Friday, November 1, 2013

The Trans-Atlantic Cable

When you hear about the Trans-Atlantic cable these days it’s only in the history books. Today we get instant communication with other parts of the world via satellite systems, but back in 1854 Cyrus Field had the idea of laying a cable between the United States and England.

Field was not searching for fame and money. He already had money. He was a retired New York paper merchant with a considerable fortune and he was only 33.

Field used his apparent persuasive salesmanship, to get money from the British government as well as Uncle Sam.

It wasn't until the fifth try in 1865 that the telegraph link worked perfectly.  On the third try, several years earlier, the cable worked briefly.  An intermittent message was tapped out between Newfoundland and Ireland on August 5th 1858, but the Morse code was erratic and it eventually stopped working on September first.



Being the entrepreneur that he was Field pulled up several thousand feet of the failed cable. He sold it to Tiffany & Company. They cut it into three and a half-inch sections, gold plated some, silver plated others and left a few plain. Tiffany then sold them to the public complete with a signed document by Cyrus Field that it was indeed a piece of the first briefly working trans-Atlantic cable.


As the late radio broadcaster Paul Harvey used to say, “Now you know the rest of the story.”

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