The 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable

Assembled from 25 blocks · 1 evidence · 15 related

1. Story
2. The first cable to carry a message between Europe and North America, and a failure that established the whole subsequent industry. Laid by the Atlantic Telegraph Company after unsuccessful attempts in 1857 and earlier in 1858, with the ships meeting in mid-ocean and paying out in opposite directions, it was completed on 5 August 1858 between Valentia Island in Kerry and Trinity Bay in Newfoundland. Test signals passed from 10 August; the first official message — the directors' announcement that "Europe and America are united by telegraph" — went on 16 August, followed by a much-publicised exchange between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan. Then the signal decayed. Over about three weeks of working life the cable carried a few hundred messages in each direction, and it failed on 18 September 1858, probably because very high voltages had been applied in an attempt to force a signal through insulation that was already deteriorating. The lesson taken from the failure — that the problem was electrical and material rather than a matter of will — produced the 1865 and 1866 attempts, the recovery of the lost 1865 cable from the seabed, and a permanent link. It also produced the industry's first understanding that a cable is a system with a physics that has to be respected.
3. Knowledge
4. The Valentia Island cable station
5. The 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable
6. TAT-1
7. Cyrus West Field
8. Connections
9. The Valentia Island cable station
10. Cyrus West Field
11. TAT-1
12. The first Atlantic telegraph cable is completed
13. The 1858 cable fails
14. The cable landing station
15. The 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable
16. The first Atlantic telegraph cable is completed
17. A permanent Atlantic cable lands at Heart's Content
18. The 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable
19. The first Atlantic telegraph cable is completed
20. A permanent Atlantic cable lands at Heart's Content
21. The 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable
22. TAT-8
23. TAT-1 opens with 36 telephone circuits
24. Evidence
25. Supports the 1858 cable dates (completion 5 August, first test signals 10 August, first official message 16 August, failure 18 September), the message counts of the working period, the 1866 landing at Heart's Content and the recovery of the 1865 cable, and Cyrus Field's organising role. V55 verification basis: retrieved by search, not opened. This is a specialist enthusiast-maintained archive rather than an institutional one; it is the standard working reference for this subject and reproduces primary material, but a curator should replace it with institutional citations before publication.