Cyrus West Field

person · earth

The American merchant who financed and drove the first Atlantic telegraph cables, and whose significance is organisational rather than technical: he invented none of it. Field made money in the paper trade, retired young, and from 1854 spent more than a decade assembling what the project actually required — the Atlantic Telegraph Company, capital raised in both London and New York, the co-operation of the British and United States governments, the loan of naval vessels for the laying, and the technical talent of others, including William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, whose mirror galvanometer made the faint signals readable. He crossed the Atlantic dozens of times in the course of it. The 1857 attempt failed when the cable parted; the 1858 cable worked for about three weeks and died; the 1865 cable was lost in mid-ocean; the 1866 cable succeeded, and the 1865 cable was then recovered from the seabed and completed. Field is in this Journey because that sequence is the pattern of the industry that followed: the hard part of a submarine cable is not the idea, it is sustaining capital and organisation through failures that are guaranteed to happen.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.