The power and importance of timely communications – itself a timely reminder at a time when the Post Office is under siege – is the focus of the 121st #stampoftheday, a 4-cent stamp marking the 100th anniversary of the first telegraph message sent via a transatlantic cable.

The telegraph, which was the first device to send messages using electricity was first demonstrated by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1837. Over the next two decades, it became an important form of communication over land. But long-distance underwater cables were slower in coming. In 1850 a cable was run between England and France. That same year Bishop John T. Mullock, head of the Roman Catholic Church in Newfoundland, proposed a telegraph line that would connect with the mainland, via Nova Scotia. At about the same time a similar plan occurred to Frederic Newton Gisborne, a telegraph engineer in Nova Scotia. In the spring of 1851, Gisborne procured a grant from the legislature of Newfoundland and, having formed a company, began the construction of the landline. In 1853 his company collapsed, he was arrested and lost everything.

In 1854 Gisborne was introduced to Cyrus West Field, a Massachusetts native who had made a fortune supplying paper mills and buying their products, which he resold to growing newspapers. Field was intrigued by the idea of extending the planned cable beyond Newfoundland across the Atlantic to England. However, he knew nothing about either submarine cables or the deep sea. He consulted Morse as well as Lieutenant Matthew Maury, an authority on oceanography. The charts Maury constructed from soundings in the logs of multiple ships indicated that the cable could be laid on a shallow underwater plateau that ran between Ireland and Newfoundland that Murray named Telegraph Plateau. Maury also concluded that a route going directly to the US was too rugged and long to be tenable, as well as being longer.

So Field adopted Gisborne’s scheme as a preliminary step to the bigger undertaking, that would connect New York to London via Newfoundland. The first step was to finish the line between St. John’s and Nova Scotia. After a failed attempt in 1855, this line was competed in 1856 at a cost of more than $1 million (about $30 million in today’s dollars), a fraction of what it was going to cost to lay a couple across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1855, while the cable to Nova Scotia was still being laid, Field made the first of 56 trips across the Atlantic to consult with John Watkins Brett, who had created and led companies that had laid cables across the English Channel in 1850 and from England to Ireland in 1853.

In October 1856, Brett and Field, who provided a quarter of the capital, formed the Atlantic Telegraph Company. The company’s board included both Morse and William Thomson, a noted physicist and engineer who in 1892 was “ennobled” and became Lord Kelvin. (In his honor, absolute temperatures are stated in units of kelvin.). The British and American government also both agreed to provide subsidies for the project and each government provided a ship to lay the cable as well.

In the summer of 1857, the company began laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable on Telegraph Plateau. The cable consisted of seven copper wires, covered with three coats of gutta-percha (resilient, electrically nonconductive, thermoplastic latex produced from the sap of the gutta-percha tree), and wound with tarred hemp, over which a sheath of 18 strands, each of seven iron wires, was laid in a close helix. It weighed nearly 550 kg/km (1.1 tons per nautical mile), was relatively flexible and was able to withstand a pull of several tens of kilonewtons (several tons). Since no wire rope maker had the capacity to make so much cable on that timescale, the task was shared by two English firms. Late in manufacturing it was discovered that the respective sections had been made with strands twisted in opposite directions. This meant that the two sections of cable could not be directly spliced wire-to-wire as the iron wire on both cables would unwind when it was put under tension during laying. The problem was solved by splicing through an improvised wooden bracket to hold the wires in place.

The first attempt was a failure because the cable kept breaking largely because it was difficult to the tension of the cable as it was payed out. A new mechanism was designed and successfully tested in May 1858. On June 10, the two ships set sail to try again. Ten days out they found themselves in a severe storm that almost halted the enterprise because the ships sere top heavy with cable that could not all fit in the hold. However, they weathered the storm and began laying cable, which again repeatedly broke. When the unsuccessful expedition returned to Ireland, some directors wanted to abandon the project and selling off the unused cable. But Field persuaded them to keep going and the ships set out again on July 17. The cable ran easily this time and the cable was fully laid by August 5.

After several test messages, were sent on August 16, the first official message was sent via the cable: “Directors of Atlantic Telegraph Company, Great Britain, to Directors in America:-Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, good will towards men.” Next was the text of a telegram of congratulation from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan expressing a hope that the new line would prove “an additional link between the nations whose friendship is founded on their common interest and reciprocal esteem.” The President responded that, “it is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle. May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of Heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world.” The messages, it bears mention, took some time to decipher – Queen Victoria’s message of 98 words took sixteen hours to send.

The next morning a grand salute of 100 guns resounded in New York City, the streets were decorated with flags, the bells of the churches were rung, and at night the city was illuminated. On September 1 there was a parade, followed by an evening torchlight procession and fireworks display, which caused a fire in the Town Hall. However, in September 1858, after several days of progressive deterioration of the insulation, the cable, which had not yet been put in service for public use, failed altogether. The reaction to this news was intense. Some writers even hinted that the line was a hoax, and others pronounced it a stock exchange speculation.

Field was not deterred and hoped to renew the project, even though the public had largely lost confidence in it. In the coming years, other cables were laid in the Mediterranean and Red Sea, which led to better cable designs. By 1865, Field orchestrated the laying of a new transatlantic cable and within a year, its speed was vastly improved, able to transmit about eight words per minute. Later analyses suggested that the improved communications led to substantially increased trade over the Atlantic and reduced prices.

In the current era, when emails and videos can fly around the world in seconds, the transatlantic telegraph seems quaint. But its history shows that creating reliable, timely communication systems is no easy task but, if successful, is one that can produce great benefits. It seems bizarre that we seem to have forgotten that lesson and are moving backwards, not forward, as we sever the lines that should hold us together.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.