The Cable That Lasted Three Weeks: The Long Fight to Wire the Atlantic

On the afternoon of July 27, 2026, the old cable station in Knightstown, on Valentia Island off the far southwest corner of Ireland, opened its doors for lectures, an artifact display and a live telegraph link to a town about 1,900 miles to the west: Heart’s Content, in Newfoundland, where people had gathered for a long weekend of their own celebrations. It was a party for an anniversary most people have never heard of. On that date in 1866, after twelve years of failure, a ship called the Great Eastern steamed into Heart’s Content trailing a cable that had been paid out across the whole width of the North Atlantic, and Europe and North America have been wired together ever since.

The 1866 cable was not the first. Eight years earlier another cable had crossed the same ocean, and for a few dizzy weeks in August 1858 it was the most celebrated object on Earth. New York fired a 100-gun salute and set its own City Hall on fire with fireworks. Tiffany & Co. cut the leftovers into four-inch souvenirs and sold them so fast the police had to hold back the crowds. Then the cable went quiet. By early September it was dead, killed partly by bad manufacturing and partly by a doctor-turned-electrician who tried to force it back to life with thousands of volts. Some newspapers decided the whole thing had been a hoax.

The story of how the Atlantic was finally wired is a story about a stubborn paper merchant, a young Scottish physicist who did the math everyone else ignored, the largest ship in the world, which had been a commercial disaster until it found the one job only it could do, and a cable lost two and a half miles down that was fished back up from the seabed with a grappling hook. It is also, in a real sense, the origin story of the network you are reading this on.

A Paper Merchant With a Very Long Idea

In the early 1850s, news crossed the Atlantic at the speed of a steamship, which meant about ten days in good weather and much longer in winter. A price change in Liverpool or a war rumor in Paris reached New York as old news. Telegraph lines already crisscrossed both continents, and in 1850 a cable had been laid under the English Channel, but the ocean between them was a different kind of problem: more than 1,600 miles of open water, two miles deep or more for most of the way, with no one quite sure what lay on the bottom.

The man who decided to cross it anyway was Cyrus West Field, a minister’s son from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, who had started as an errand boy in a New York dry goods store and made a fortune selling paper. By 1853 he was 34 and rich enough to retire. In January 1854 a British-born telegraph engineer in Nova Scotia named Frederic Newton Gisborne came to him for money. Gisborne had been trying to run a line across Newfoundland so that news from Europe could be caught off the island by fast boat and telegraphed on to New York, and his company had gone broke. Field listened, and afterward, as he liked to tell it, studied the globe in his library. If the line was going to reach Newfoundland anyway, he thought, why not keep going all the way to Ireland?

Field knew nothing about electricity or the deep sea, so he wrote to two people who did. Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph code, told him a cable across the Atlantic was possible and later joined the project. Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury of the U.S. Naval Observatory sent something even more encouraging. Maury had been compiling depth soundings from ships’ logs, and his charts showed a broad, gently sloping shelf of seabed between Ireland and Newfoundland, covered in soft ooze made of microscopic shells. It seemed so perfect for a cable that Maury had already named it Telegraph Plateau. (The widely spaced soundings missed a large feature in the middle, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, but the route turned out to be workable anyway.)

Field threw himself into it. He finished Gisborne’s line across Newfoundland and a short cable to Nova Scotia, at a cost of more than a million dollars, and then sailed for London, where all the world’s cable makers were. In late 1856 he and the British cable pioneers John Watkins Brett and Charles Tilston Bright founded the Atlantic Telegraph Company, raising £350,000 mostly from investors in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. Field put up about a quarter of the money himself. Bright, just 24, became chief engineer; he would be knighted for his part in 1858. The chief electrician was Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse, a Brighton surgeon who had taught himself electrical engineering. And on the board, unpaid, sat a 32-year-old professor of natural philosophy from Glasgow named William Thomson, who would later be known to the world as Lord Kelvin.

The Doctor and the Professor

The most important argument in the whole enterprise happened before a single mile of cable was made, and it was about a law of physics.

A long cable lying in seawater is not just a wire. The copper core and the conducting ocean around it, separated by a thin layer of insulation, behave like an enormous capacitor. Every pulse sent into one end has to charge up that capacitor before it can be detected at the other end, and the pulse comes out smeared and sluggish. Michael Faraday had noticed the effect on underground lines. In 1854 Thomson worked out the mathematics and found what came to be called his law of squares: the time a signal takes to rise at the far end grows with the square of the cable’s length. Double the length and you make the line four times slower. For a cable roughly 2,000 miles long, that meant signaling would be painfully slow unless the cable was built with a thick copper core and plenty of insulation, and received with a far more sensitive instrument than any telegraph office used.

Whitehouse disagreed, loudly. At a meeting of the British Association in 1856 he presented experiments that, he said, showed the law of squares did not apply in practice. Thomson thought the experiments were flawed. But Whitehouse was the company’s electrician, manufacturing was already under way, and his version of physics was cheaper. The company went with a thinner cable. When Thomson took the trouble to test samples of copper that were supposed to be identical, he found some conducted electricity only half as well as others. By then it was too late to change much.

The cable itself was a clever piece of Victorian engineering wrapped around that compromise. At its center was a strand of seven copper wires. Around that went several coats of gutta-percha, a rubbery latex tapped from trees in Malaya, which had arrived in Britain in the 1840s and turned out to be almost the only material that could insulate a wire under the sea without rotting. Then came tarred hemp, and over everything an armor of iron wire strands. About 2,500 nautical miles of it were ordered, in a rush, from the Gutta Percha Company and two wire-rope firms, one in Greenwich and one in Birkenhead. Late in the job someone noticed that the two firms had twisted their armor wires in opposite directions, so the halves could not simply be joined. The splice had to be made with an improvised wooden clamp, and the press had a laugh at the company’s expense.

Snapped, Storm-Tossed and Spliced

No ship afloat in 1857 could carry the whole cable, so it was split between two borrowed warships: the British HMS Agamemnon and the American steam frigate USS Niagara. The U.S. contribution had been approved by Congress only after a fight; the bill passed the Senate by a single vote. On August 5, 1857, the shore end was landed near Valentia, and Niagara began paying out westward. The cable snapped on the first day and was repaired. A few days later, over water roughly two miles deep, a brake on the paying-out machinery was clamped too hard and the cable broke again. About 300 miles of it lay on the bottom of the Atlantic. That was the end of the season.

The company tried again in June 1858 with a better brake and a new plan, which Thomson had argued for from the start: the two ships would meet in the middle of the ocean, splice their halves together, and steam away from each other toward opposite shores. They never got the chance on the first try. Ten days out, the fleet ran into one of the worst storms anyone aboard had seen. Agamemnon, loaded with coal and with a huge coil of cable piled on her deck, rolled so far that her crew feared she would capsize. Ten sailors were hurt, and Thomson’s electrical cabin was flooded. When the ships finally made their mid-ocean splice, the cable broke after less than three miles, then again after about 54, and then a third time when some 200 miles had been run out from each ship.

Back in Ireland, some of the directors wanted to sell off what was left of the cable and walk away. Field and Thomson talked them out of it. The ships sailed again on July 17, made the splice in mid-ocean on July 29, and this time the cable ran out smoothly. Niagara reached Trinity Bay in Newfoundland on August 4, and the next morning the shore end was hauled up the beach. The same day, August 5, 1858, Agamemnon landed her end at Knightstown on Valentia Island. For the first time, there was an unbroken wire between the Old World and the New.

“Europe and America Are United”

Getting the cable to talk turned out to be much harder than laying it. Test signals went back and forth for days, and the operators struggled to make out letters at all. On August 16 the first official message went through: “Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, good will towards men.” Then came a greeting from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan, who was summering at a resort hotel in Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania. It was 98 words long. Getting it through the cable and confirmed took about 16 hours.

Nobody cared how slow it was. Buchanan replied that the cable was “a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle.” The Times of London declared that “the Atlantic is dried up, and we become in reality as well as in wish one country.” Bells rang in Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore. In New York, cannon boomed in City Hall Park at daybreak on August 17, Broadway was lit up for miles, and that evening the city put on a huge fireworks display in front of City Hall. Sparks got under the metal roof. Around midnight the cupola caught fire, and the wooden statue of Justice that stood on top of it crashed down into the rotunda. Firefighters saved the wings, but the center of the building was badly damaged.

The celebrations went on anyway. On September 1 the city held an official Cable Jubilee, with a service at Trinity Church, a procession from the Battery to the Crystal Palace on 42nd Street, and an express company wagon carrying a giant section of cable through the streets like a holy relic. Charles Lewis Tiffany had already bought the 20 or so miles of surplus cable left aboard Niagara. His store cut it into four-inch pieces, capped each end with brass, and wrapped each one in a stamped band reading “Atlantic Telegraph Cable, Guaranteed by Tiffany & Co., Broadway, New York, 1858.” They sold for 50 cents apiece, with a printed certificate from Field vouching that the piece was genuine. When the souvenirs went on sale, the crowds were so large that the police were called.

What the crowds did not know was that by the time of the Jubilee, the cable had almost stopped working.

Two Thousand Volts

Thomson had sailed on Agamemnon, and during the voyage he had relied on an instrument he had invented in the months between attempts: the mirror galvanometer. The story goes that the idea came to him while watching light flash off the monocle hanging around his neck. Instead of a heavy needle, he glued a few tiny magnets to the back of a small mirror and hung it on a single silk thread inside a coil of wire. A lamp threw a beam of light onto the mirror and from there onto a scale on the wall. The faintest current in the coil twisted the mirror a hair’s breadth, and the spot of light swung left or right across the scale. A clerk watching the spot could read the dots and dashes and call out the letters to someone writing them down. His first trial version, legend has it, hung from a hair from his dog; the working models used silk from a dress belonging to his niece Agnes.

With the mirror galvanometer, Thomson had received clear signals from the far end all the way across. But when Agamemnon landed at Valentia, Thomson handed the cable over to Whitehouse, the chief electrician, who had missed every one of the voyages. Whitehouse disconnected Thomson’s instruments and hooked up his own. His plan was to drive the cable with big induction coils, five feet long, so that enough current would arrive to work the printing telegraphs used on land lines. The signals got worse. He turned the voltage up. Most estimates say he was putting around 2,000 volts into the line; some say far more.

The insulation could not take it. Tests on cable samples later showed that a perfectly insulated length shrugged off thousands of volts, but one with a pinprick flaw “lit up like a lantern” and burned a hole through the gutta-percha. The first hundred miles out of Valentia were the oldest and worst-made part of the line, left over from 1857, and in places the copper sat badly off-center inside its insulation. Whitehouse’s coils found every weak spot.

Worse, he tried to hide what was happening. When the queen’s message finally came through, it had been read on Thomson’s mirror galvanometer after Whitehouse’s own equipment failed. Whitehouse had it re-entered into his printing telegraph by hand so he could present the printed tape as if his system had received it. In late August the company replaced him with Thomson. It was too late. The signals faded day by day, and in early September the line went dead. In all, 732 messages had passed through it. One of them, from the British government, had canceled an order sending two regiments home from Canada, saving an estimated £50,000.

The reaction was savage. Writers hinted that the cable had never worked at all and that the whole affair was a hoax, or a scheme to pump up the company’s shares. When the Carrington Event, the great 1859 solar storm that set telegraph lines sparking, hit Earth a year later, there was no Atlantic cable left to damage. A joint inquiry by the British Board of Trade and the company, which reported in 1861, put most of the blame on Whitehouse and dismissed him. More usefully, it concluded that the problems with ocean cables mostly came from known, avoidable causes: bad copper, bad insulation, bad storage, rough handling. A cable built properly, it said, should work. Thomson was appointed to the committee that drew up the specification for the next one.

The Ship Nobody Could Use

It took Field six years to raise the money for another try. The American Civil War did not help, and investors who had cheered in 1858 did not want to be burned twice. When the money finally came, in 1864, it came with a new cable and a new ship.

The new cable was nearly twice as heavy as the old one, about 4,000 pounds per nautical mile. It had a much thicker core of very pure copper, more gutta-percha, and an armor of 18 high-strength steel wires, each wrapped in tarred Manila yarn. It also had Thomson’s electrical theory baked into it. And at roughly 2,300 nautical miles, all of it could fit inside a single ship, if the ship was big enough. Only one was.

The Great Eastern was the last great dream of the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. She was 692 feet long, several times larger than any ship afloat, with two giant paddle wheels, a screw propeller, six masts and five funnels. She was designed to carry 4,000 passengers to Australia without stopping for coal. She was also cursed with bad luck. Her first launch, in November 1857, stalled on the slipway and killed two men; it took until January 1858 to get her into the Thames. Brunel collapsed with a stroke aboard her days before her first trial trip in 1859 and died soon after hearing that a steam explosion off Hastings had killed five of her crew. As a passenger liner she lost money on almost every voyage. In 1862 she ripped a gash 83 feet long in her outer hull on an uncharted rock off Long Island. In 1864 she was sold at auction for a fraction of her cost.

Her new owners chartered her to the cable company in return for shares, which would be worth something only if the cable succeeded. Some of her saloons were torn out and replaced with three enormous iron tanks, and the cable was coiled into them under water to keep the gutta-percha from drying out. Paying-out machinery with improved brakes was built on her stern, and picking-up gear on her bow, in case the cable had to be hauled back aboard to cut out a fault.

1865: Lost Two and a Half Miles Down

In July 1865 the Great Eastern left Valentia, paying out cable astern at about six knots. Thomson was aboard, along with the artist Robert Charles Dudley, who painted the expedition, and the journalist William Howard Russell, who wrote its official account. More than once the electricians found a fault and the crew had to haul miles of cable back up from the deep, cut out the bad section and splice in fresh cable. In one case they found a sliver of iron wire driven straight through the insulation, and some aboard suspected sabotage.

On August 2, with about 1,200 miles of cable laid and only some 600 miles to go, the crew was hauling the cable back aboard to cut out yet another fault when it chafed against the bow, parted, and slid over the side. The end vanished into water about two and a half miles deep.

What happened next sounds impossible. The crew lowered a grappling hook on a line of iron wire rope, more than two miles long, and dragged it slowly across the seabed, back and forth across the cable’s path. They hooked the cable and began to raise it, until the rope parted. They tried again and hooked it again. Three times they lifted the cable part of the way to the surface before a shackle or swivel gave way and it sank back to the bottom. After more than a week they had too little rope left to try again and had to steam home, leaving buoys to mark the spot.

By now, though, the people who mattered were sure it could be done. The 1865 cable had worked perfectly the whole time it was being laid, and it had shown that a heavier, better cable could be laid and even fished out of the deep ocean. Field formed yet another company, the Anglo-American Telegraph Company, to lay a new cable the next summer and then go back for the old one.

1866: Heart’s Content

On July 13, 1866, the Great Eastern sailed from Foilhommerum Bay on Valentia Island. This time the voyage went almost without incident. Fourteen days later, on the evening of Friday, July 27, she steamed into the harbor at Heart’s Content in thick fog. The shore end was landed the next day. the railway engineer Daniel Gooch, who had helped buy the ship and sailed with her for the cable company, sent a message to Lord Stanley, the British foreign secretary: “Perfect communication established between England and America; God grant it will be a lasting source of benefit to our country.”

Then the Great Eastern went back to sea to find the cable she had lost the year before. Her first officer, a 30-year-old Irishman named Robert Halpin, navigated the search fleet back to the spot in mid-ocean, with nothing but sextants, chronometers and the positions recorded in 1865 to go on. Again the grapnels went down, and again the cable came up and slipped away. Finally, in early September, after weeks of trying, the 1865 cable was raised to the surface; bringing it safely aboard took 26 hours. It was carried into the electricians’ room and tested. The signal came through from Valentia, more than 1,200 miles away, and the ship broke into cheers. The old end was spliced to new cable in the ship’s tanks, and the Great Eastern steamed back to Heart’s Content. There were now two working cables across the Atlantic.

That November, Thomson, the ship’s captain James Anderson and the cable company’s managing director Richard Glass and engineer Samuel Canning were knighted, and Gooch was made a baronet. Field, as an American, could not be knighted; the U.S. Congress later awarded him a gold medal. Thomson’s share of the fame turned him from a respected academic into a public figure on both sides of the ocean. He went on to patent much of the equipment that ran the world’s cables, including the siphon recorder, which drew incoming signals as a wiggling ink line on paper tape so no one had to stare at a spot of light. Five years later, as president of the British Association, he would give the speech that first publicly used a name for a strange new element seen only in the Sun, helium. Halpin became captain of the Great Eastern and went on to lay cables to India, Brazil and Australia, some 26,000 miles in all.

Ten Dollars a Word

The difference between the two cables was dramatic. The 1858 line had managed about one-tenth of a word per minute, and took roughly two minutes for a single letter. The 1866 cable carried about eight words a minute from the start, some 80 times faster. The company’s slogan was “two weeks to two minutes.”

It was also staggeringly expensive. The first tariff charged £20 for a message of up to 20 words, which in America worked out to about $10 a word in gold. In August 1866 Scientific American complained that its own 20-word message to London had cost £24, and called the charges “exorbitant.” A skilled workman would have had to set aside about ten weeks’ wages to send a single telegram. In practice the users were governments, newspapers and big business. Merchants quickly invented commercial codes in which one word stood for a whole sentence; for one fireworks maker, the word “festival” meant “a case of three mammoth torpedoes.” When the company found its cable running at only about 5 percent of its capacity, it halved its prices. Competitors laid more cables. By 1900, 15 cables crossed the Atlantic.

The cable changed things that had nothing to do with telegrams. In the autumn of 1866 the U.S. Coast Survey sent the astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould to Valentia, where he set up a temporary observatory beside the cable house. On five nights between late October and late November, he and his colleagues in Heart’s Content exchanged clock signals through the cable and timed the stars at each end. The result was the first direct measurement of the longitude difference between Europe and North America, the same problem that, a century earlier, John Harrison had attacked with his sea clocks. Economists have found the effects too. A 2018 study in the American Economic Review of the cotton trade between New York and Liverpool found that once traders could get same-day prices from across the ocean, trade became more efficient, with gains the author put at about 8 percent of the value of exports.

Thomson’s math, meanwhile, kept turning out to matter. In the 1870s and 1880s the self-taught English physicist Oliver Heaviside extended Thomson’s cable equations to include a property called inductance and showed how the smearing of signals could be reduced, work that later made long-distance telephone lines possible. But telegraph cables still had no way to boost their signals along the way. Power could not easily be sent down a cable to amplifiers sitting on the ocean floor.

From Copper and Gum to Glass and Light

That problem was not solved until the 1950s. The first transatlantic telephone cable, TAT-1, opened on September 25, 1956, between Scotland and Newfoundland. It used polyethylene insulation instead of gutta-percha and 51 vacuum-tube amplifiers, designed by Bell Labs, spaced along the seabed. It could carry 35 phone calls at once, plus a channel for telegraph traffic, and in its first 24 hours it handled 588 calls between London and the United States. From 1963 it also carried the Washington–Moscow hotline, set up after the Cuban Missile Crisis, as a teleprinter link.

Today the copper and gutta-percha are gone, replaced by hair-thin strands of glass that carry data as pulses of laser light, but the basic idea Field chased in 1854 has not changed. According to the telecom research firm TeleGeography, there are now more than 600 submarine cable systems in service around the world, with about a hundred more planned. Fourteen of them cross the Atlantic. Together they carry the vast majority of the internet traffic that moves between continents. Satellites get most of the attention, but when you load a web page served from another continent, it almost certainly traveled along the seabed.

The ships that lay and repair those cables still do roughly what the Great Eastern did. They pay cable out over the stern, plow it into the seabed near shore, and, when a cable is cut by a ship’s anchor or a fishing trawler, they still send down a grapnel to fish it up and splice it.

Where the Cable Came Ashore

Both ends of the story are still there. The Heart’s Content Cable Station handled transatlantic traffic until 1965. At its peak more than 200 people worked there, and the company built housing for its staff in what had been a small fishing village. The red brick office building, finished in 1876, has been a provincial historic site and museum since 1974, and still holds a complete set of telegraph equipment. Across the road, the ends of old cables run down to the water. On Valentia, the 1868 cable station in Knightstown stands facing the sea, flanked by the terraces built for the married telegraph staff, and a memorial marks the Telegraph Field above Foilhommerum Bay where the 1866 cable came ashore.

In 2022 and 2023 Canada and Ireland put the two stations together on their tentative lists for UNESCO World Heritage status, as a single property called the Transatlantic Cable Ensemble. Supporters are still preparing the full nomination, and the foundation behind the Valentia side expects a final dossier in 2027 and a decision from the World Heritage Committee in 2028. Hence this summer’s double celebration: 160 years since the 1866 landing and 150 years since the Heart’s Content station opened its doors, marked with lectures on both sides of the ocean and a live telegraph link between the two old stations.

It is worth remembering how close the whole thing came to never happening. The first cable broke three times in a season, was nearly lost in a storm, worked for three weeks and was burned out by its own electrician. The second snapped two thirds of the way across. It took 12 years, five attempts, a ship nobody else wanted, a physicist who refused to be ignored, and a businessman who crossed the Atlantic dozens of times and would not give up. When people in 1858 said the cable had dried up the Atlantic, they were early by eight years. They were not wrong.

Further reading