The Valentia Island cable station

Assembled from 18 blocks · 2 evidence · 14 related

1. Story
2. The European end of the first transatlantic telegraph cables, on an island off the coast of County Kerry in the south-west of Ireland. The 1858 cable was landed here; so, after the failures of 1857, 1858 and 1865, was the successful cable of 1866, from Foilhommerum Bay, and Valentia went on to work as a cable station for just over a century. The geography is the argument. Valentia is the westernmost convenient landfall in Europe with a sheltered harbour and a short, steep shelf, which makes the ocean crossing as short as the Atlantic allows and puts the fragile shore end in as little bad water as possible; the corresponding point on the other side is the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, for the same reasons in reverse. Ireland and Canada have jointly proposed the transatlantic cable stations at Valentia and Heart's Content for World Heritage inscription, and the sites remain on a tentative list rather than inscribed. A reader who wants one image for this whole Journey can take this one: two rocky headlands, chosen in the 1850s because they were the closest two useful pieces of land across an ocean, still doing the same job.
3. Knowledge
4. The cable landing station
5. The Valentia Island cable station
6. Connections
7. The cable landing station
8. The 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable
9. The first Atlantic telegraph cable is completed
10. A permanent Atlantic cable lands at Heart's Content
11. The submarine fibre-optic cable
12. Cable power feed equipment
13. Porthcurno cable station
14. The Valentia Island cable station
15. The Heart's Content cable station
16. Evidence
17. 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.
18. Cited only for the fact that the transatlantic cable stations are the subject of a World Heritage TENTATIVE LIST nomination and are not inscribed. V55 verification basis: the entry appeared in retrieved search results by title and publisher; the page was not opened, whc.unesco.org having been measured as blocked to V55 sessions. Nothing about the nomination's scope, date or partner states is claimed here.