Atlantic Cable

Telegraph chart, America and Europe, by Charles Magnus, 1858, from LC

1854 - Cyrus Field was a successful paper manufacturer in New York who became interested in the telegraph after meeting with Newfoundland promoter Frederick Gisborne. Field studied the globe in his library and decided to build a transatlantic telegraph line between America and Europe. He gained the support of Samuel F. B. Morse and M. F. Maury of the Washington Observatory, and formed a company with Peter Cooper as president. This company on March 10 bought the Newfoundland Electric Telegraph Company to gain the exclusive rights to the telegraph in Newfoundland.

1857 - Field and his Atlantic Telegraph Company attempted to lay a cable 1600 miles across the Atlantic using the British ship Agamemnon and the USS Niagara from Valentia, Ireland. However, the cable broke before reaching Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. Three more attempts in 1858 failed until a fourth attempt was successful and Queen Victoria sent a transatlantic message August 16 to Present James Buchanan. But after a few weeks, due to faulty insulation, messages became too weak to receive and the cable was abandoned.

1860 - Hiram Sibley began another approach to an international telegraph network. He had joined with Ezra Cornell in 1854 to consolidate the growing number of small telegraph companies building lines west of Buffalo, New York. Sibley and Cornell founded Western Union in 1856 and grew into the nation's largest communication company over the next ten years, culminating in the absorption of Morse's Magnetic Telegraph Company into Western Union by 1866. Sibley in 1860 obtained an subsidy of $40,000 per year from Congress to build a transcontinental telegraph line. He dreamed of extending the line through Alaska and Russia and Europe to encircle the globe. This dream was shared by Secretary of State William Seward who granted a subsidy to the Intercontinental Telegraph Company of Perry Collins that joined with Sibley to form the Western Union Extension Company. With the help of the Czar of Russia, Sibley was building lines in Siberia when his plan collapsed due to Field's success with the Atlantic cable.

1865 - Field used the world's largest steamship, the Great Eastern, to lay a new cable with improved gutta-percha insulation and three times more copper, but halfway across the Atlantic the cable broke on August 2. Field formed a new company, Anglo-American Telegraph, to raise funds for another attempt in 1866.

1866 - The Great Eastern succeeded July 27 in laying a new cable from Ireland to Newfoundland. The ship returned to the Atlantic, located and grappled the end of the lost 1865 cable, and brought it to Newfoundland Sept. 7 as a second functioning cable.

1869 - The Great Eastern laid a third cable for the French firm, the Societe du Cable Transatlantique Francais, from Brest to the island of St. Pierre to Duxbury, Massachusetts, connecting France and the United States. Field's Anglo-American Telegraph Company allied with the French company to share control of the three cables by 1870.

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revised 8/15/05 by Steven Schoenherr at the University of San Diego | on reserve