American Scientist

Cyrus West Field was such a driven man that he would even enter a room quickly, yet his life was on the brink of idleness. At the age of 34 in 1854, Field had already made a fortune in the paper industry, and faced early retirement without any new projects on his horizon. He was no stranger to hard work: The seventh son of a poor country preacher, he had left his Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home for New York City in 1835, at the age of 16, with $25 and his father’s blessing. Field initially scraped by as a stock boy. He recorded every personal expense, and this discipline helped him steadily climb up the ladder of success. He had also been lonely: He had regularly sent letters home begging for someone to write back. Ultimately, his work ethic solved both problems, setting him on a circuitous path from paper to telegraphy and creating a communication network that alleviated homesickness and isolation for people around the world.

The turning point in Field’s life occurred on a cold evening in January 1854, when he received an unfamiliar visitor to his Gramercy Park mansion. His brother, Matthew Field, had invited over a man named Frederic Newton Gisborne, who was down on his luck. Gisborne, a British engineer living in Newfoundland, had been smitten by telegraphy and dreamed of wiring the island of Newfoundland and connecting it to the mainland, and from there to New York. Newfoundland is the easternmost part of North America and sits only 2,000 miles from Europe. A European ship carrying news across the Atlantic would shave off a day of travel by docking at this easterly point. It was a clever idea, but Gisborne miscalculated the difficulty.

Newfoundland possessed an untamed and unforgiving landscape. Simply surveying 400 miles of it took Gisborne several months, and installing telegraph wires proved nearly impossible. His financial backers withdrew, leaving him unable to pay his debts. He lost everything and went to jail. After his release, he traveled to New York City to find other funders. A chance meeting with Matthew Field brought him to his encounter with Cyrus—and that meeting changed everything.

Gisborne, a strapping and bearded man with thick weathered hands, sat across from tall and thin Cyrus Field, who had a delicate air. Field listened, intrigued but unconvinced, to Gisborne’s proposal to shorten the arrival time of a message by a day. After examining the globe in his library, the thought dawned on Field that the span to connect Newfoundland nearly matched the distance across the Atlantic Ocean. It occurred to Field that a much more worthwhile accomplishment would be to cut the entire travel time for transatlantic messages, rather than merely shaving off one day.

Asking the Experts

The notion of directly cabling messages with lightning speed to Europe sparked Field’s interest, but before he could pursue it, he needed answers. He wanted to know if the cable could survive a long period underwater, and made inquiries to the Navy. His letter reached Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury, who had taken soundings of the ocean floor of the Atlantic and was later known as the “father of oceanography.”

In an earlier expedition, Maury serendipitously measured the cable’s path between Ireland and Newfoundland and surmised that there was a raised, flat section that he called the “Telegraphic Plateau.” (Interestingly, the Telegraphic Plateau was found years later to be untrue. The wide spacing between soundings had led Maury to conclude that the seafloor was relatively flat, but actually it wasn’t.) Moreover, Maury collected samples of the ocean floor, which contained shells, diatoms, and fragments of sea life. The lack of sand indicated that the water was calm and the floor was undisturbed.

In addition to a peaceful ocean bottom, this electrically transmitting cable needed protection from the conductive seawater. That answer came from a milky sap from a Malaysian plant with the strange name of gutta percha. A natural plastic, gutta percha forms easily in hot water, and becomes firm but flexible when cooled. Scientists such as Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Lord Kelvin claimed its insulating behavior to be superior to the popular Indian rubber, which was difficult to work with and often degraded. The mighty cable needed to be composed of a core of seven copper wires coated with gutta percha and protected by an outer sheath of iron wires and hemp.

Field also needed to understand if electrical signals could travel long distances, and contacted Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the creator of the code of dots and dashes that bears his name. Morse had connected America’s first telegraph cable between Baltimore and Washington, DC and dispatched the first (and foreboding) message: “What hath God wrought?” Unbeknownst to Field, Morse had experimented with submerged cables and successfully conveyed messages along them. Morse had even predicted in 1843 that “telegraph communication may with certainty be established cross the Atlantic Ocean.” With these reassuring bits of information, Field set out to stitch the Atlantic with threads of copper.

Copper is an old friend to civilization. The Bronze Age has copper to thank for it, because bronze contains copper and tin. Copper was a main ingredient of Julia Child’s first recipe, which wasn’t whipped egg whites for meringue in a copper bowl. Quite the contrary, in World War II, Child concocted foul-smelling copper acetate for shark repellant while working at the Office of Strategic Services (the early CIA). Today, copper serves humanity by bringing power and data to our devices along electrical cords and within integrated circuits. In Field’s time, copper ushered society into modernity by knitting together both sides of the Atlantic.

Two tasks confronted Field: Connect Newfoundland and then connect the Atlantic. Neither would be easy. Although Gisborne had been the originator of the idea and later played a minor role as an engineer before returning to Canada to pursue his own career in telegraphy, the cable project needed Field’s business acumen and determination. Newfoundland, with its hostile terrain, wild seas, and menacing icebergs, did not invite the timid. Field and his team of workers endured. After months of struggle to string copper wires across this harsh wilderness, Field was rewarded with the unparalleled and hardest job of all: wiring the vast Atlantic.

Connecting the Atlantic

The first attempt to stretch the cable across the Atlantic started in August 1857. Two ships—the USS Niagara and the HMS Agamemnon— met in Ireland each holding half the load (no craft at the time could carry the entire cargo). Heading westward together, the plan was for one boat to discharge its haul and then splice its line’s end to the length on the second accompanying ship. All went smoothly until the 335-mile mark, when an accident occurred with the cable’s payout machine. The cable snapped and was lost.

The second attempt in 1858 made improvements and installed a better payout machine. This time the boats met in the middle of the Atlantic and the vessels headed to opposite shores with the ends of the cables connected. The ships kept in contact constantly and checked the cable continuously. Lord Kelvin, who acted as a scientist on the project, devised an invention called a mirror galvanometer to monitor the health of the cable. This contraption amplified and projected the tiny signal onto a screen to distinguish dots and dashes.

After a mighty and damaging storm passed and the squalls quieted, the ships parted with their cables joined. At the 80-mile mark, the signal went silent, so the vessels rendezvoused and re-spliced. After the repair, there were smooth payouts until the 200th mile when the signal faded and never returned.

After this second failed attempt, both vessels headed quickly to England in mid-July. Disappointed but undeterred, Cyrus Field realized there were enough summer months for another bid if preparations happened briskly. With a swift turnaround, a third attempt was made in July 1858. Both ships met in the middle of the Atlantic and deposited their copper strands while moving in opposite directions.

By the end of the first day, the signal mysteriously went away, then miraculously returned. Other problems arose. The magnetic pull of the iron protection around the cable compromised compass readings and caused the Niagara to go off course, which wasted the precious payload that threatened to run out. Fortunately, a small accompanying ship led the way and the Niagara arrived at Newfoundland with a working cable. On the other end, the Agamemnon overcame its troubles as well, and soon reached the Irish shores with an operating copper line too. Triumph came at last.

Cyrus Field sent the first official message across the transatlantic cable on August 16, 1858, of “Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and good will toward men.” (Actually, with all of the testing, it was the 129th message and sent on the seventh day of operation.) To commemorate the occasion, Queen Victoria sent a 98-word congratulatory message to President James Buchanan, who responded with a flowery 149-word reply. The former took 16 hours to transmit; the latter came in 10.

The telegraph engineers noticed that when a dash emerged from the cable, a dot rushed right behind it, making a message hard to understand. The electrical signals underwent signal retardation, whereby they spread into weaker and longer pulses, which relegated the engineers to the time-consuming work of confirming and repeating messages. Edward O. Wildman Whitehouse, a medical doctor turned ill-informed amateur electrician, was the cable’s chief science advisor and quarreled with Lord Kelvin on how to resolve this problem.

Kelvin knew that transmitting signals underwater would not be easy because the doctrine of squares applied; that is, the speed of the message decreased as the square of the total length of the wire. Kelvin’s approach was to make signals shorter (and he was ultimately proven correct). Whitehouse’s thinking was to amplify the signal by increasing the voltage. His solution proved disastrous. When Whitehouse tested it, he roasted the cable and it never worked again.

With four weeks of life, 400 messages were sent. The cable briefly gave, and then took away, something that the public much desired. As a result there was a huge uproar against Cyrus Field. People felt swindled and thought transatlantic communication was fake. Field nearly went bankrupt and failed to secure further backing. In time, however, attention moved away from this clamor. The United States entered the Civil War, and the public had more pressing worries than the cable.

During the war, Field persevered in the behind-the-scenes groundwork of organizing and funding another working cable. He was well rewarded for his renewed effort. Since his last attempt, a mammoth ship that could carry the whole cable was built—the Great Eastern. Engineer Isambard Brunel created the Great Eastern to connect the British Commonwealth, running between England, Australia, and India without refueling. But the boat hit on hard times and was on auction at a fraction of its cost. Field believed the Great Eastern could reduce the chance for failure, so soon it became the copper cable’s new mode of transportation.

After 30 attempts to raise it from the deep, the wire was recovered and spliced to a new length.

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On the fourth attempt in 1865, the Great Eastern engulfed the entire cable and set sail for Newfoundland from Valentia, Ireland. However, at the 80-mile mark trouble came. The signal weakened and the cable needed to be retrieved. The gargantuan hull took nearly two days to reverse and recover the bad section of wire. Eventually, a small iron nail was found embedded in the cable. Four days later, trouble returned. Another nail. With thoughts of sabotage on his mind, Field kept watch, but evidence of any purposeful tampering never emerged.

In the next three days, hundreds of miles spewed out successfully until suddenly a defective part of wire went over at the 1,200-mile mark and broke. The captain of the ship tried to retrieve the snapped end with a grappling hook and rope, using the tension of the rope as a way to “feel” for the lost cable on the ocean bottom. After four attempts, each taking several days, the Great Eastern was forced to stop. Supplies, food, and morale on the ship were perilously low. A buoy was left where the broken line rested.

With triumph nearing, the fifth attempt saw a new cable quickly fabricated and a new grappling system installed. The ship set sail on Friday the 13th of July 1866, but that omen was disregarded. With near ease, the Great Eastern reached Newfoundland and moored in the deepest harbor that could accommodate it—a small fishing village of 400 people called Heart’s Content. The cable was brought on shore and tested, and found to be alive and well. Celebrations commenced, but Field was preoccupied. He wanted to rescue the lost strand.

In three short days, the Great Eastern returned to the broken line. After 30 attempts to raise it from the deep, the wire was recovered and spliced to a new length, and the Great Eastern headed back with the second working cable. Finally, Cyrus Field succeeded. After eight years from the first attempt, he had firmly tied together the two sides of the Atlantic.

Copper’s Consequences

Like any innovator, Field would have had difficulty anticipating the impact of his creation, but hoped that it could be used to prevent misunderstandings between nations and “disarm all prejudice.” There are certainly instances where a transatlantic message would have created different outcomes. Take the War of 1812, for example. France, England, and the United States fought each other in the bloody Battle of New Orleans in 1814. America won under the leadership of General Andrew Jackson, which made his bid for the presidency straightforward. There was a problem, however. A truce was reached before the battle began; the news took weeks to arrive from Europe. Had the copper cable existed, lives could have been saved and there might be a different portrait on the $20 bill. Such an historical event speaks to the profound impact of the cable. But, admittedly, pinpointing all of its consequences is difficult.

Nevertheless, the copper cable provides lessons on how technology shifts life. Before the cable, Heart’s Content, Newfoundland was a small fishing hamlet. After the cable, a new social class of well-off cable station workers usurped this quiet village, causing friction by bringing in expensive amenities and squeezing out the original residents. Replace “cable station” with “Internet companies” and “Heart’s Content” with “San Francisco Bay Area” and this 19th-century incident closely mirrors examples from the modern day.

Cyrus Field hoped the cable would increase communication, build business, and prevent conflicts. In an 1862 address to the American Geographical and Statistical Society in New York, he proclaimed that “its value can hardly be estimated to the commerce, and even to the peace, of the world.” Scholars claim it did those things, and it also compressed time and space, separated information from geography, increased globalization, jumpstarted journalism, and tightened imperialism. But the role of the cable did not stop there. The copper cable and telegraph made surprising modifications, particularly in language. Transmitting a message cost about $100 to send 10 words in 1866 (about $1,300 today). This cost squeezed the language of the news into a sparse and neutral style. Ernest Hemingway, who was once a journalist, credited his venerable prose from working in a newsroom. And he and his writing style went on to inspire generations thereafter.

The telegraph cable started a linguistic evolution that continues today, as technology now sculpts language with constraints of 140 characters, the offering of emoticons, and the flourishing of acronyms. How language will settle, if at all, remains a mystery. What is certain is that humankind creates technology and then technology re-creates humankind. The cable was yet another instance where copper, an old friend, played a significant part in transforming civilization.

After the telegraph, copper telephone wires followed in the 1950s, and Field’s technology remained largely unchanged for more than a century, until fiber-optic cables were installed in the 1980s. That first copper cable was the starting entry in a system of linkages that have continued to evolve, but still fulfill the same basic goals: linking lives, speeding communication, and combating loneliness.