Today, in a world in which news flashes around the globe in an instant, time lags are inconceivable. In the mid-nineteenth century, communication between the United States and Europe -- the center of world affairs -- was only as quick as the fastest ship could cross the Atlantic, making the United States isolated and vulnerable.But in 1866, the Old and New Worlds were united by the successful laying of a cable across the Atlantic. John Steele Gordon's book chronicles this extraordinary achievement -- the brainchild of American businessman Cyrus Field and one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century. An epic struggle, it required a decade of effort, numerous failed attempts, millions of dollars in capital, a near disaster at sea, the overcoming of seemingly insurmountable technological problems, and uncommon physical, financial, and intellectual courage. Bringing to life an overlooked story in the annals of technology, John Steele Gordon sheds fascinating new light on this American saga that literally changed the world.

John Steele Gordon writes a regular column, "The Business of America," for American Heritage magazine, and can be heard frequently on Public Radio International's Marketplace. He has appeared in a number of television documentaries about American and economic history, including Ric Burns's New York: A Documentary Film and The Great Game. He lives in North Salem, New York

A Note on Money	xv
Acknowledgments	xvii
I "An Enterprise Worthy of This Day of Great Things"	1	(13)
II Cyrus Field	14	(14)
III Newfoundland	28	(19)
IV "How Many Months? Let's Say How Many Years!"	47	(14)
V Raising More Capital	61	(14)
VI The First Cable	75	(25)
VII "And Lay the Atlantic Cable in a Heap"	100	(21)
VIII Lightning Through Deep Waters	121	(21)
IX "Here's the Ship to Lay Your Cable, Mr. Field"	142	(21)
X A New Cable, a New Attempt	163	(24)
XI "The Great Eastern Looms All Glorious in the Morning Sky"	187	(22)
Epilogue-"There Were Two Worlds ... Let There Be One"	209	(8)
Notes	217	(8)
Bibliography	225	(4)
Index	229

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Chapter One

"An Enterprise Worthy of

This Day of Great Things"

Thomas Nightingale had prospered in South Carolina almost from the day he had arrived as a young man from his native Yorkshire in the 1720s. He got his start operating a cow pen on the frontier but soon branched into numerous other activities, including building Newmarket Race Track in Charleston and importing some of the first thoroughbred horses to the North American colonies.

The timing of his arrival had been fortunate. Trade in rice and indigo was fast making the Carolina tidewater the richest part of the British North American empire, and Thomas Nightingale grew rich right along with his adopted land.

In 1760, already well established among Charleston's aristocracy, he decided to add one more proof of his status in that very status-conscious society. He bought a pew, number 101, in St. Michael's Church, then under construction in Charleston. With the great wealth at the congregation's disposal, little expense had been spared in the building of St. Michael's, a masterpiece of American colonial architecture. Much of the woodwork, for instance, would be supplied by Thomas Elfe, the city's leading cabinetmaker and himself a pew holder. A pew in such a church did not come cheaply. But for fifty pounds--more than a workman's annual wage in the middle of the eighteenth century--Thomas Nightingale received a deed to the pew, signed and sealed by the church commissioners.

That deed, to our eyes, has one very curious aspect. It is dated "the fifth day of December in the Year of our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty and in the Thirty-Fourth year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King GEORGE the Second ..." But George II had died suddenly of a burst blood vessel on October 25, 1760, while in his water closet. December 5, therefore, was in fact in the first year of the reign of his grandson, King George III.

It is a measure of the perceived vastness of the Atlantic Ocean in the eighteenth century that the king's richest North American possession remained ignorant of his death a full six weeks after the event. Charleston, in fact, did not learn of the king's death for another two weeks or more.

Yet America's civilization and character developed during the colonial period in the context of this profound isolation from its European roots. In 1620, the Mayflower had sailed from Plymouth, in Devonshire, on September 16, and raised Cape Cod only on November 9. That was considered a very good passage at the time, and in fact it was still a good passage two hundred years later. It was by no means unprecedented for a ship unfortunate in weather to take four months to make the trip from the Old World to the New.

Because the trip was so long, expensive, and perilous, only a handful of immigrants to the New World--mostly members of the colonies' business and political elites--ever had the opportunity to return to the Old. Thus, to set sail for America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was, almost always, to say good-bye forever to all the emigrant had known and loved.

Since for all practical purposes, news could travel no faster than human beings could carry it, knowledge of events in Europe--the center of the Western world--was just as slow to flow across the ocean as men and goods. North America was not only three thousand miles from Europe--it was two months from it as well. There was not even a regular postal system; letters were entrusted to anyone willing to carry them, to be delivered when and if possible.

Today, such isolation is almost inconceivable. After all, it took the Apollo astronauts only three days to reach the moon, a distance almost a hundred times as great as the width of the Atlantic, and news from the moon (not, to be sure, that there is much) could reach us in seconds.

But in Thomas Nightingale's day, the vast gulf between Europe and America was simply a fact of life. Like growing old, or needing to sleep for several hours a day, it was taken as a given, if sometimes regretted.

But even as King George lay dying in his water closet, many of his subjects, especially in the Midlands of England, were already deeply involved in a process that would profoundly alter the boundaries of what was possible. The cloth industry, for example, a mainstay of the British economy for centuries, had begun to mechanize, adopting the factory system of manufacture, which would come to dominate the world economy. John Kay's flying shuttle, introduced in 1733, considerably increased the speed with which cloth could be woven. The spinning jenny and the water frame, introduced in the 1760s, greatly accelerated the manufacture of yarn. The power loom in the 1780s completed the mechanization of the industry.

At first these machines were powered by falling water pushing on mill wheels. Then, in 1769, the Scotsman James Watt patented a greatly improved steam engine, and in 1784 introduced a rotary version, capable of turning a shaft. The new power source, which made work-doing energy both cheap and capable of being applied in almost unlimited amounts to a single task, proved the catalyst of profound change. Dubbed the Industrial Revolution in 1848 (when it was already almost a century old), it swept away the world of Thomas Nightingale and George II in a matter of two generations and created the modern world.

Politics helped. With the final defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, on June 16, 1815, the Western world entered into a period of peace that would last nearly a hundred years, until the outbreak of the First World War on August 1, 1914. In this period of relative peace, with the exception of the American Civil War, wars were mostly short and often distant from the centers of western civilization. Thus, national and individual energies could be directed to peaceful pursuits. With steam, the new energy source, offering a myriad of possibilities, men of the highest talent and ambition--men who in earlier times might have gone into politics, the military, or trade--moved to exploit these possibilities to the fullest.

Soon the steam engine was being used not only to power factories that produced an ever-growing number of products at prices the middle class could afford hut also to revolutionize transportation. In the eighteenth century, bulky goods were transported by water or they did not move at all. But in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Richard Trevithick in England and Oliver Evans in the United States developed high-pressure steam engines that produced far more power per unit of weight than Watt's engine had. Fitted to wagons that moved on rails, a technique used in mining since the sixteenth century, the new high-pressure engines were capable of hauling large loads at unprecedented speeds over land.

After George Stephenson solved any number of engineering puzzles and built the Manchester and Liverpool Railroad, which began operating profitably in 1829, railroads quickly spread like a spiderweb across both Europe and North America. This development greatly reduced the cost of transporting both people and goods, and made possible markets of national scope. This, in turn, greatly reduced the cost of manufacturing those goods through economies of scale--decreasing their price and increasing the demand for them. The rate of economic growth and wealth creation soared.

This new wealth enormously increased the size and influence of the middle class. Indeed, the very term middle class was coined only in 1812. And this new socioeconomic group began to enjoy a lifestyle quite unknown even to the rich fifty years earlier. In the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the attributes of the modern domestic world became common in their households: central heating, running water, and abundant interior lighting; cheap newspapers, magazines, artwork, and books; cheaper clothes, linens, china, carpeting, and wallpaper.

Given human nature, it is not surprising that people indulged in these rich new possibilities, and an overstuffed, densely furnished, intricately appointed style of decor was the height of fashion in the mid-nineteenth century. At that time, more was more.

This sudden, accelerating increase in the standard of living and in the technology of everyday life also affirmed a belief in progress and in the possibility of improvement, a sense that anything--economic, technical, or social--was possible. The nineteenth century thus became a great age of both optimism and reform as people began to tackle social problems that had once been thought intractable artifacts of the human condition, such as poverty, drunkenness, and gambling. Not the least of these reforms was in politics.

Where wealth, and thus power, had once been concentrated among the owners of land and the great merchants, now a new class of factory owners rose who were often richer--and more liquid--by far than the older moneyed class. In the 1830s the franchise was widened in both Britain and the United States, and in 1832 Parliament was reformed and the seats redistributed for the first time since the time of Henry VIII. This recognition of the new economic reality via a peaceful, constitutional transfer of power from the landed aristocracy to the bourgeoisie is one of the most remarkable events of the nineteenth century or, indeed, of any age.

The wealth these factory owners piled up changed society in other ways. Money became an obsession. "Wealth! Wealth! Wealth!" wrote the English social critic John Sterling as early as 1828. " Praise to the God of the nineteenth century! The Golden Idol! The mighty Mammon! Such are the accents of the time, such the cry of the nation.... There may be here and there an individual who does not spend his heart in laboring for riches; but there is nothing approaching to a class of persons actuated by any other desire." The year before, the young novelist and future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli had coined the word millionaire to describe the members of this new class.

The steam engine was also soon applied to transportation at sea. The Savannah , built in New York in 1819, weighed 320 tons and was equipped with a 90-horsepower engine and collapsible paddle wheels. That year she crossed from Savannah, Georgia, to Liverpool in only 27 days and 15 hours (663 hours), having used her engine for about 80 hours of the trip.

Measured in time, the Atlantic was shrinking rapidly before the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution, but transportation was by no means the only field in which speed was increasing by orders of magnitude, thanks to another profoundly new technology. Long-distance communication as well was changing beyond recognition.

* * *

It had never been quite true that news and men moved at the same speed. Smoke and flag signals had been around since antiquity. The homing instinct of pigeons was exploited to carry messages at least as early as A.D. 1150, when the sultan of Baghdad established a pigeon postal system. In 1588, Queen Elizabeth I ordered the construction of bonfires along the south coast of England, to be ready to convey to London in a couple of hours instead of days a single message: "The Armada has been sighted."

The French took visual signaling to the ultimate. Beginning in 1794, Claude Chappe built a series of semaphore stations between Paris and important military posts, such as the great naval base at Brest, three hundred miles west of Paris on the tip of the Brittany peninsula. Equipped with a mast and two cross arms, these stations were spaced five to ten miles apart and worked by four or free people each. They were, in effect, a series of gigantic Boy Scouts wigwagging to each other across the French landscape. By this method, messages could be transmitted at a rate of several hundred miles a day, far faster than any other method of the time.

The system had numerous disadvantages. For one thing, it was so expensive on a per word basis that only a sovereign government could afford to utilize it. For another, it was useless in bad weather and at night. And because each message had to be copied and repeated many times by fallible human beings, the error rate was extremely high. Regardless, timely information can be so valuable that the Chappe system (which he dubbed a telegraph --from the Greek words meaning writing at a distance) and variations of it spread rapidly across Europe.

Even before Chappe developed his signaling system, however, indeed before Thomas Nightingale bought his church pew, the basis of a wholly new communications technology was being laid by--to use the marvelous phrase of Sir Arthur Clarke--"beachcombers on the further shores of theoretical physics."

That basis was electricity. It had first been recognized as a separate phenomenon in the seventeenth century, although its nature was an utter mystery at the time. It was in the eighteenth century that that nature began to be studied seriously. In 1749 Sir William Watson demonstrated that it was possible to transmit electricity down a metal wire for long distances. In the next decade Benjamin Franklin explored the subject. He proved among much else that lightning was an electrical phenomenon, thanks to his famous--and extremely hazardous--experiment with a kite and a key. It was also Franklin who coined many words that are still used in discussing electricity, such as positive, negative, battery , and conductor . He once amused dinner guests by igniting spirits of alcohol from across the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, using an electric wire to convey the spark.

In 1753 an unknown writer, using only the initials C.M., proposed in Scots' Magazine the use of electricity to convey information over long distances by means of wires. The first such system actually built, in Geneva in 1774, used one wire for each letter of the alphabet. The current would charge a pith ball with static electricity, which in turn would attract a bell and ring it. This alphabetical carillon actually worked, after a fashion, but was hardly a practical system. It was only with the invention of the electromagnet and much better batteries, and the availability of cheap wire thanks to the Industrial Revolution in the early years of the nineteenth century, that it became possible to convert the electric telegraph from a parlor trick to use as a world-transforming technology.

Like many seminal inventions of the industrial era--the railroad, automobile, television, the computer--the electric telegraph was not the invention of one person. Several people contributed vital parts of the system, but it was William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in England and Samuel F. B. Morse in the United States who first built practical, working telegraph lines of substantial length and transmitted messages over them. Eventually it was Morse's particular system and, especially, his marvelously efficient code--the only part of his telegraph system wholly original with Morse--that became the standard.

The telegraph was something very new under the sun, something that would have been utterly inconceivable to the world of Thomas Nightingale. The telegraph could transmit information at very high speed--thousands of times faster than it could be physically carried and hundreds of times faster than Chappe's visual telegraph could transmit it--and at very low cost. So it is not surprising that once its practicality was demonstrated, the telegraph spread with astonishing speed, olden using the convenient pathways forged by the equally fast-spreading railroads.

The relatively small countries of western Europe were mostly wired by 1850. Even the vast and only partially settled United States had a telegraph line running across the continent to California by 1861, only seventeen years after Morse had first tapped out the dashes and dots spelling "What hath God wrought?"

Because nearly three-quarters of the surface of the Earth is covered by water, it was not long before men began to consider the problem of extending the miracle of telegraphy across these bodies of water. Indeed, Samuel Morse studied the problem in 1842, two years before he sent his famous message from Washington to Baltimore, when he laid an insulated copper wire across New York harbor and transmitted an electric current through it. In 1845, Ezra Cornell (who would found Cornell University two decades later) laid a line that crossed the Hudson River from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to Manhattan, where the George Washington Bridge is today. It worked satisfactorily for several months until ice broke it.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from A Thread Across the Ocean by John Steele Gordon. Copyright © 2002 by John Steele Gordon. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.