Early History
Cyrus West Field and the Atlantic Telegraph Company were behind the construction of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. The project began in 1857 and was completed on August 5, 1858. The cable functioned for only three weeks, but it was the first such project to yield practical results. The first official telegram to pass between two continents was a letter of congratulation from Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom to the President of the United States James Buchanan on August 16. Signal quality declined rapidly, slowing transmission to an almost unusable speed. The cable was destroyed the following month when Wildman Whitehouse applied excessive voltage to it while trying to achieve faster operation. (It has been argued that the faulty manufacture, storage and handling of the 1858 cable would have led to premature failure in any case.) The cable's rapid failure undermined public and investor confidence and delayed efforts to restore a connection. A second attempt was undertaken in 1865 with much-improved material and, following some setbacks, a connection was completed and put into service on July 28, 1866. This cable proved more durable.
Previously, communication between Europe and the Americas could only happen by ship. The transatlantic cable reduced communication time to a matter of minutes, allowing a message and a response in the same day. Five attempts to lay the cable were made over a nine-year period – one in 1857, two in 1858, one in 1865, and one in 1866 – before lasting connections were finally achieved with the 1866 cable and the repaired 1865 cable by Isambard Kingdom Brunel's ship the SS Great Eastern, captained by Sir James Anderson. In the 1870s duplex and quadruplex transmission and receiving systems were set up that could relay multiple messages over the cable.
Additional cables were laid between Foilhommerum and Heart's Content in 1873, 1874, 1880, and 1894. By the end of the 19th century, British-, French-, German-, and American-owned cables linked Europe and North America in a sophisticated web of telegraphic communications.
Read more about this topic: Transatlantic Telegraph Cable
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