A permanent Atlantic cable lands at Heart's Content
The Great Eastern completed a cable from Foilhommerum Bay on Valentia Island to Heart's Content in Newfoundland, and it worked. The ship then returned to the position where the 1865 cable had been lost, grappled it from a seabed some kilometres deep, spliced it and completed it to the same village — so that two working cables ran between Ireland and Newfoundland within weeks of each other. The recovery is the first demonstration of the operation on which the entire repair industry still depends: finding a cable on the bottom by dragging for it, bringing an end aboard and splicing.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- The Heart's Content cable station · site · Canada
- The Valentia Island cable station · site · Ireland
- Cyrus West Field · person · United States · not located
- Locating and repairing a cable fault · process · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
History of the Atlantic Cable and Submarine Telegraphy
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.
atlantic-cable.com (Bill Burns), with corroborating institutional accounts · Partly verified
History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy, atlantic-cable.com, including its TAT-1 and 1858 cable sections; corroborated against Linda Hall Library and RTÉ Brainstorm accounts of the 1858 cable and Cyrus Field
Recorded on The Heart's Content cable station
- The first Atlantic telegraph cable is completed
- A permanent Atlantic cable lands at Heart's Content
- Eleven cable ships repair the Luzon Strait cables
- Both cables to the Matsu Islands are cut within six days
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.
- Both cables to the Matsu Islands are cut within six days · 2023-02-02 – 2023-02-08
- Eleven cable ships repair the Luzon Strait cables · 2007-01 – 2007-02
- The first Atlantic telegraph cable is completed · 1858-08-05