Nineteenth-century Atlantic telegraph cables allowed messages between Europe and North America to travel as electrical signals, reducing the wait for letters carried by ships. Early attempts failed, but the 1866 cable achieved lasting success. The project had to solve problems of seabed installation, insulation, and weakening signals.
Early history
In the 1840s and 1850s several people proposed or advocated construction of a telegraph cable across the Atlantic, including Edward Thornton and Alonzo Jackman.
As early as 1840 Samuel F. B. Morse proclaimed his faith in the idea of a submarine line across the Atlantic Ocean. By 1850 a cable was run between England and France. That year, Bishop John T. Mullock, head of the Catholic Church in Newfoundland, proposed a telegraph line through the forest from St. John's to Cape Ray and cables across the Gulf of St. Lawrence from Cape Ray to Nova Scotia across the Cabot Strait.
Around the same time, a similar plan occurred to Frederic Newton Gisborne, a telegraph engineer in Nova Scotia. In the spring of 1851 he procured a grant from the Newfoundland legislature and, having formed a company, began building the landline.
A plan takes shape
In 1854, businessman and financier Cyrus West Field and Gisborne discussed the project. Afterward, Field considered the idea that the cable to Newfoundland could be extended across the Atlantic Ocean.
Field was ignorant of submarine cables and the deep sea. He consulted Morse and Lieutenant Matthew Maury, an authority on oceanography. The charts Maury constructed from soundings in the logs of multiple ships indicated that there was a feasible route across the Atlantic. It seemed so ideal for cable laying that Maury named it Telegraph Plateau. Maury's charts also indicated that a route directly to the US was too rugged to be tenable and considerably longer. Field adopted Gisborne's scheme as a preliminary step to the bigger undertaking and promoted the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company to establish a telegraph line between America and Europe.
The first step was to finish the line between St. John's and Nova Scotia, which was undertaken by Gisborne and Field's brother, Matthew. In 1855 an attempt was made to lay a cable across the Cabot Strait in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. It was laid out from a barque in tow of a steamer. When half the cable was laid, a gale rose, and the line was cut to keep the barque from sinking.
First contact
Test messages were sent from Newfoundland beginning 10 August 1858. The first was successfully read at Valentia on 12 August and in Newfoundland on 13 August.
Directors of Atlantic Telegraph Company, Great Britain, to Directors in America:—Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, good will towards men.
Next was the text of a congratulatory telegram from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan at his summer residence in the Bedford Springs Hotel in Pennsylvania, expressing hope that the cable would prove "an additional link between the nations whose friendship is founded on their common interest and reciprocal esteem". The President responded: "It is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle. May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of Heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world."
Failure of the first cable
Operation of the 1858 cable was plagued by conflict between two of the project's senior members – Thomson and Whitehouse. Whitehouse was a medical doctor by training, but had taken an enthusiastic interest in the new electrical technology and given up his medical practice to follow a new career. He had no formal training in physics; all his knowledge was gained through practical experience. The two clashed even before the project began, when Whitehouse disputed Thomson's law of squares when the latter presented it to a British Association meeting in 1855. Thomson's law predicted that transmission speed on the cable would be very slow due to an effect called retardation. To test the theory, Bright gave Whitehouse overnight access to the Magnetic Telegraph Company's long underground lines.