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New York City wakes to a hundred-gun salute. Church bells ring all day. Fireworks light up the sky.
The city is celebrating a telegram.
Not what it said. New Yorkers are celebrating how it traveled: along a 2,000-mile cable lying on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. A message that once took two weeks by steamship had crossed in an instant.
The man behind the cable was Cyrus Field, a paper tycoon who retired at 34 and quickly discovered he was terrible at retiring. He knew nothing about telegraphy, engineering, or the sea. Experts thought his idea was about as feasible as a trip to Venus. For a while, they were right: five expeditions, a killer storm, and one very public disgrace stood between Field and the wire that would shrink the world.
This week: why a bored millionaire attempted the moonshot of the Victorian era, and why the internet you’re reading this on still runs along the descendants of his cable. Plus: the world’s first transatlantic text messages, and a quality-control test that involved touching a live wire to your tongue.
🎧 Listen to The Wire That Connected the World on HISTORY This Week (wherever you get your podcasts).
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