Transatlantic Telegraph Cable (1858-1866): Linking Two Continents

The transatlantic telegraph cable was the first electrical link between Europe and North America. A first cable laid between Ireland and Newfoundland was completed on 5 August 1858 and greeted with wild celebration, but it failed within weeks. Eight years later, in July 1866, the giant steamship Great Eastern laid a durable cable, and from then on news, prices and diplomatic messages crossed the ocean in minutes instead of days.

Background: news at the speed of ships

By the 1850s the electric telegraph, pioneered by Cooke and Wheatstone in Britain and by Samuel Morse in the United States, was spreading quickly over land. Underwater cables were also proving possible. A cable across the English Channel between Dover and Calais began working in 1851, insulated with gutta-percha, a natural latex from trees in Southeast Asia that stayed stable under seawater.

The Atlantic was another matter. The distance between Ireland and Newfoundland, the shortest practical route, was roughly 3,000 kilometres of deep ocean. Until a cable existed, the fastest way to send news between London and New York was by steamship, which took around ten days or more.

Cyrus Field and the Atlantic Telegraph Company

Cyrus West Field (1819–1892), a New York paper merchant who had retired wealthy, became interested in 1854 in a scheme to link Newfoundland to the American mainland by telegraph. He soon aimed higher: a cable across the whole ocean. Field won support from the Morse camp, ordered a survey of the sea floor, and in 1856 helped found the Atlantic Telegraph Company in London with the engineer Charles Tilston Bright, the cable entrepreneur John Watkins Brett and the electrician Wildman Whitehouse.

Most of the capital came from British investors. The British and American governments lent warships and promised payments for official messages. The young Glasgow physicist William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, joined the board and studied how signals would behave in such a long cable.

Before any cable was made, the route had to be understood. Soundings taken by the US Navy ship Arctic in 1856 and the British HMS Cyclops in 1857 suggested a broad, relatively smooth stretch of sea floor between Ireland and Newfoundland. The American oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury called it the “Telegraph Plateau”. The depths were enormous, in places more than two miles, but there seemed to be no great underwater mountains to cut the cable.

The first attempts, 1857–1858

In August 1857 the cable was loaded onto two warships, HMS Agamemnon and USS Niagara, because no single ship could carry it all. Paying out began at Valentia Island off south-west Ireland. On 11 August, after a few hundred miles had been laid, the cable snapped in deep water, possibly because the braking machinery was applied too sharply. The rest of the season was lost.

In 1858 the ships tried a new method: they met in mid-Atlantic, spliced the two halves together and sailed in opposite directions. Two attempts in June failed in heavy weather and broken cable. A further attempt succeeded. The ships spliced the cable on 29 July 1858, and on 5 August Agamemnon landed her end at Valentia while Niagara landed hers in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland.

The signals were extremely faint. Thomson’s sensitive mirror galvanometer, which used a tiny mirror to magnify the movement of a magnet, helped operators read them. On 16 August Queen Victoria’s greeting to President James Buchanan was transmitted; it took many hours to send. New York held parades and fireworks, which accidentally set fire to the cupola of City Hall, and Charles Bright was knighted.

The success did not last. Whitehouse, believing high voltage would speed things up, applied very powerful currents that probably damaged the already weak insulation. Signals grew worse, and by early September 1858 the cable was dead. Some members of the public suspected that the whole affair had been a hoax.

A joint inquiry by the British government and the Atlantic Telegraph Company, reporting in 1861, studied the failure and other cable disasters. It produced better standards for cable design, testing and insulation, and supported Thomson’s view that a thicker conductor and low voltages would work better than brute force.

Money was hard to find after 1858, and the American Civil War (1861–1865) distracted the United States. In 1864 cable making and laying were combined in a new firm, the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, chaired by the railway engineer Daniel Gooch.

The Great Eastern and success in 1866

The new cable was far heavier and better insulated. Only one ship could carry all of it: the Great Eastern, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and launched in 1858, nearly 700 feet (211 metres) long and a commercial failure as a passenger liner. Under Captain James Anderson, with Samuel Canning in charge of the cable work, she sailed from Valentia in July 1865. On 2 August, with more than 1,000 miles of cable laid, it broke and sank in deep water. Attempts to grapple it from the sea floor failed.

In 1866 the expedition tried again with a new cable financed by the Anglo-American Telegraph Company. The Great Eastern left Valentia on 13 July 1866 and on 27 July landed the cable at Heart’s Content, Newfoundland. Gooch sent the news to London. The ship then went back, found the 1865 cable in water about two and a half miles deep, raised it, spliced on new cable and completed it on 8 September 1866. There were now two working Atlantic cables.

The 1866 cable was very different from its predecessors. It had a thicker copper conductor, much more gutta-percha insulation and an outer armour of iron wires wrapped in tarred hemp, making it stronger but far heavier. On the Great Eastern it was coiled in huge tanks filled with water to keep the insulation in good condition, and electricians tested it continuously as it ran out over the stern, so that faults could be found at once.

Key people

• Cyrus West Field: American financier and promoter who kept the project alive through repeated failures and crossed the Atlantic many times to raise money.
• William Thomson (Lord Kelvin): physicist whose theory of signal transmission and sensitive instruments made the cables usable; knighted in 1866.
• Charles Tilston Bright: chief engineer of the 1857–1858 attempts, knighted in 1858.
• Wildman Whitehouse: electrician of the 1858 cable, dismissed after its failure.
• Daniel Gooch: chairman of the cable-making company and a leading figure on the 1865–1866 expeditions.

Consequences

The effect on news and business was immediate. European prices and political news appeared in American newspapers the same day, and markets in London and New York began to move together. Messages were very expensive at first, with tariffs commonly cited at £20 for twenty words, so early traffic was dominated by governments, newspapers and merchants.

More cables followed rapidly, and by the end of the century a global network of submarine cables, much of it British-owned, linked Europe with the Americas, India, East Asia and Australia. Historians have compared this network to an early version of the internet. The telegraph also prepared the way for later breakthroughs in communication, such as the telephone patent of 1876.

News agencies and newspapers were among the main beneficiaries. Telegraphed reports of European politics, wars and market prices appeared in American papers within hours, and American news reached Europe as fast. Governments gained a new diplomatic tool, though instant messages could also raise tension during crises. Cyrus Field became a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic and received a gold medal from the US Congress, but his later investments went badly and he died in 1892 having lost much of his fortune.

By the numbers

Myths and facts

Myth: the 1858 cable never worked. It did carry a few hundred messages, including official greetings and a message that stopped two regiments being sent from Canada to India, before it failed.

Myth: the 1866 cable was simply a repeat of 1858. It was a much heavier and better-designed cable, built to standards developed after the 1861 inquiry and laid by a single ship.

Timeline

• 1851: A submarine cable between Dover and Calais starts working.
• 1856: The Atlantic Telegraph Company is founded in London.
• 1857, 11 August: The first attempt fails when the cable breaks in deep water.
• 1858, 5 August: The first transatlantic cable is landed in Ireland and Newfoundland.
• 1858, 16 August: Queen Victoria’s message to President Buchanan is transmitted.
• 1858, early September: The cable stops working.
• 1865, 2 August: The Great Eastern’s first cable breaks mid-ocean and is lost.
• 1866, 27 July: The Great Eastern lands a working cable at Heart’s Content, Newfoundland.
• 1866, 8 September: The recovered 1865 cable is completed, giving a second link.

Why it matters

The transatlantic cable made communication between continents almost instant for the first time. It tied European and American markets, newspapers and governments together and began the global communications network that underlies the modern connected world.