months? Let's Say How ManyYears!"Field, p. 41.Field, p. 42.Quoted in Carter, p. in.Quoted in Carter, p. 116.Quoted in Carter, p. 114.Quoted in McDonald, p. 37.Quoted in Carter, p. 116.Quoted in Carter, p. 117.Raising More CapitalQuoted in Judson, p. 68.Quoted in Field, p. 81.Quoted in Clarke, p. 35Quoted in Clarke, p. 39.

Quoted in Carter, p. i2<>.d. Quoted in Clarke, p. 37.7. Quoted in Field, p. 103.8. Field, p. <)(>.y. Quoted in Field, p. 109.

The First Cable1. All quoted in Stampp, pp. 211-12.2. Quoted in Bright, p. 47.3. Quoted in Clarke, p. 40.4. Bright, p. 47.5. Quoted in Dibner, p. 20.(>. Quoted in Field,

pp. 127-28.7. Quoted in Field, pp. 129-30.8. Quoted in Field, p. 131.9. Field, p. 133.10. Quoted in Field, p. 13^.11. Quoted in Bright, p. 70.12. Quoted in Field, p. 138.

13. Quoted in Carter, p. 140.14. Quoted in Bright, p. 71.15. Quoted in Field, p. 137.16. Quoted in Field, p. 139.

"And Lay the Atlantic Cable in a Heap"1. Quoted in Field, p. 144.2. Field, p. 147.3. Quoted in Dibner, p. 27.4. Quoted in Judson, p. 87.5. Field, p. 155.6. Bright, p. 91.7. Bright, p. 91.8. Quoted, as are the following quotes on the

storm, in Bright, pp. 91-105.9. Quoted in Carter, p.152.10. Quoted in Field, p. 159.n. Quoted in Field, p. 159.12. Quoted in Carter, p. 153.

13. Quoted in Field, p. 161.14. Quoted in Bright, p. HI.Lightning Through Deep Waters1. Field, p. 163.2. Quoted in Judson, p. 92.3. Quoted in Carter, p. 15^.4. Quoted in Bright, p. 117.5. North American Review, April, 1866.(,.

Field, p. 166.j. Quoted in Bright, p. 118.8. Quoted in Field, p. 169.9. Quoted in Judson, p.92.10. Quoted in Bright, p.121.n. Quoted in Bright, p.121.12. Quoted in Bright, p. 124.

13. Quoted in Clarke, p. 57.14. Quoted in Bright, p. 126.15. Quoted in Bright, p. 127.16. Quoted in Bright, p. 127.17. Quoted in Bright, p. 130.18. Quoted in Carter, p. 159.19. Quoted in Bright, p. 132.20. Quoted m Field, p. 172.21. Quoted in Field, p. 172.22. Quoted in Judson, p. 94.23. Quoted in Judson, p. 95.24. Quoted in Carter, p. 160.25. Quoted in Field, p. 174.26. Nevins, vol. II, pp. 407-8.27. Nevins, vol. II, pp. 408-9.28. Quoted in Carter, p. 161.29. Quoted in Clarke, p. 60, and Carter, p. 165.30. Quoted in Carter, p. 161.

31. Quoted in Carter, p. 161.32. Quoted in Judson, pp. 100-101.33. Quoted in Field, p. 197.34. Nevins, vol. II, p. 410.35.Quoted in Clarke, p.63. 3<>. Quoted in Carter, p. 177.37.Quoted in Carter, p.178.IX"Here's the Skip to Lay Your Cable, Mr. Field"1. Quoted in Clarke, p. 71.2. Quoted in Clarke, pp. 70-71.3. Quoted in Clarke, p. 70.4. Quoted in Clarke, pp. 74-75.5. Quoted in Clarke, p. 74.6. Quoted in Rolt, p. viii f.7. Quoted in Clark, p. 124.8. Quoted in Clark, p. 180.

9. Quoted in Dugan, p. 6.10. Quoted in Dugan, p. i.11. Quoted in Dugan, p. 73.A New Cable, a New Attempti. Quoted in Foote, vol. I, p. 161.z.Quoted in

Carter, p. 192.Quoted in Carter, p. iijiE

Quoted in Judson, p. 137.Quoted in Carter, p. iy6.Field, p. 238.Field, p. 239.Field, p. 239.<j. Field, p. 240.10. Quoted in Judson, p. 172.n. Quoted in Judson, p. 172.Quoted in Carter, p. 213.Quoted in Carter, p. 213.Quoted in Carter, p. 21(5.

Quoted in Judson, p. 175.Boatner, p. 11.Quoted in Carter, p. 217.Quoted in Carter, p. 224.Quoted in Carter, p. 224.Russell, p. 51.Quoted in Carter, p. 228.Quoted in Dugan, p. 172.Quoted in Carter, p. 229.Russell, p. 60.Field, p. 278.i6. Quoted in Judson, p. 192.Russell, pp. 77-8.Quoted in Field, p. 284.Field, p. 28^.Quoted in Field, p. 287.XI"The Great Eastern Looms All Glorious in the

Morning Sky"

Quoted in Dugan, p. 185.Quoted in Field, p. 254.3-Field, p. 2(j£.4. Quoted in Judson, p. 197.5. Quoted in Field, p. 304.6. Quoted in Carter, p. 244.7. Quoted in Carter, p. 243.8. Quoted in Carter, p. 245.9. Quoted in Carter, p. 24(5.10. Field, p. 319.11. Quoted in Field, p. 323.12. Quoted in Field, p. 323.13. Quoted in Field, p. 325.14. Quoted in Carter, p. 248.15. Quoted in Judson, p. 205.16. Quoted in Judson, p. 206.17. Quoted in Field, p. 333.18. Quoted in Field, p. 338.

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