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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