The Transatlantic Cable: A Thread Across the Ocean

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show. And our favorite subject, as you know, is American history. Nowadays, we never have to think about how long a message might take to get somewhere or to someone. In fact, often, if there isn’t a near-instantaneous reply, we often get frustrated or even annoyed. If the message is going from Oxford, Mississippi, or sending to, let’s say, Oxford, England, we want it now, and we want it fast. John Steele Gordon, historian and friend of Hillsdale, is here to tell us how the story of the telegraph and the Transatlantic Cable changed the world.

You know, some inventions are more important than others. I mean, Oscar Hammerstein the First, a great opera impresario, was the grandfather of the lyricist, who was a great inventor too, by the way. But he once invented a reversible necktie so you could spill gravy on two sides. And…

He sold it.

He made money on this thing, but this did not change the world. It had been known for one hundred years that you could send electricity down a wire. Many very important scientists of the 18th century had investigated this, including Benjamin Franklin, whose famous experiment with the kite and the key proved that lightning is an electrical phenomenon. If you’re tempted to reproduce Franklin’s experiment, I would strongly suggest that you don’t. It was a parlor game until the 19th century when wire became cheap because wire factories powered by steam could draw out copper very quickly and efficiently. Before then, you had to beat it out. And so the telegraph became practical in the early 19th century, and people all over the world were trying to do it.

But two men in England…

Wheatstone and Cook developed and patented a system in 1837 that actually worked.

It was kind of clunky, but it worked.

Samuel Morse in this country sent his famous message, ‘What Hath God Wrought?’ in 1844, and his system eventually became adopted worldwide because it was simpler than the other systems, and also because of his marvelously efficient code, which is the only part of the whole system that he invented entirely himself. Everything else was mainly bits and pieces he had borrowed, and the code. It was so efficient that people discovered very soon that they could. At first, they would write down the dots and the dashes, and then they would translate them. They found that once telegraphers got used to it, they could actually do it by ear and just write down the message. One of the very first people to learn how to do that, by the way, was a young telegrapher in Pittsburgh whose name was Andrew Carnegie. And telegraph wires sprang up like crazy. They often used the rights of the railroads as a convenient place to string their poles and their wires, and it wasn’t long before the railroads learned that they could use a telegraph as a signaling system. Because most of the railroads those days were single-track, and so if there was an oncoming train expected and it didn’t come, well, this train had to sit on the siding until it came. With a telegraph, they could telegraph ahead, saying, ‘You know, we’re stuck. You guys can come on.’ Suddenly, the railroads became much more efficient. Prices went down, use went up. But underwater telegraphy was another matter nobody knew. Of it was possible, but there was a very strong reason to try. And that was: in the 1840s and ’50s, the strongest country in the world was located on an archipelago off of Northwest Europe. They wanted to be able to connect to Europe, and so it was trying. I mean, the English have always loved to be… They loved that 22 miles of water between them and the French, but they also mean the famous mid-19th century Times of London headline: ‘Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off.’ And so a pair of brothers named Brett ordered 30 miles of telegraph wire and put it on the back of a boat and reeled it out across the Channel and tried to send a message back to Dover. And the message that got there was gibberish, undecipherable, but at least it proved that you could get an electric signal through 22 miles of…

…a submarine cable.

And what made the cable possible was this stuff called gutta-percha. The sole use of gutta-percha today is it’s used to fill root canals. After you’ve had the nerve removed, the dentist puts in gutta-percha, and shortly after it came into use, a golf-playing clergyman in Scotland wondered if they might possibly be able to make golf balls out of gutta-percha, because they had…

…been making. They were called the featheries.

They’re made of leather and stuffed with boiled goose feathers, and this was a very highly skilled job stuffing the feathers into the golf ball, and they were very expensive and they only lasted maybe two or three games. So this clergyman, who loved to play golf but didn’t like paying for the featheries, made golf balls out of gutta-percha, and, hey, it worked great, and they were very much cheaper. And he discovered after he’d played with them two or three times that the ball started going further, and he didn’t understand why. We do understand why now. It was the dents and the nicks imparted by the golf clubs gave it better aerodynamics, and so they put dimples on golf balls, and that’s why the dimples are there to this day, because the ball goes further. And then golf players loved that characteristic.

And that would come to a guy who…

…was responsible for the cable wouldn’t have happened without him. It would have happened eventually, but it wouldn’t have happened nearly as soon as it did. And his name was Cyrus Field, and he came from an old New England family from Connecticut. His father was David Dudley Field, a great New England clergyman. He’s distinguished enough as a clergyman and an author to be listed today in the Dictionary of American Biography, which is the standard 24-volume work on distinguished Americans of the past. The Reverend David Dudley Field and his wife had eight sons – three daughters and eight sons. Two of the sons died: one died in childhood, one died in very early manhood.

He was lost at sea.

Of the six sons who lived to a full lifetime, four of them made it into the Dictionary of American Biography on their own.

The two who didn’t…

…one was a very distinguished engineer, and the other was president of the Massachusetts Senate for three terms. So he may have been a great clergyman, but clearly the Reverend David Dudley Field was a pretty good father too.

And you’re listening to John Steele Gordon. And by the way, his book, A Thread Across the Ocean: The Story of the Transatlantic Cable, is terrific. Go to Amazon.com, pick it up, or the usual suspects. When we come back, more of the story of how the telegraph went from Samuel Morse to winning World War I. Here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of Our American Stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture, and faith, are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we’re back with Our American Stories and the story of the Transatlantic Cable. Historian John Steele Gordon was just introducing Cyrus Field, a bright young man from a very impressive New England family who was the person responsible for connecting both sides of the Atlantic.

Cyrus Field was not as intellectual as some of his brothers – just as smart, just not as interested in book learning. And when he was 16, he asked his father’s permission to go to New York and go into business, and his father granted it. New York is unique among American colonies. The Puritans came to New England, the Quakers came to Philadelphia, Catholics came to Maryland in order to worship as they wished to do so. The Dutch came to New York to make money, and for no other reason whatsoever. In fact, they didn’t even get around to building a church for 17 years; they’re so busy trading first. When they did, they named it the Church of Saint Nicholas, and Santa Claus has been the patron saint of New York ever since. So Cyrus Field came to this town that was famous for hustle and bustle, and ‘let’s make a deal.’ And he was very, very good at doing exactly that. He owned a paper company, a wholesale paper company, and became very rich. By the time he was in his 30s, he was worth several hundred thousand dollars, which in the 1850s made you enormously rich. He lived in a great, big house on Gramercy Park, his brother right next door. They had doors that communicated between the two houses, and he was sort of, he was bored with running the paper company because he was an entrepreneur at heart, and once the thing was up and running and just cranking out dividends, it bored him. He was willing to take the dividends, of course. And then one day his brother, Matthew Field, brought a guy named Frederick Gisborne over to see him because Gisborne had been running a telegraph line across the southern shore of Newfoundland with the hopes of putting a cable across the Cabot Strait, the entrance to the Saint Lawrence River, and connecting it to the telegraph grid in North America, because they said that would make communication with England two days shorter, because Newfoundland is one-third of the way along the…

…Great Circle Route to England.

And Cyrus Field wasn’t very interested in that because he didn’t think two days made that much difference, because it was only one day difference to Halifax, which was connected to the telegraph grid already. But then he just looked at the globe in his library and saw that, you know, Newfoundland was indeed one-third of the way up on the shortest route to England. And he said, ‘Well, hey, if we could lay a cable all the way to Ireland, then communication wouldn’t be ten days; it would be ten minutes.’

‘And, you know, we can make money doing that.’ And so he decided to do it.

He wrote to a couple of people: Matthew Fontaine Maury, the great oceanographer, asking if it was possible, and Maury wrote back saying, ‘Funny you should ask. We just did a series of soundings and we found this thing, which we actually have named the Telegraph Plateau because it’s the ideal place to lay a telegraph cable.’ Then he asked Samuel Morse if it was possible, and Morse said, ‘Sure.’

Morse was a tinkerer. He was actually a great portrait…

…artist, but he wasn’t very well technically grounded either. He’d borrowed most of his ideas from people who knew much more about telegraphy…

…than he did.

Field decided to go ahead with this, and of course, he had no idea what he was getting into – almost like if somebody in the 1950s reading about the success of the Russian Sputnik, saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea: how about a manned expedition to Mars?’ Because the longest undersea cable in 1854 was less than 300 miles laid across the North Sea, which never gets deeper than about 300 feet, and this would have to be 2,000 miles long and be at a depth of sometimes 15,000 feet. So he embarked upon it. He got his neighbor Peter Cooper, the founder of the Cooper Union – to this day the only American university that does not charge tuition. And he also got Moses Taylor, who was an enormously rich man who ended up controlling the gaslight industry in New York. And they all put in very considerable sums of money, and off they go, starting on this. The first thing they did was to lay the telegraph line across the southern shore of Newfoundland, which turned out to take about four times as long as they had counted on and cost five or six times as much. The southern shore of Newfoundland is not an easy place to work.

If you like rain and fog, you will love Newfoundland.

And then they were going to lay the cable across the Cabot Strait, about 80 miles, and they simply had no idea what they were doing. They ordered the cable in England, the only place in the world that could make submarine cable. It was brought over in a sailing ship. They hired a steamship in New York to go up there. It was going to tow the sailing ship across as the sailing ship unreeled the cable, and they invited everybody to come on board the steamboat.

So all the investors…

Peter Cooper was there. The Reverend David Dudley Field, aged about 70, was there. Their wives and daughters were there in big hats, long skirts, and parasols. And they got to St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland. The whole city was full of great, large, black, amiable Newfoundland dogs, and they fell in love with them. And they bought 10 or 12, brought them on board. And so here was a combination between a commercial enterprise on the cutting edge of technology and a yachting party, and the captain proved to be very uncooperative. He refused to follow orders. For one thing, he said, ‘I’ll know how to sail my ship.’ Well, he may know how to sail a ship, but he didn’t know where they wanted it to sail. And finally, they had to cut the cable, and it was a $500,000 disaster. So they needed lots more money, and the only place to get it was England, and England was much more enthusiastic about the cable than the United States was because England had this worldwide empire which was very difficult to communicate with. And so the British government said, ‘Okay, once the cable works, we guarantee to pay you 16,000 pounds a year,’ which means you can borrow at four percent, you know, virtually the entire estimated cost of laying the cable once it works. The United States government made the same promise, although it took a great deal of screaming and yelling in Congress because a lot of Americans think, ‘You know, what do we need this for?’ But they finally did come on board. Each of the navies donated two ships. The U.S. lent the USS Niagara, one of the largest warships in the world, made of iron, state-of-the-art ship design. The British gave them the Agamemnon, which, although it was steam-powered, it looked for all the world like a boat that had fought at Trafalgar…

…50 years earlier.

I mean, it was a three-decker, three-masted ship of the line that had been retrofitted for steam, and it was a lousy sailor, as most of those great, big, tubby ships of the line were. They had to use two ships because there wasn’t. No ship in the world could carry enough cable to do the whole job. The first time they started in Ireland, got out about 400 miles, and the cable…

…snapped, and that was the end of that. There wasn’t enough time.

Next year, they tried it again, sailed out to the middle. This time, before they got to the middle, they were caught in one of the worst Atlantic storms in memory. The Agamemnon survived only because of superb seamanship on the part of the captain and the crew. It had 250 tons of cable sitting on its forward deck, which made it even more top-heavy than it had been before, and he managed to save that cable. They could have just cut it and tossed it, but they did not. They survived. They tried it again; the cable snapped. They went back to England. At this point, they were derided by everybody. This was a wild goose chase. ‘Why are we putting money into this silly thing?’ And Field said, ‘Look, you know the money’s been spent, we have the cable, we have enough to do it.’

‘Let’s try it again. You know, we’ve got nothing to lose. Otherwise we just sell the cable for scrap.’

And then it’s a certain disaster. So they tried it, and it worked. They unreeled it, firstly, without any problem whatsoever.

And you’re hearing the true nature of an entrepreneur, and that is, they see things that no one else sees, and they’re not even sure they know how to do. They call a few guys, a few gals, and the next thing you know, they’re giving it a shot. And when they fail, they just want to try it one more time because they want to fix what didn’t work and make that dream a reality, and not some pie-in-the-sky crazy dream, but something doable. And when you think of a guy like Elon Musk saying, ‘I want to build a spaceship to somewhere.’ Well, he’s doing it. This spirit – well, it’s always been in humankind, and something about our country unleashes it in people and allows it to thrive. When we come back, more of John Steele Gordon’s story, the story of the Transatlantic Cable. Here on Our American Stories, and we’re back with the conclusion of the Cyrus Field and Transatlantic Cable story and the telegraph cable that connected America to England, and from there…

…to the rest of the world.