If you’ve ever had trouble completing a call due to a weak signal, or sudden drop in your cell phone connection, then you know how time-consuming and frustrating that experience can be.
Today we live in a world offering instant global communication, yet, we sometimes experience network and power outages that disrupt and delay our conversations, making them unnecessarily drawn-out, and seem to take forever.
If a five or ten minute delay feels like an eternity, what would a conversation that took almost 18 hours to complete feel like?
By today’s standards, it would seem outrageous and intolerable. Yet, not long ago, it was considered the greatest technological feat in engineering history. Sending—not a voice—but a pulse, a signal, a coded letter-by-letter telegram, shot through copper cable no bigger than a garden hose, across the bottom on a vast ocean.
In the mid-19th century, major cities all over Europe and North America were getting connected with a new communication technology that would change life on this planet forever: the electric telegraph system.
Up until this time, any message you wanted to send could only travel as quickly as the person carrying it. Walking, running, a quick horse (a pigeon?), or speedy boat were as fast as your information could travel.
Suddenly, thousands of miles of cable connected cities and communities all over Europe and the United States as never before. In North America, telegraph poles began to stitch together hundreds of towns and communities with thousands of miles of copper wire. England and France began transmitting telegraph messages across areas of land, and small bodies of water. Then, in 1851, an undersea cable was laid between Dover and Calais, enabling near-instantaneous communication between these two historically warring countries, revolutionizing trade, diplomacy, and news sharing.
It also demonstrated it was possible to lay cable on both land and underwater, which is significant since our planet has a great deal of water.
Most of the Earth’s surface is covered in water, and in 1850, your best bet for getting a message across a huge body of water—like the Atlantic Ocean—was a fast ship in favorable weather, about 2 weeks, and considered at the time, darn fast.
If England could run an underwater cable all the way to France—about twenty-five miles—why not North America?
Well, the challenge was obvious: The Atlantic Ocean is larger, with over two thousand miles of open water. Successfully laying 2,000 miles of heavily insulated, electrical cable, continuously across the bottom of the ocean, and transmitting messages between two continents in minutes instead of weeks was, at the time, pure science fiction.
Yet, in 1858, that is exactly what they did, and in doing so, accomplished what many consider the greatest engineering and technological feat of the 19th century.
As with all great technological achievements, there were many key individuals involved in making the transatlantic telegraph cable a reality, with the most famous being American entrepreneur, Cyrus W. Field (1819-1892).
After making a fortune in the paper industry, Field turned his attention to what was considered a technological fantasy: Connecting two continents with over two thousand miles of continuous telegraph cable—across the bottom of an ocean—and transmit messages instantaneously.
Yet, Field had absolutely no background in telegraphy or engineering. What he possessed was immense enthusiasm and unwavering determination, and he understood what he needed to make this hard-to-imagine dream reality.
The first thing he needed was money, and lots of it.
That is where Cyrus Field truly excelled. He may not have been an inventor, or electrical engineer, but he had a great capacity to organize people, governments, and capital, and convince them to fund his outrageous venture. He crisscrossed the Atlantic 30 times selling stock and looking for investors, and he found them.
In 1852 he formed the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Co which was to carry out the laying of the transatlantic cable from Ireland to Newfoundland in Canada.
In 1856, Field purchased the rights to an electric telegraph system devised by inventor David Hughes (1830-1900), an apparatus that converted electrical signals into a printed message—and considering the technology of the time—the best option for underwater cable transmission.
Next, Field needed his engineers to develop and manufacture over two thousand miles of submarine cable. Cable durable, reliable and dependable enough to transmit his telegraph system over thousands of miles, while enduring life on the bottom of one of the world’s biggest and harshest oceans. You might think the cable would have to be large in circumference—like the hose that comes out of a fire plug—when, in fact, the first transatlantic telegraph cable is deceptively slight, looking more like a garden hose than something the fire department would use.
The core is filled with seven strands of copper wire, rope, and yarn, soaked in tar, and covered in multiple layers of gutta percha, then encased in an iron armor cover. Gutta-percha is the game changing discovery that made the first submarine cables possible. It is a waterproof, rubber-like substance produced by trees native to southeast Asia. The material is amazingly non-conductive and astonishingly effective at insulating telegraph wires, even from the harsh environment on the bottom of the ocean.
Producing over two thousand miles of insulated cable was too much for any one wire-rope manufacturer to produce, so the task was shared by Glass, Elliot & Co. of Greenwich, and R.S. Newall and Company of Birkenhead, England, who completed the job in 1856.
Over two thousand miles of continuous copper cable—no matter how thin—is immensely heavy. At the time, no one ship in the world was prepared to carry and unspool over seven thousand tons of cable, yard by hard, over and across the Atlantic Ocean.
So, Mr. Field got two ships. He convinced the English and American governments to give him the use of The HMS Agamemnon and the USS Niagara, each to carry half the load, and arranged to have the two ships rendezvous in the middle of the Atlantic, splice the cables together, shake hands, and sail in opposite directions, laying cable, yard by yard on the bottom of the ocean until they reach land.
After two years and two disasterous attempts, they met with success. On August 4th, 1858 the Niagara docked in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, and one day later, the Agamemnon docked on the west coast of Ireland, utilizing horses crews to position the heavy cables and bring them to shore. The cable connected Valentia Island, Ireland, to Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, Canada.
“The greatest work and genius of man ever contemplated.”
A new communication age had begun. Public celebrations erupted in cities across the US and Europe. On August 16th, Queen Victoria wrote a note of congratulations to the US president, James Buchanan, hoping this new technology would increase the bond between their two countries.
Buchanan made a lengthy reply, “May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations…” giving operators even more of a headache as reception across the cable was exceptionally poor, and it took an average of two minutes to transmit a single character.
The grandiose congratulations and splashy celebrations were as short-lived as the connection, and the signal died on September 3, 1858.
The cause of death? The 1858 transatlantic cable failed primarily due to design flaws, and the decision to use excessively high voltage to transmit signals, which overloaded the cable and caused the insulation to disintegrate.
After years of hard work, and millions of dollars lost, the two continents were again, cut off.
Yet, they did it! They transmitted a message from one side of an ocean to the other through electric telegraphy. Think of the Wright Brothers & Kitty Hawk’s first successful flight in 1903, then jump ahead 66 years to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969.
In many ways, Cyrus Field and his investors did the same thing (though not as heroic) by successfully demonstrating that transatlantic telegraphy was possible, and could reduce the time taken to communicate between Europe and North America from a few weeks to a few hours.
Today, of course, we do it in seconds.
Within a decade more powerful and reliable undersea cables were laid, building, and vastly improving upon the signal. Throughout the 20th century, cable networks expanded and evolved with telephones replacing telegraphs, digital data replacing analog signals.
Today, fiber optics have replaced copper with over five hundred undersea cables running 900,000 miles of wire all over the planet. The first telegraph cable could only transmit a few words per minute, today’s fiber optic cable delivers billions of words per second, worldwide. Our world is connected like never before.
Which brings us to the question asked when the cable was first proposed: Will this instantaneous information technology improve our lives? Will it make us safer, smarter, happier?
At one time, the answer seemed obvious.
Stay grounded.