Atlantic Telegraph Company

The Atlantic Telegraph Company was a company formed in 1856 to undertake and exploit a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic ocean, the first such telecommunications link.

The project stemmed from an agreement between the American Cyrus Field and the Englishmen John Watkins Brett and Charles Tilston Bright, and was incorporated in December 1856 with £350,000 capital, raised principally in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. The board of directors was composed of eighteen members from the UK, nine from the U.S. and three from Canada. The original three projectors were joined by E.O.W. Whitehouse as chief electrician. Curtis M. Lampson served ably as vice-chairman for over a decade.

The board recruited the physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), who had publicly disputed some of Whitehouse's claims. The two enjoyed a tense relationship before Whitehouse was dismissed when the first cable failed in 1858.

When a second cable, under Thomson's supervision, was proposed, a new subsidiary company, the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, was formed to execute the new venture.

On the failure of the expedition to lay the second cable in 1865, a third company was formed to raise the capital for a further attempt, the Anglo-American Telegraph Company. The next expedition in 1866 was a success, also succeeding in recovering the lost second cable. The service generated revenues of £1000 in its first day of operation. The approximate price to send a telegram was: one word, one mile (1.6 km)= $0.0003809