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The First Transatlantic Cable: Storms, Snapped Wires & the Madman Who Wired the World (Sleep Story) · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome back to Sleepless History, the show where we wander slowly through the quiet corners of the past, the kind of stories that never made it into your school textbooks, but probably should have.
0:12
[SPEAKER_00]: If this is your first time here, the idea is simple.
0:16
[SPEAKER_00]: No shouting, no jump cuts, no urgency.
0:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Just a long calm walk through a true story.
0:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Told slowly enough that you can let your eyes close whenever they're ready.
0:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight's story is a strange one.
0:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the story of a wire, a single, thin, rubber-coated copper wire.
0:36
[SPEAKER_00]: No thicker than a garden hose at its widest point.
0:39
[SPEAKER_00]: that a small group of obsessive, sleep deprived, occasionally half-mad 19th-century men, decided to lay along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
0:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Not across it, along the bottom of it.
0:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Two and a half thousand miles of cable sunk into water so deep that for most of human history, nobody even knew what was down there.
1:01
[SPEAKER_00]: No light, no maps, no idea whether the ocean floor was flat
1:07
[SPEAKER_00]: or filled with current strong enough to tear a steel cable in half.
1:11
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a story about ambition, outrunning knowledge.
1:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a story about a paper salesman with no engineering background who convinced the most powerful governments and bankers on earth to better fortune on a wire nobody could see, running through a place nobody had ever been.
1:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a story about a doctor who decided he understood electricity better than men who had spent their whole life studying it.
1:35
[SPEAKER_00]: and how his stubbornness very nearly burned the entire project to ash.
1:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a story about isolation, real isolation.
1:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind where you are floating in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from anyone who could help you.
1:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind where if something goes wrong, truly wrong, there is no one coming.
1:54
[SPEAKER_00]: so get comfortable.
1:56
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going back to the middle of the 1800s to a world that moved at the speed of a ship and we're going to watch slowly and patiently as a handful of stubborn people try to drag that world into something faster.
2:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
2:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1 The Hook and the Madness
2:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Picture the world in the early 1850s.
2:22
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no internet, obviously.
2:25
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no telephone, there is no radio.
2:28
[SPEAKER_00]: If you wanted to send a message from London to New York, you wrote it down on a piece of paper, sealed it in an envelope, and handed it to a man boarding a ship.
2:37
[SPEAKER_00]: That ship would cross the Atlantic Ocean, weather permitting, in somewhere between 10 and 14 days.
2:43
[SPEAKER_00]: If the weather did not permit, it could take three weeks or longer.
2:48
[SPEAKER_00]: There were no guarantees.
2:49
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no way to check on it once it left the harbour.
2:53
[SPEAKER_00]: You simply waited and hoped and went on with your life until either the reply came back or it didn't.
3:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Now imagine you are a government, or a bank, or a merchant, and something urgent happens.
3:07
[SPEAKER_00]: A war breaks out, a market crashes, a king dies.
3:11
[SPEAKER_00]: In Europe, this news spreads through Europe in hours, because the telegraph already exists on land.
3:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Why has run along railroad tracks and through countryside?
3:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Carrying messages at something close to the speed of light.
3:25
[SPEAKER_00]: A message that might have taken a week to travel between two cities by horse and carriage in the 1700s could now travel between London and Paris in minutes.
3:35
[SPEAKER_00]: But the moment that news needs to cross the ocean, all of that speed evaporates.
3:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The telegraph wire simply stops at the coastline because nobody has figured out how to send an electrical signal through saltwater, through cold,
3:54
[SPEAKER_00]: so the message gets handed to a ship and the ship becomes the bottleneck.
3:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Suddenly, you are back to the speed of sales and steam engines.
4:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Back to 10 or 14 days.
4:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Back to total silence and total uncertainty.
4:09
[SPEAKER_00]: For a message that could have travelled at the speed of light, if there had only been a wire to carry it.
4:15
[SPEAKER_00]: This gap, this strange seam in the world where the fastest information on Earth suddenly slows down to the speed of a boat.
4:23
[SPEAKER_00]: is the entire reason our story exists.
4:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Somebody was going to try to close that gap eventually.
4:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The only question was who and how, and at what cost, the man who decided he would be the one to do it was named Cyrus Field.
4:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you were designing a character for a story like this, you probably wouldn't choose Cyrus Field.
4:46
[SPEAKER_00]: He wasn't an engineer.
4:47
[SPEAKER_00]: He wasn't a scientist.
4:49
[SPEAKER_00]: He had no background in electricity, no background in oceanography, no background in shipbuilding.
4:55
[SPEAKER_00]: What he was was a paper merchant.
4:58
[SPEAKER_00]: a very successful one.
5:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Cyrus Field had made his fortune in the paper business in New York, building up a company, growing wealthy, and then in his early 30s, finding himself with money, energy, and absolutely no idea what to do next.
5:14
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the kind of man who needed a project, a big one.
5:18
[SPEAKER_00]: and in 1854, almost by accident, he found one.
5:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The story goes that field was approached about a much smaller idea.
5:27
[SPEAKER_00]: There was already a plan being floated to build a telegraph line across the island of Newfoundland.
5:33
[SPEAKER_00]: on the eastern edge of Canada, in order to connect it by undersea cable to mainland North America, which would shave a day or two off the time, it took for news from Europe to reach New York, since ships could drop their male at Newfoundland instead of sailing all the way down the coast.
5:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a modest, sensible idea.
5:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Connect an island to a continent, save a little time.
5:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Cyrus Field looked at this modest idea, and somehow his mind let straight past it.
6:04
[SPEAKER_00]: If you can run a cable under the water to connect an island to a continent, he reasoned.
6:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Why stop there?
6:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Why not keep going?
6:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Why not run the cable the rest of the way?
6:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Across the entire Atlantic Ocean, all the way to Ireland, all the way to England.
6:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Connect the old world to the new world directly with wire, so that a message typed in London could appear almost instantly on a desk in New York.
6:31
[SPEAKER_00]: To put this in perspective, the distance field was now imagining wasn't a few miles between an island and a coastline.
6:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It was roughly 2,500 miles of open ocean.
6:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Much of it over water.
6:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So deep that nobody on earth had ever measured the bottom.
6:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody knew what the sea floor looked like along that route.
6:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody knew if it was smooth sand or jagged volcanic rock or carved with deep underwater canyons that could snap a cable like a thread the moment it dropped into them.
7:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The technology to send an electrical signal that far through an insulated wire under crushing ocean pressure barely existed.
7:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The cable itself, the actual physical material capable of doing this, had only been invented a few years earlier and had never been tested at anything close to this scale.
7:20
[SPEAKER_00]: None of that stopped him.
7:21
[SPEAKER_00]: If anything, it seemed to excite him more.
7:24
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the first thing you have to understand about Cyrus Field if you want to understand this story.
7:29
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not an engineer who calculated the odds and decided the project was feasible.
7:34
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a salesman and an organizer who decided the project was thrilling.
7:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And then went looking for engineers to make it possible after the fact.
7:43
[SPEAKER_00]: He had, by most accounts, an almost supernatural gift for raising money and rallying powerful people around an idea.
7:51
[SPEAKER_00]: even when that idea bordered on lunacy.
7:54
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote letters, he visited scientists, he visited bankers, he visited the president of the United States and the Queen of England and convinced both of their governments to subsidise the project, to lend ships, to lend money, to lend credibility, all on the basis of a plan that, on paper,
8:14
[SPEAKER_00]: should have terrified anyone who actually understood the scale of the engineering problem.
8:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And in a sense that lack of fear that obliviousness to the scale of what he was attempting is exactly what made the project possible at all.
8:29
[SPEAKER_00]: An engineer who understood every single thing that could go wrong might never have started.
8:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Cyrus Field didn't understand every single thing that could go wrong, so he started anyway, and then spent years discovering one catastrophe at a time.
8:46
[SPEAKER_00]: exactly how much he didn't know.
8:48
[SPEAKER_00]: He needed scientists, though.
8:50
[SPEAKER_00]: He needed someone who actually understood electricity, who could tell him what kind of wire to use, how thick the insulation needed to be, how strong of an electrical signal would be required to push a message across 2,500 miles of ocean.
9:06
[SPEAKER_00]: without it fading into nothing along the way.
9:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where our second major character enters the story.
9:13
[SPEAKER_00]: His name was Wildman White House.
9:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, take a moment with that name because it is somehow entirely real and it fits the man almost too perfectly.
9:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Wildman White House was not originally an electrician or a physicist.
9:31
[SPEAKER_00]: He trained as a medical doctor, a surgeon, practicing in the English town of Brighton.
9:36
[SPEAKER_00]: At some point in his career, he became fascinated by the emerging science of electricity, specifically as it related to telegraphy, and he began conducting his own experiments on his own time without any formal training in the field.
9:51
[SPEAKER_00]: He was, by most descriptions, intelligent, confident,
9:55
[SPEAKER_00]: an absolutely certain of his own correctness.
9:57
[SPEAKER_00]: A combination that can be either extremely useful or extremely dangerous, depending on whether the person turns out to actually be right.
10:06
[SPEAKER_00]: White House had developed a set of theories about how electrical signals behaved when sent through long lengths of insulated underwater wire.
10:14
[SPEAKER_00]: and how best to boost a weak signal back up to readable strength using induction coils, which are essentially devices that use bursts of electromagnetic energy to amplify an electrical pulse.
10:27
[SPEAKER_00]: He was passionate about these theories.
10:30
[SPEAKER_00]: He defended them loudly and he had through confidence and persistence as much as through credentials, positioned himself as one of the lead electrical engineers on what would become the
10:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Here is the problem and we will spend a great deal of time on this problem later in our story because it nearly destroys the entire endeavor.
10:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of the actual leading scientists of the era, men who had spent years studying the physical properties of electricity and signal transmission, including a brilliant Scottish physicist named William Thompson, who would later be honored as Lord Kelvin, disagreed with several of White House's core theories.
11:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Thompson believed, based on careful mathematical reasoning, about how electrical signals degrade and distort,
11:21
[SPEAKER_00]: that the project required gentle, low-voltage signals, sent slowly and carefully, read by extremely sensitive instruments, capable of detecting the faintest flicker of electricity.
11:36
[SPEAKER_00]: White House, believe the opposite.
11:38
[SPEAKER_00]: He believed in brute force.
11:41
[SPEAKER_00]: bigger voltage, stronger pulses, hit the cable harder, and the signal would simply punch through faster.
11:48
[SPEAKER_00]: These two philosophies, gentle sensitivity versus brute force power, would collide again and again over the course of this story, and the collision would have consequences that nobody, least of all White House, could have predicted.
12:04
[SPEAKER_00]: So now we have our two central figures.
12:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Cyrus Field, the visionary with no technical background, driven by sheer force of personality, and an almost reckless optimism, and Wildman White House, the self-taught electrical expert, driven by an equally reckless confidence in his own theories, theories that the most respected scientific minds of his era were quietly trying to warn him about.
12:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Between these two men and the small army of engineers, sailors, financiers and scientists, they gathered around them, the project moved forward.
12:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And as it moved forward, the sheer scale of what they were attempting began to reveal itself, peace by peace, like a fog slowly lifting to reveal a mountain range nobody had realized was there.
12:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about that scale for a moment, because it is genuinely staggering, even now, with the benefit of modern hindsight.
13:01
[SPEAKER_00]: First, there was the ocean itself.
13:03
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1850s, almost nothing was known about the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, along the route they intended to use.
13:11
[SPEAKER_00]: There were no satellites, no sonar, no submarines capable of exploring the deep sea.
13:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The only way to measure ocean depth at the time was to lower a weighted rope or wire over the side of a ship and simply let it fall until it hit bottom, then measure how much rope had been let out.
13:31
[SPEAKER_00]: This process, called sounding, was slow, imprecise and only gave you information about the single point directly beneath the ship at that exact moment.
13:43
[SPEAKER_00]: To map an entire ocean floor along a 2,500 mile path using this method would have taken an impossibly long time.
13:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So in practice, the early expeditions only managed a handful of soundings along the route.
13:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Enough to get a rough sense of the depth, but nowhere near enough to actually understand the terrain the cable would be resting on.
14:05
[SPEAKER_00]: This meant the engineers were in a very literal sense, dropping a wire into the dark and hoping for the best.
14:12
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not know if there were underwater mountains that the cable might snag on as it sank.
14:17
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not know if there were ocean currents strong enough at depth to drag the cable sideways and stretch it past its breaking point.
14:26
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not know if the bottom was soft mud that would cushion the cable gently, or sharp volcanic rock that would slice through the insulation, the moment it touched down.
14:37
[SPEAKER_00]: They were, in essence, performing one of the largest engineering projects in human history at that point.
14:44
[SPEAKER_00]: In an environment, they had almost no actual information about.
14:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Second, there was the cable itself, and this is where things get genuinely strange, in a way that I think deserves a few quiet, slow minutes of attention.
15:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The cable needed an insulating material, something that could wrap around a copper wire and keep electricity from leaking out into the surrounding sea water, while also being flexible enough to coil onto a ship.
15:12
[SPEAKER_00]: strong enough to survive being dragged along an unknown ocean floor and durable enough to survive years, ideally decades of constant exposure to crushing pressure and freezing cold water.
15:26
[SPEAKER_00]: No material like this had existed in human history until just a few years before this project began.
15:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The solution came from a substance called Guta Purchar.
15:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Guta Purchar is a natural latex
15:40
[SPEAKER_00]: a kind of rubber that comes from the sap of certain trees native to Southeast Asia, particularly in regions of what is now Malaysia and Indonesia.
15:50
[SPEAKER_00]: centuries, it had been used locally for various small purposes.
15:54
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was essentially unknown to the wider world until the early 1840s, when European traders and scientists began importing and studying it.
16:03
[SPEAKER_00]: What they discovered was remarkable.
16:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Unlike most rubber, available at the time, gutter purchase became soft and moldable when heated, but hardened into a tough
16:15
[SPEAKER_00]: water resistant, electrically insulating material when cooled.
16:20
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not rot easily.
16:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not dissolve in salt water.
16:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It could be melted.
16:25
[SPEAKER_00]: shaped around a copper wire core, and then left to harden into something almost like a flexible plastic sheath.
16:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Decades before actual plastic would be invented.
16:36
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, gutter purchase was, almost by sheer geological and biological luck, nearly perfectly suited to the one task that human civilization desperately needed, solved at that exact moment in history.
16:55
[SPEAKER_00]: would have been functionally impossible.
16:57
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no other known material in the 1850s capable of doing the job.
17:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So the engineer's designed a cable with a copper wire core, wrapped in several layers of gutter percher insulation, and then,
17:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the gutter percher alone was not strong enough to survive the physical strain of being laid across an ocean floor, and occasionally dragged, snagged, or stressed by currents.
17:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole thing was further wrapped in strands of iron wire, twisted together into a tough outer armor.
17:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The end result was a cable that, when you held a short length of it in your hands,
17:34
[SPEAKER_00]: felt heavier and tougher than you might expect.
17:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost like a thick dense rope.
17:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But when you start multiplying that weight across 2,500 miles, the numbers become almost unbelievable.
17:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The finished cable weighed in the range of one ton per nautical mile, one ton of cable.
17:54
[SPEAKER_00]: For every single mile, repeated across the entire width of the Atlantic Ocean.
18:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Sit with that figure for a moment, because the next part of our story depends entirely on understanding just how enormous a physical object this cable actually was.
18:11
[SPEAKER_00]: We are not talking about a wire you could coil up and carry over your shoulder.
18:16
[SPEAKER_00]: We are talking about thousands of tons of dense, twisted metal and rubber.
18:24
[SPEAKER_00]: that somehow had to be loaded onto ships, carried across an ocean, and lowered, carefully, continuously, without a single break onto a sea floor that nobody had ever seen.
18:38
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you even begin to move that much cable?
18:41
[SPEAKER_00]: What kind of ship could possibly carry it?
18:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And once you're out there, in the middle of the open Atlantic, with thousands of tons of unspooling
18:52
[SPEAKER_00]: what happens when something goes wrong?
18:54
[SPEAKER_00]: That is where we're headed next.
18:56
[SPEAKER_00]: But for now, let your mind sit with the image.
18:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The factories in England, working day and night, manufacturing mile after mile of this strange, heavy, rubber-coated wire, coiling it into massive tanks, preparing it for a journey that no cable in human history had ever
19:21
[SPEAKER_00]: one ton per mile, a seafloor nobody had mapped.
19:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And two men, a paper salesman and a self-taught doctor, convinced that somehow, against every reasonable expectation, they were going to make it work.
19:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we move on to the ships themselves, it's worth slowing down even further and spending a little more time with Cyrus Field as a person.
19:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the more closely you look
19:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Field was born in the early 1800s in a small town in Massachusetts, the son of a clergyman, one of several children in a large and, by most accounts, fairly modest household.
20:03
[SPEAKER_00]: He left home as a teenager to seek his fortune, eventually finding work in New York City, where, through a combination of hard work, sharp business instincts,
20:13
[SPEAKER_00]: and what appears to have been a genuinely tireless work ethic.
20:17
[SPEAKER_00]: He built up a successful paper manufacturing and trading business by his early 30s.
20:23
[SPEAKER_00]: By the standards of his era, this alone would have been considered a remarkable life achievement.
20:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of story that, on its own,
20:31
[SPEAKER_00]: might have been the highlight of another wise ordinary biography, but field had a restless quality to him that seemed to resist the idea of simply settling into a comfortable, successful life.
20:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Friends and associates from the period frequently commented on his seemingly boundless energy, his willingness to throw himself entirely into a new pursuit,
20:54
[SPEAKER_00]: and a personality that combined genuine warmth and charm with an almost stubborn refusal to accept that something couldn't be done, simply because everyone around him said it couldn't be done.
21:05
[SPEAKER_00]: This combination of traits, the charm, the energy, the stubbornness, turned out to be exactly what was required for a project, like the transatlantic cable.
21:16
[SPEAKER_00]: a project that depended less on any single person's technical expertise and more on someone's ability to keep an enormous, complicated, multinational effort moving forward through years of setbacks, financial strain and repeated public failure.
21:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Engineers could design the cable, scientists could calculate the electrical requirements.
21:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Sailors could
21:42
[SPEAKER_00]: But someone needed to hold the entire fragile coalition of investors, governments, and engineers together, year after year, through disaster after disaster, and that someone was Cyrus Field.
21:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It's worth remembering, too.
21:58
[SPEAKER_00]: that field was attempting this, not in isolation, but against the backdrop of an already rapidly expanding telegraph network on land.
22:07
[SPEAKER_00]: By the 1850s, telegraph lines criss-crossed much of the eastern United States and large portions of Europe carrying messages between cities at speeds that would have seemed like pure magic, only a generation earlier.
22:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The American
22:23
[SPEAKER_00]: working alongside his collaborator Alfred Veil, had developed both a workable telegraph system and the now famous code of dots and dashes that allowed complex messages to be transmitted using simple, rapid electrical pulses.
22:39
[SPEAKER_00]: This system had spread quickly, almost explosively, across the American landscape in the 1840s and early 1850s, fundamentally changing how quickly information could move between cities that were connected by wire.
22:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So in a sense, Cyrus Field wasn't proposing something entirely without precedent.
23:01
[SPEAKER_00]: He had watched, like everyone else of his generation, as the telegraph transformed communication across land, shrinking the time it took for news to travel between distant cities from days to mere minutes.
23:14
[SPEAKER_00]: What he was proposing was simply an extension of that same idea, applied to a problem nobody had yet solved, the enormous, churning, mysterious expanse of the open ocean.
23:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The smaller project that originally caught field's attention,
23:29
[SPEAKER_00]: the plan to connect the island of Newfoundland to the rest of North America by underwater cable was itself no small undertaking for its time and it's worth remembering that this initial venture separate from the larger transatlantic dream came with its own set of difficulties, delays, and near disasters before it was eventually completed.
23:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Early attempts to lay this shorter cable encountered storms, equipment failures, and the same fundamental uncertainties about underwater cable durability that would later plague the much larger transatlantic effort.
24:05
[SPEAKER_00]: In some ways, the newfoundland cable served as a smaller, lower stakes rehearsal for the much larger drama that was about to unfold.
24:13
[SPEAKER_00]: A chance for engineers and investors alike to encounter, in miniature,
24:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The kinds of problems that the Atlantic crossing would eventually present on a vastly larger and more dangerous scale.
24:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also worth pausing to appreciate just how genuinely uncertain the entire scientific community was about whether a transatlantic cable could work at all.
24:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Even setting aside the purely mechanical and logistical challenges of manufacturing and laying it.
24:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Beyond the disagreements between William Thompson and Wildman White House that we've already discussed, there was a more fundamental open question hanging over the entire project in its earliest stages.
24:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody had ever sent an electrical signal through a single continuous insulated wire anywhere close to 2,500 miles in length.
25:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The behavior of electrical current over such enormous distances,
25:11
[SPEAKER_00]: or interact with the surrounding seawater over such a length was not fully understood by anyone, including the most credentialed scientists of the era.
25:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Thompson's mathematical work on signal degradation represented some of the first serious theoretical attempts to even predict how such a system might behave and even his calculations remained in important respects.
25:37
[SPEAKER_00]: and the actual results could be measured.
25:40
[SPEAKER_00]: This is worth remembering as we continue through this story, because it means the entire project existed in a strange, uncomfortable space between confident engineering and genuine scientific gambling.
25:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody, not field, not Thompson, not White House, not any of the financiers or government officials who backed the project.
26:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Could say with complete certainty that the fundamental concept would even work.
26:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Regardless of how carefully the cable was manufactured,
26:12
[SPEAKER_00]: or how skillfully the ships managed to lay it.
26:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They were, in the truest sense, venturing into the unknown, in more ways than simply the literal geographic sense of sailing into uncharted ocean waters.
26:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 2, The Floating Coils
26:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's pick up where we left off.
26:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The factories in England are humming along, turning out mile after mile, of iron-wrapped gutter-perature-coated cable.
26:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The plan is set.
26:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The financing, somehow, against all odds, has been secured, with both the British and American governments agreeing to provide ships, subsidies and support.
26:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Cyrus Field has talked his way into the rooms of presidents and queens, and Wildman White House has positioned himself as the chief electrician for the entire venture.
27:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Now comes the part that in some ways is even harder than building the cable in the first place.
27:13
[SPEAKER_00]: They actually have to get it across the ocean, and immediately they run into a problem that nobody had fully anticipated.
27:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Think about that for a second.
27:27
[SPEAKER_00]: We already talked about the weight, roughly one ton of cable for every single mile multiplied across 2,500 miles.
27:35
[SPEAKER_00]: That comes out to a total weight once you add in machinery, coal, crew and supplies that no single vessel of that era was built to handle.
27:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Ships of the 1850s, even the largest warships in the world, were designed to carry cannons, sailors, supplies, coal for their engines.
27:54
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not designed to carry several thousand tons of densely coiled industrial cable stacked into their holds like enormous metal spider webs.
28:04
[SPEAKER_00]: So the engineers came up with a solution.
28:07
[SPEAKER_00]: If no single ship could carry the whole cable, they would split the job between two of the largest warships available.
28:14
[SPEAKER_00]: One British and one American.
28:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Each one carrying roughly half of the total length and meet somewhere in the middle of the ocean to splice the two halves together.
28:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The two ships chosen for this task were the United States ship Nyagra.
28:30
[SPEAKER_00]: often simply called the USS Niagara, and her Majesty's ship Agamemnon, known as the HMS Agamemnon.
28:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Both were among the largest and most powerful warships of their respective navies.
28:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The Niagara was a relatively new American frigate, built only a few years earlier, considered one of the most advanced warships the United States Navy possessed at the time.
28:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The Agamemnon was a British battleship, a veteran of recent conflict, sturdy, well-built and trusted by the Royal Navy.
29:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Neither ship, of course, had been designed with anything like this mission in mind.
29:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Warships are built for speed, for maneuverability, for mounting cannons along their sides, for carrying sailors and gunpowder and shot.
29:17
[SPEAKER_00]: They are, emphatically, not built
29:25
[SPEAKER_00]: shifting the entire balance and centre of gravity of the vessel.
29:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So engineers had to essentially gut portions of each ship's interior, removing gun decks and storage areas, and reinforcing the whole structure to handle a load of cable far beyond what these ships had ever carried before.
29:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The cable itself was coiled into massive circular tanks, built directly into the ship's holes.
29:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Coil after coil after coil of heavy dents wire stacked in giant loops so that it could be paid out slowly and continuously from the back of the ship as it steamed forward.
30:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, try to imagine what it would have been like to actually be a sailor or engineer, aboard one of these vessels during this period.
30:13
[SPEAKER_00]: You are on a ship that no longer feels entirely like a ship.
30:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The lower decks, the places where sailors would normally sleep, eat, store supplies, walk freely from one end of the vessel to the other, and now filled almost entirely.
30:28
[SPEAKER_00]: With a mile after mile of dense, heavy, slightly oily smelling cable, coiled into pits that take up enormous amounts of space, the smell of tar and gutter percher and machine oil fills the lower decks.
30:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The normal rhythm of life aboard a warship, drills, watches, gunnery practice, has been replaced by a strange new rhythm centered entirely around one single fragile two and a half thousand mile long thread of wire.
30:59
[SPEAKER_00]: that the entire mission depends upon.
31:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's the detail that I think deserves real attention.
31:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's the kind of detail that turns this from simply a difficult engineering project into something genuinely unsettling, something that sits with you the way a slow building piece of music does.
31:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The cable, once it left the coast, did not behave gently.
31:21
[SPEAKER_00]: As the ship rolled and pitched in ocean swells, the enormous coiled mass of cable in the holes would shift.
31:28
[SPEAKER_00]: We're talking about thousands of tons of dense, heavy wire, sitting in pits below deck, moving with the motion of the ship.
31:37
[SPEAKER_00]: In calm seas, this shifting was manageable, a slow, controlled settling, as the coils adjusted slightly with each role of the vessel.
31:46
[SPEAKER_00]: But in rough seas, in genuine Atlantic storms, the cable could shift violently, the loops tangling, snagging.
31:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Occasionally, piling up against the sides of their containing pits, with enough force to damage the cable itself, or worse, to threaten the structural stability of the ship.
32:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Picture being a crew member, assigned to watch over these cable pits during a storm.
32:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Picture standing near a massive pit filled with coiled iron and rubber cable, listening to it grown and shift in the darkness as the ship rolls violently from side to side, knowing
32:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The entire mission could be lost in an instant.
32:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And knowing too, that if those coils happen to shift in just the wrong direction, you yourself could be crushed by several tons of cable, suddenly sliding across the deck.
32:38
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the environment these sailors lived in for weeks at a time.
32:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Not constant danger, not constant chaos, but a slow, grinding, ever-present tension.
32:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind that doesn't announce itself loudly,
32:52
[SPEAKER_00]: but instead sits quietly in the background of every single day.
32:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Every single watch, every single attempt to sleep in a bunk a few feet away from thousands of tons of slowly shifting metal coils.
33:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, there was the isolation.
33:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Once these ships left the coastline of Ireland, heading west into the open Atlantic, paying out cable behind them as they went.
33:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They entered a kind of silence that is genuinely difficult for those of us living now.
33:20
[SPEAKER_00]: In a world of satellite phones and instant global communication to fully understand, there was no radio.
33:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Radio communication in any practical sense did not exist yet.
33:33
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no way to call for help.
33:36
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no way to check the weather forecast ahead of time beyond what the crew could observe with their own eyes and instruments.
33:43
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no way to coordinate with anyone outside of visual or signal flag range.
33:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Once you are out there, in the middle of the Atlantic, laying cable, you were, in every meaningful sense, entirely alone.
33:58
[SPEAKER_00]: If a storm rolled in that nobody had predicted, you faced it with whatever skill and luck your crew possessed, with no outside assistance possible.
34:06
[SPEAKER_00]: If the cable snagged on something deep below, you had to make decisions in real time, with no expert back on land to consult, because there was no way to consult anyone.
34:18
[SPEAKER_00]: If the ship itself began taking on water, or suffered serious mechanical failure, far from the coast, in the middle of an ocean that, at the time, very few ships travelled along this particular path.
34:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Rescue was at best a distant hope and at worst simply not coming this isolation wasn't a side effect of the mission.
34:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It was in many ways the central defining feature of the entire experience for the men involved.
34:49
[SPEAKER_00]: They were sailing not just across an ocean, but into a kind of communication void, a gap in human awareness.
34:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Ironically, attempting to close that exact gap for everyone else, while experiencing themselves, the most extreme version of that same isolation imaginable.
35:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So how, in the middle of all this, the constant low-grade fear of the shifting coils, the total isolation of the open ocean, the uncertainty of an unmapped sea floor below them, did the crew actually know whether their mission was succeeding?
35:23
[SPEAKER_00]: How did they know, hour by hour, that the cable behind them was still intact, still carrying a usable electrical signal, still doing the one job it existed to do.
35:33
[SPEAKER_00]: This brings us to one of the most quietly fascinating pieces of technology in this entire story, a device called the Mirror Galvanometer.
35:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the basic problem the engineer's faced was this, by the time an electrical signal travelled across 2,500 miles of underwater cable, it would arrive incredibly weak, far too faint to move a normal needle or register on any standard electrical instrument of the era.
36:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The cable itself, despite the careful insulation, would leak tiny amounts of electrical charge along its length.
36:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And the sheer distance the signal had to travel, caused it to fade dramatically by the time it reached the other end.
36:16
[SPEAKER_00]: If you tried to read this week, faded signal with ordinary equipment, you would see nothing.
36:22
[SPEAKER_00]: No movement.
36:24
[SPEAKER_00]: No indication that anything was happening at all.
36:32
[SPEAKER_00]: William Thompson, who would later become Lord Kelvin, Thompson designed an extraordinarily sensitive instrument that could detect even the faintest possible electrical signal.
36:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Far weaker than anything a normal galvanometer, the standard instrument for measuring electrical current could ever hope to register.
36:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's how it worked.
36:52
[SPEAKER_00]: and I want to walk through this slowly, because the elegance of the design is worth appreciating, even in a story full of brute force iron cables and storm-tost warships.
37:04
[SPEAKER_00]: A normal galvanometer uses a magnetic needle, similar to a compass needle that gets deflected, moved by the magnetic field generated by an electrical current passing through a nearby coil of wire.
37:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The stronger the current, the more the needle moves.
37:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is that with an extremely weak signal, the needle simply doesn't have enough force to move in any visible, readable way.
37:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Thompson's solution was to replace the heavy metal needle with an incredibly small, light weight mirror, just a tiny sliver of reflective glass, suspended on an extremely fine thread.
37:42
[SPEAKER_00]: with a tiny magnet attached to its back, because the mirror itself was so light, so close to weightless.
37:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Even the faintest possible electrical signal, the tiniest whisper of current arriving after traveling 2,500 miles through the ocean, was enough to cause the tiny mirror to rotate.
38:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Just slightly, now, a slight rotation in a tiny mirror is still hard to see with the naked eye.
38:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So Thompson added one more clever piece.
38:11
[SPEAKER_00]: He shone a focused beam of light onto the mirror and allowed that beam to reflect off the mirror's surface onto a scale or screen some distance away.
38:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the beam of light had to travel a relatively long distance after bouncing off the mirror.
38:26
[SPEAKER_00]: even a tiny rotation of the mirror itself would cause the reflected beam of light to swing a much larger, much more visible distance across the receiving screen.
38:36
[SPEAKER_00]: In effect, the apparatus turned a microscopic mechanical movement into a large, easily readable swing of light.
38:44
[SPEAKER_00]: This is, when you stop and think about it, a beautifully simple and elegant solution to an enormously
38:54
[SPEAKER_00]: and it's the kind of invention that quietly enabled an entire era of long-distance communication that otherwise would have been impossible.
39:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So picture this now.
39:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere in the depths of one of these ships, in a small dimly lit cabin, an operator sits hunched over the receiving end of this device, watching a tiny beam of light dance back and forth across a small scale.
39:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Every few minutes, a signal is sent.
39:21
[SPEAKER_00]: A deliberate agreed upon pulse of electricity sent purely to confirm that the cable is still intact, still carrying current, still functioning as it should.
39:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The operator watches for the telltale flicker, the small swing of light, that means somewhere across hundreds or thousands of miles of dark, freezing ocean water.
39:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The cable is still there, still whole, still doing its job.
39:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Tick, the light swings, the cable is alive.
39:52
[SPEAKER_00]: A few minutes past, tick, the light swings again.
39:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The cable is still alive.
40:00
[SPEAKER_00]: This rhythmic, repetitive, almost meditative process became the literal heartbeat of the entire expedition.
40:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The crew didn't just hope the cable was intact.
40:11
[SPEAKER_00]: They watched for it continuously, methodically, the way you might watch a heart monitor in a hospital room, waiting with each beep for confirmation that everything is still okay and dreading.
40:23
[SPEAKER_00]: With every passing second of silence,
40:27
[SPEAKER_00]: that the next beep simply won't come, because if it doesn't come, if that tiny beam of light stops swinging and simply goes still, there is no second chance.
40:39
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no way to dive down and check what happened.
40:43
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no way to repair a break, thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean, with 19th-century technology in the middle of the Atlantic.
40:53
[SPEAKER_00]: A break means the cable, all of it, every single mile laid so far, all of the money, all of the years of preparation, all of the manufacturing, all of the planning is simply gone, lost, swallowed by an ocean that nobody has ever fully mapped and likely never to be recovered.
41:10
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the tension
41:12
[SPEAKER_00]: that defines the next part of our story.
41:15
[SPEAKER_00]: A crew isolated, alone, thousands of miles from help, staring at a tiny beam of light, hoping with every passing minute that it keeps swinging.
41:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the moment it stops, everything stops with it.
41:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we're about to see in the 1850s, that beam of light stopped far more often than anyone wanted it to.
41:40
[SPEAKER_00]: chapter 3, the snapping point.
41:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's slow down even further here, because this next stretch of the story is the heart of everything.
41:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The part where ambition meets the roar in different power of the ocean, again and again, with painful results.
41:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The first real attempt to lay the transatlantic cable
42:06
[SPEAKER_00]: By this point, years of planning, fundraising and manufacturing had gone into the project.
42:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The cable had been built, the ships had been modified, the crews had been assembled.
42:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone involved understood that this was the moment, the culmination of everything that had come before.
42:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The original plan for this first attempt was relatively straightforward, at least on paper.
42:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Rather than starting in the middle of the ocean and working outward in two directions, the team decided to begin on the coast of Ireland, load the entire cable onto a single ship, the U, S, S, Niagara, and simply steam continuously westward, paying out cable behind them the entire way.
42:49
[SPEAKER_00]: until they reached the coast of Newfoundland on the other side.
42:53
[SPEAKER_00]: One continuous line laid from one fixed starting point, stretching all the way across.
43:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The Niagara set out from the coast of Ireland, near a remote, wind swept bay, with enormous fanfare.
43:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Crowds gathered to watch, speeches were given.
43:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone understood they were witnessing the beginning of something historic.
43:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The cable began paying out smoothly from the ship's stern, sinking down into the water behind it, as the Niagara moved steadily westward.
43:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The mirror galvanometer aboard ticking away reliably, confirming every few minutes that the cable remained intact.
43:30
[SPEAKER_00]: For a while, it actually worked.
43:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Mile after Mile of Cable unspooled from the ship's holes and disappeared into the dark water behind them, sinking down toward a sea floor nobody had ever truly seen.
43:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The crew settled into the strange new rhythm of the voyage, watching the cable payout, listening for the telltale signals confirming everything remained connected.
43:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, a few hundred miles out from the Irish coast, disaster struck.
43:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The cable was paid out from the ship using a large mechanical braking system.
44:02
[SPEAKER_00]: A device designed to control the speed and tension of the cable as it unspalled.
44:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Preventing it from running out too quickly and snapping under its own weight, while also preventing it from running out too slowly and creating dangerous slack that could tangle.
44:17
[SPEAKER_00]: This braking machinery needed to be operated with enormous care and precision, constantly adjusted to match the ship's speed, the depth of water beneath them, and the natural tension created by gravity, pulling the cable down toward the ocean floor.
44:35
[SPEAKER_00]: At some point during this first attempt, the braking machinery jammed.
44:39
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't need to dwell too long on the precise mechanical details of why it jammed, whether it was an equipment malfunction, an operator error, or simply an unforeseen floor in the design.
44:50
[SPEAKER_00]: because in the end the Y mattered far less than the result.
44:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The break locked up at the exact moment the cable needed slack and the sudden sharp tension that built up in that instant was more than the cable could physically withstand.
45:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It snapped just like that after everything after years of planning after the careful manufacturing of thousands of tons of cable after the fanfare
45:20
[SPEAKER_00]: and the steady ticking confirmation of the mirror galvanometer, the line simply broke and the loose end, hundreds of miles of cable still attached to it, vanished downward into the black water.
45:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Sinking toward a sea floor that nobody could see, nobody could reach, and nobody could ever hope to recover it from with the technology available at the time.
45:42
[SPEAKER_00]: There is something almost unbearably quiet about a failure like this.
45:46
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no explosion, no dramatic crash.
45:49
[SPEAKER_00]: No single moment of chaos that the crew could point to afterward and say, there, that's when everything went wrong.
45:58
[SPEAKER_00]: There was simply a snap, a sudden release of tension, and then nothing, the cable was gone.
46:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds of miles of it swallowed instantly and silently by an ocean that didn't care how much money, time, or hope had been poured into the thing it had just casually destroyed.
46:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The Niagara had no choice but to turn around and sail home.
46:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The expedition had failed.
46:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The first attempt to cross the Atlantic with a telegraph cable ended not with some dramatic fiery catastrophe, but with a single mechanical failure, a single snapped line.
46:39
[SPEAKER_00]: and a long, defeated journey back to shore.
46:43
[SPEAKER_00]: You might expect, after a failure like this, that the project would simply end.
46:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The investors had poured enormous sums of money into manufacturing the cable and outfitting the ships, and a significant portion of that cable was now permanently lost at the bottom of the ocean.
47:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Public confidence, which had been sky-high during the celebratory departure, took a serious hit,
47:06
[SPEAKER_00]: There were murmurs, understandably, that perhaps the entire idea had simply been two ambitious, too far beyond the actual capabilities of 19th-century technology, but Cyrus Field
47:19
[SPEAKER_00]: True to the character we described back in our first chapter, refused to give up.
47:24
[SPEAKER_00]: He went back to his investors.
47:26
[SPEAKER_00]: He went back to the governments who had supported the project.
47:29
[SPEAKER_00]: He argued successfully that the failure had been a mechanical problem, a solvable problem.
47:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Rather than evidence that the entire concept was fundamentally impossible.
47:41
[SPEAKER_00]: New cable was manufactured to replace what had been lost.
47:45
[SPEAKER_00]: New plans were drawn up.
47:47
[SPEAKER_00]: and in the summer of the following year 1858, the team tried again.
47:52
[SPEAKER_00]: This time though, they changed their strategy in a fundamental way, and the new approach while solving some of the problems from the first attempt, introduced an entirely new set of terrifying risks, instead of starting from one coast and laying cable continuously all the way to the other side.
48:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The team decided to split the remaining cable between the two ships, the Nyagra and the Agamemnon, sail both ships to the exact midpoint of the Atlantic Ocean, splice the two halves of cable together in the open sea, and then have each ship steam in opposite directions away from each other, paying out cable behind them as they went.
48:33
[SPEAKER_00]: with the Niagara heading toward Newfoundland and the Agamemnon heading back toward Ireland.
48:38
[SPEAKER_00]: On paper, this approach made sense.
48:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It distributed the weight and risk between two ships, instead of relying on a single vessel to carry the entire load.
48:50
[SPEAKER_00]: But think for a moment.
48:51
[SPEAKER_00]: about what this actually meant in practice.
48:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It meant sailing to, massive, heavily loaded warships out to the literal middle of the Atlantic Ocean, as far from any coastline, any port, any possible assistance, as it was physically possible to be, and performing one of the most delicate and critical operations of the entire mission.
49:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Splicing together two ends of cable with precision and care, while floating on open water fully exposed to whatever weather the Atlantic happened to be producing at that particular moment.
49:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Atlantic, as it turned out, was not in a forgiving mood.
49:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The ships reached their rendezvous point in the middle of the ocean and began the delicate work of splicing the cable ends together.
49:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost immediately, the weather turned violent.
49:40
[SPEAKER_00]: a massive storm rolled in, the kind of storm that the open Atlantic produces with terrifying regularity, far from any sheltering coastline, with waves capable of tossing even large warships around like toys.
49:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The Agamemnon, in particular, suffered enormously during this storm.
49:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Contemporary accounts describe the ship rolling so violently in the heavy swells that it came dangerously close to capsizing entirely.
50:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It's masks dipping toward the water at sickening angles before the ship would slowly agonizingly write itself, only to roll again moments later in the opposite direction.
50:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Inside the ship,
50:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The massive coiled tanks of cable, the same coils we described earlier as a quiet, ever present source of tension, even in calm seas, began to break loose under the violent motion of the storm.
50:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine being below deck during this, imagine the sound alone, the groaning of a wooden hulled ship under enormous stress, the crashing of waves against the hull, the screaming of wind through the rigging above, and underneath all of that,
50:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The deep, heavy, grinding sound of thousands of tons of iron cable, shifting and tumbling inside the ship's holes, breaking free from their carefully arranged coils, sliding across the deck with each violent role of the vessel, sailors who had been assigned to monitor and manage these cable pits.
51:10
[SPEAKER_00]: found themselves facing not just the ordinary terror of a violent ocean storm, but the very real immediate danger of being crushed by loose, shifting coils of cable weighing potentially tons, moving unpredictably with every pitch and roll of the ship.
51:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Several crew members were injured during this storm.
51:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The danger was not theoretical.
51:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It was immediate, physical and terrifying.
51:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Playing out in the dark, cramped, oil and tar-centred holds of a ship, being thrown around by some of the worst weather the Atlantic Ocean could produce.
51:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And through all of this, remember there was no way to call for help.
51:51
[SPEAKER_00]: No way to radio another ship, no way to alert anyone on shore, no way to do anything except endure the storm, manage the chaos as best as humanly possible, and hope that both the ship and the cables survived long enough to continue the mission.
52:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually,
52:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The storm passed, as storms do, and the crews exhausted, battered, but still alive, resumed their work.
52:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The splice was completed.
52:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The two ships began steaming away from each other, paying out cables as they went.
52:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The Niagara heading west toward Newfoundland, the Agamemnon heading east toward Ireland.
52:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Each ship now utterly dependent on the cable trailing behind it,
52:34
[SPEAKER_00]: But the troubles were far from over, over the following days, the cables snapped again, and then again.
52:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Each time the process had to restart.
52:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The ships had to return to roughly the same area.
52:48
[SPEAKER_00]: retrieve what cable they could, splice new connections, and try once more.
52:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Each failure costing precious time, materials, and morale.
52:58
[SPEAKER_00]: By most historical accounts, the cable broke, and had to be respliced, or restarted multiple separate times during this 1858 expedition.
53:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Each failure landing like a physical blow to a crew already exhausted from the storm.
53:14
[SPEAKER_00]: already running on afraid nerves and insufficient sleep.
53:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where I want you to really sit with the psychological dimension of what these men were experiencing.
53:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think it's easy looking back from our modern vantage point to focus purely on the mechanical and historical details.
53:32
[SPEAKER_00]: the snapped cables, the storms, the technical specifications, while losing sight of the simple human reality of what it actually felt like to live through this.
53:44
[SPEAKER_00]: These were men confined to a relatively small wooden ship in the middle of an empty ocean.
53:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Thousands of miles from any port, with no way to communicate with the outside world, watching their entire mission fail, repeatedly, in slow, grinding, demoralizing fashion.
54:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Sleep deprivation became a serious problem.
54:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The operator's monitoring the mirror galvanometer, the small flickering beam of light that told them whether the cable remained intact, found themselves staring at that tiny point of light for hours at a stretch.
54:18
[SPEAKER_00]: In dark, cramped cabins below deck.
54:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Watching for the smallest flicker of movement, the smallest confirmation that the entire mission hadn't already failed yet again.
54:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Picture this scene slowly, the way you might picture a single still frame from a film.
54:35
[SPEAKER_00]: A small, dim cabin lit only by a low lamp.
54:39
[SPEAKER_00]: A man sitting hunched over a delicate instrument.
54:42
[SPEAKER_00]: His eyes fixed on a tiny beam of reflected light, dancing across a small
54:48
[SPEAKER_00]: outside the ship creeks and rolls gently with the swell.
54:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere below thousands of tons of cable sit coiled in the dark.
54:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The man has been watching this small point of light for hours, has barely slept in days and exists in this moment entirely within the narrow, exhausting tunnel of his singular task, waiting, hoping, dreading for the tiniest flicker that will tell him whether his entire mission, the years of effort behind it still has a heartbeat.
55:20
[SPEAKER_00]: This kind of sustained, low-grade psychological pressure combined with genuine physical danger and near total isolation from the outside world takes a toll that is difficult to fully convey through historical records alone but accounts from the period do describe crews showing visible signs of exhaustion, irritability and strain as the 1858 expedition dragged on failure after failure
55:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Storm after storm.
55:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Each new attempt requiring the same exhausted men to summon.
55:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Once again, the patients and precision needed to splice cable, monitor signals, and pray that this time, finally, the connection would hold.
56:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It's worth pausing here to consider the broader emotional arc that the people involved in this project were experiencing on land, as well as at sea, back in London and New York, investors and government officials waited anxiously for any word of the Expeditions Progress, knowing that.
56:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Once the ships had departed, there would be no way to receive any updates until they either succeeded or returned, defeated to a port somewhere.
56:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic had covered the launch of the 1858 expedition with considerable fanfare, and the public having already absorbed the disappointment of the 1857 failure was watching closely, eager for good news,
56:53
[SPEAKER_00]: but increasingly braced for the possibility of another setback.
56:57
[SPEAKER_00]: This created an unusual kind of double isolation.
57:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The crews at sea were isolated from any outside information or assistance.
57:06
[SPEAKER_00]: while the public on land was equally isolated from any real-time knowledge of what was actually happening out in the middle of the ocean.
57:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Both groups were left to wait, separated by thousands of miles of water and an information gap that would not close until the ships either completed their mission or limped back to shore with news of failure.
57:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Contemporary accounts from crew members aboard the Agamemnon, during the worst of the 1858 storm, described scenes that even filtered through the somewhat formal, restrained language typical of 19th century writing, conveyor vivid sense of genuine terror.
57:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Waves were described as breaking clean over the deck, sending torrents of seawater pouring down into the lower decks where the cable was stored.
57:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The ship's chief engineer reportedly worried at the height of the storm that the vessel's structural integrity itself was at risk given the unusual stress placed on the hull by the enormous shifting weight of the cable combined with the violent motion of the waves.
58:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Officers aboard the ship made the difficult decision at certain points during the worst of the storm.
58:20
[SPEAKER_00]: to have crew members physically restrained the cable coils using ropes and improvised bracing and attempt to prevent the coils from shifting further and causing additional damage or injury.
58:31
[SPEAKER_00]: This meant sailors already exhausted, already frightened by the violence of the storm itself, were tasked with the additional, genuinely dangerous job of working directly alongside thousands of tons of shifting iron cable in the dark, in a violently rolling ship,
58:50
[SPEAKER_00]: trying to physically hold in place something that outweighed any reasonable human capacity to control through sheer physical strength alone.
58:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the kind of detail that, when you sit with it slowly, reveals just how much raw, unglamorous physical courage this entire project actually required.
59:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Not just from the famous names like Cyrus Field and William Thompson, but from dozens, even hundreds, of ordinary sailors and engineers whose names rarely appear in the history books, but who nonetheless spent days at a time fighting against a storm, against shifting cable, against their own exhaustion, simply to give this fragile, ambitious project a chance at survival.
59:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And then almost unbelievably, after all of that, after the storms, the near-cap sizing, the repeated snapped cables, the sleep-deprived crews staring at flickering lights and dark cabins, something changed.
59:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The cable held.
59:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4.
59:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The short-lived triumph.
59:59
[SPEAKER_00]: After everything, after the snapped lines, the violent storms, the near-capsizing of the Agamemnon, the sleepless nights spent watching a tiny beam of light for any sign of life.
1:00:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The two ships finally managed to complete their journeys.
1:00:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The Niagara reached the coast of Newfoundland.
1:00:18
[SPEAKER_00]: and the Agamemnon reached the coast of Ireland.
1:00:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Each one trailing its half of the cable behind it and against every reasonable expectation built up over the course of two grueling, failure-filled summers, the connection held.
1:00:33
[SPEAKER_00]: This happened in early August of 1858.
1:00:36
[SPEAKER_00]: For the first time in human history, a continuous electrical connection.
1:00:41
[SPEAKER_00]: existed between Europe and North America.
1:00:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Running along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, two and a half thousand miles of iron wrapped, good aperture insulated cable.
1:00:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, after everything, doing the one job it had been built to do.
1:00:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The reaction, once word spread, was nothing short of explosive.
1:01:02
[SPEAKER_00]: To understand just how significant this moment felt to people living through it.
1:01:06
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to remember the baseline we described all the way back in our first chapter.
1:01:11
[SPEAKER_00]: For all of human history up to this point, sending a message across the Atlantic Ocean had required a ship and a ship required at minimum, 10 days, often closer to two weeks, sometimes longer if the weather was poor.
1:01:26
[SPEAKER_00]: This had simply been and accepted unquestioned fact of life for every single person who had ever lived.
1:01:33
[SPEAKER_00]: If you wanted to know what was happening across the ocean, you waited.
1:01:37
[SPEAKER_00]: You waited for weeks, and there was nothing to be done about it, because that was simply how the world worked.
1:01:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And now, suddenly, that fact was no longer true.
1:01:47
[SPEAKER_00]: A message could travel from Europe to North America, not in weeks, not in days, but in minutes, or even less.
1:01:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The world had, in a very real tangible sense, just become dramatically smaller, almost overnight.
1:02:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The first official message sent across the completed cable came from Queen Victoria of England, addressed to President James Buchanan of the United States.
1:02:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The message itself was relatively brief by modern standards, but ran to roughly 98 words.
1:02:18
[SPEAKER_00]: A formal diplomatic greeting,
1:02:22
[SPEAKER_00]: that the new connection between the two nations would serve as an instrument for promoting peace and friendly relations between their respective countries.
1:02:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Now here's a detail that I think is worth sitting with for a moment.
1:02:35
[SPEAKER_00]: because it illustrates just how far the technology still had to go, even in this moment of triumph.
1:02:42
[SPEAKER_00]: That 98-word message took approximately 16 hours to transmit successfully across the cable.
1:02:49
[SPEAKER_00]: 16 hours for fewer than 100 words.
1:02:53
[SPEAKER_00]: By any modern standard, this would feel agonizingly, comically slow.
1:02:59
[SPEAKER_00]: If you sent a text message today and waited 16 hours for it to arrive, you would assume something had gone catastrophically wrong.
1:03:07
[SPEAKER_00]: But in 1858, compared to the previous standard of 10 to 14 days by ship, 16 hours felt like an absolute miracle.
1:03:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It felt to the people experiencing it.
1:03:19
[SPEAKER_00]: like watching the laws of physics themselves, bend in service of human ambition.
1:03:25
[SPEAKER_00]: A message that would have taken nearly two weeks by the fastest available method now took less than a single day.
1:03:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The scale of that improvement, even with the slowness we would find frustrating today, was almost impossible for people of that era to fully process.
1:03:42
[SPEAKER_00]: When word of the successful connection and the Queen's message,
1:03:45
[SPEAKER_00]: reached the public on both sides of the Atlantic.
1:03:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The celebrations that followed were enormous, and in some cases, genuinely chaotic.
1:03:54
[SPEAKER_00]: In New York City, accounts describe massive street celebrations breaking out almost spontaneously.
1:04:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Church bells rang across the city, cannons were fired in celebration.
1:04:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Fireworks lit up the night sky, crowds gathered in the streets, and Cyrus Field, the paper merchant turned ocean cable visionary, found himself transformed almost overnight into one of the most celebrated men in the entire country, a figure of near mythical status.
1:04:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The man who had connected two continents and shrunk the entire world in the process.
1:04:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a particularly memorable, if slightly chaotic detail from the celebrations in New York.
1:04:34
[SPEAKER_00]: During one of the celebratory events, fireworks set off in honor of the achievement reportedly caused a fire at City Hall.
1:04:43
[SPEAKER_00]: a small, almost comedic footnote to an otherwise triumphant moment.
1:04:48
[SPEAKER_00]: A reminder that even history's greatest celebrations can occasionally get a little out of hand.
1:04:54
[SPEAKER_00]: For a brief, shining period in the late summer of 1858, it seemed as though the impossible had truly been achieved.
1:05:02
[SPEAKER_00]: the Atlantic had been conquered.
1:05:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The old world and the new world were connected, instantly, permanently, and the future suddenly seemed to stretch out ahead.
1:05:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Full of promise, full of possibility, full of a kind of optimism that is genuinely difficult to fully recapture from our modern vantage point.
1:05:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Simply because we have never lived in a world where this kind of connection didn't already exist.
1:05:31
[SPEAKER_00]: almost invisibly to the cheering crowds in the streets.
1:05:35
[SPEAKER_00]: A serious problem was already beginning to take shape, and it traced directly back to one of the two central figures we introduced all the way back in our very first chapter.
1:05:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Wildman White House.
1:05:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember White House had developed his own theories about how best to send electrical signals through long lengths of underwater cable.
1:05:57
[SPEAKER_00]: theories that directly contradicted the careful, mathematically grounded approach favored by William Thompson, the physicist who had designed the elegant, ultra-sensitive mirror galvanometer that the crews had relied upon throughout the entire voyage.
1:06:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Thompson believed in gentle, low-voltage signals sent carefully, read by extremely sensitive instruments.
1:06:22
[SPEAKER_00]: White House believed in brute force, in pushing larger amounts of electrical power through the cable to force the signal through faster and stronger.
1:06:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Once the cable was successfully laid and operational, control over the actual day-to-day operation of the Transatlantic Connection fell largely to White House in his role as the project's chief electrician.
1:06:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And almost immediately, White House grew frustrated.
1:06:51
[SPEAKER_00]: even though it was functioning was transmitting signals slowly, far slower than the public's excited imagination had perhaps anticipated.
1:07:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember that 98-word message, taking 16 hours.
1:07:05
[SPEAKER_00]: White house, confident in his own theories, convinced that the slowness was a solvable engineering problem, rather than an inherent physical limitation of the cable itself.
1:07:15
[SPEAKER_00]: decided to take matters into his own hands.
1:07:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Rather than using the gentle low voltage approach favoured by Thompson, White House began applying his own equipment.
1:07:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Massive induction coils capable of generating extremely high voltage electrical pulses.
1:07:33
[SPEAKER_00]: in an attempt to force stronger, faster signals through the cable.
1:07:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Estimates from historical accounts suggest the voltage levels White House applied reached as high as 2,000 volts, an extraordinary, almost violent amount of electrical force.
1:07:49
[SPEAKER_00]: to apply to a delicate cable that had been designed, insulated, and tested for nothing remotely close to that level of power.
1:07:59
[SPEAKER_00]: To understand why this was such a catastrophic decision, you have to remember what the cable was actually made of, a thin core of copper wire, wrapped in layers of gutter percher insulation,
1:08:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The natural tree-derived rubber substance we discussed back in chapter 1 designed to keep electrical current safely contained within the wire and prevent it from leaking out into the surrounding sea water.
1:08:24
[SPEAKER_00]: This insulation had been carefully engineered to handle the relatively gentle electrical signals that the original design called for.
1:08:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It had never been intended to withstand sustained exposure to voltage levels in the thousands.
1:08:40
[SPEAKER_00]: applied repeatedly, aggressively, in White House's attempts to force faster transmission speeds.
1:08:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The result, slowly, quietly, invisibly, thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean, was that the insulation began to break down.
1:08:57
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the part of our story that I think carries the deepest sense of tragedy.
1:09:03
[SPEAKER_00]: because the destruction happened so gradually, so invisibly, that almost nobody involved fully understood what was happening until it was far too late to stop it.
1:09:15
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no dramatic snap, no sudden visible failure like the one that had doomed the first 1857 expedition.
1:09:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, there was a slow creeping degradation.
1:09:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The insulation breaking down bit by bit under the relentless stress of voltage far beyond anything it had been designed to handle.
1:09:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Allowing tiny amounts of electrical current to begin leaking out into the surrounding seawater, weakening the signal, distorting the connection, eroding day by day, the very thing that made the cable useful in the first place.
1:09:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the course of approximately three weeks following the initial celebrated connection, the cable's performance steadily, agonizingly declined.
1:09:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The signals being transmitted across the Atlantic grew weaker.
1:10:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Messages that had once taken hours to transmit began taking longer, communications grew garbled, harder to reach.
1:10:11
[SPEAKER_00]: the careful clicks and flickers of the receiving instruments becoming less distinct, less reliable day by day.
1:10:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And then slowly the signal began to fade entirely.
1:10:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Picture the operators on either end of this connection during these final weeks.
1:10:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Watching their instruments with the same intense focus we described during the laying of the cable itself.
1:10:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Except now, instead of watching for confirmation that everything was working, they were watching with a growing, sinking dread as the signal grew weaker and weaker.
1:10:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The once reliable ticks and flickers becoming fainter, less frequent, more difficult to distinguish
1:10:53
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a particular kind of heartbreak in watching something fail, slowly, in real time.
1:10:59
[SPEAKER_00]: When you understand, even as it's happening, that you are witnessing the death of something extraordinary, and that there is nothing you can do to stop it.
1:11:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The cruise and operators monitoring the cable during these final weeks experienced exactly this.
1:11:14
[SPEAKER_00]: They watched helplessly
1:11:16
[SPEAKER_00]: as the connection that had inspired fireworks and church bells and city-wide celebrations just weeks earlier, slowly, quietly faded into silence.
1:11:27
[SPEAKER_00]: By early September of 1858, the transatlantic cable had effectively stopped working entirely.
1:11:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The signal had degraded so badly that meaningful communication was no longer possible.
1:11:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The ocean had not snapped the cable this time, the way it had in 1857.
1:11:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, the cable had simply, slowly been poisoned from within.
1:11:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Its insulation destroyed by voltage levels, it was never designed to handle.
1:11:57
[SPEAKER_00]: applied by a man who believed with absolute confidence that brute force could overcome a problem that careful, gentle engineering had actually already solved correctly.
1:12:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The public reaction to this failure was, in many ways, even harder to bear than the technical failure itself.
1:12:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Word had spread so widely and so triumphantly about the successful connection.
1:12:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The fireworks, the celebratory messages, the apparent conquest of the Atlantic Ocean, that when the connection subsequently failed just weeks later, a wave of public skepticism, and even outright disbelief followed, some members of the public
1:12:38
[SPEAKER_00]: began to suspect that the entire project had been some kind of elaborate hoax or fraud from the very beginning.
1:12:45
[SPEAKER_00]: That perhaps the cable had never truly worked at all, and the celebrated messages had been fabricated or exaggerated for the benefit of investors and promoters.
1:12:56
[SPEAKER_00]: This suspicion was of course deeply unfair to the genuine engineering achievement
1:13:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Queen Victoria's message genuinely had traveled across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to President Buchanan, a feat that no human being in history had ever previously accomplished.
1:13:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But the slow, quiet nature of the failure, the lack of any single dramatic moment that the public could point to and clearly understand left room for doubt.
1:13:30
[SPEAKER_00]: confusion and a creeping cynicism that would linger for years afterward, casting a long shadow over what had genuinely been one of the great engineering achievements of the era.
1:13:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It's worth lingering for a moment on just how widely this celebration spread, because it wasn't confined to a single city or a single country.
1:13:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers across the United States and Britain ran extensive coverage of the successful connection, often devoting entire front pages to the achievement, printing detailed accounts of the cable's construction, the voyages of the Niagara and Agamemnon, and the text of Queen Victoria's message in full.
1:14:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Editorial writers of the era reached for grand, almost cosmic language to describe what had happened, suggesting that the connection represented nothing less than a fundamental shift in the relationship between two continents that had, for the entirety of human history, up to that point, been separated by an unbridgeable, weeks long gap in communication.
1:14:34
[SPEAKER_00]: In Britain, celebrations were somewhat more restrained in tone,
1:14:39
[SPEAKER_00]: compared to the exuberant street parties in New York, reflecting perhaps.
1:14:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Certain cultural differences in how each country tended to express public enthusiasm, but the sense of genuine astonishment and pride was, by all accounts, just as strong, British newspapers emphasised the cooperative nature of the achievement, the partnership between American ambition and British engineering,
1:15:05
[SPEAKER_00]: and naval support, framing the cable as a triumph, not just of one nation, but of a shared Anglo-American effort to conquer the natural barrier of the ocean itself.
1:15:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Businesses on both sides of the Atlantic began almost immediately imagining the practical implications of this new connection.
1:15:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Merchants who dealt in international trade speculated about how quickly market information might now travel.
1:15:32
[SPEAKER_00]: potentially transforming how goods were bought, sold, and priced across the ocean.
1:15:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Newspaper publishers imagined a future where foreign news could be reported within the same day it occurred, rather than weeks later.
1:15:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Fundamentally changing the nature of international journalism.
1:15:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Governments began considering how diplomatic relations themselves might shift.
1:15:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Now that messages between capital cities could, in theory, be exchanged in the same day, rather than over the course of a month-long round trip by ship.
1:16:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, as we already know, this wave of optimistic speculation was built upon a foundation that would soon prove far less stable than anyone celebrating in the streets could have imagined.
1:16:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The same newspapers that had run breathless, celebratory front-page coverage of the successful connection in early August, would, just weeks later, find themselves reporting on its quiet, confusing collapse, a whiplash that left both the press and the public uncertain about what to believe, and deeply embarrassed about how enthusiastically they had celebrated something that had
1:16:45
[SPEAKER_00]: frustratingly temporary.
1:16:47
[SPEAKER_00]: For Cyrus Field, the man whose relentless optimism and sheer force of personality had driven this project forward through years of setbacks.
1:16:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The failure of the 1858 cable was a devastating blow, both professionally and personally.
1:17:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The man who had been celebrated as a near mythical hero just weeks earlier, now found himself facing public doubt, skepticism.
1:17:12
[SPEAKER_00]: and the practical reality that the enormous financial and physical effort poured into the project had produced a connection that worked for only a few short weeks before fading into silence.
1:17:25
[SPEAKER_00]: But as we'll see in our final chapter, this would not be the end of the story, not even close.
1:17:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5, the legacy of the Abyss.
1:17:38
[SPEAKER_00]: After the failure of 1858, the dream of a working transatlantic telegraph cable entered a long, quiet period of dormancy.
1:17:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The public's enthusiasm had curdled into skepticism.
1:17:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Investors who had poured enormous sums of money into the project were understandably reluctant to commit further funds toward another attempt, especially given the painful, very public collapse of the previous effort.
1:18:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And to make matters even more complicated.
1:18:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The 1860s brought with them an enormous, all-consuming distraction in the form of the American Civil War, a conflict that absorbed the attention, resources, and energy of the United States for years, leaving little room for ambitious, expensive, and recently humiliated transatlantic cable projects.
1:18:28
[SPEAKER_00]: But Cyrus Field, true to the character we followed throughout this entire story,
1:18:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Through the 1860s, even as the war raged in America and skepticism lingered in the public imagination, field continued working quietly behind the scenes, gathering investors, commissioning detailed reviews of exactly what had gone wrong in the previous attempts.
1:18:53
[SPEAKER_00]: and slowly, patiently rebuilding the case for trying again.
1:18:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And this time, the approach was fundamentally different, shaped directly by the painful lessons learned from the failures of 1857 and 1858.
1:19:08
[SPEAKER_00]: First, and perhaps most importantly, the role of Wildman White House in the project's electrical engineering had ended.
1:19:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Following the public collapse of the 1858 cable,
1:19:20
[SPEAKER_00]: and the growing recognition among scientists and engineers that his aggressive, high-voltage approach, had directly contributed to the destruction of the insulation.
1:19:29
[SPEAKER_00]: White House's influence over future transatlantic cable efforts diminished considerably.
1:19:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The careful, mathematically grounded approach championed by William Thompson, the same man who had designed the elegant mirror galvanometer,
1:19:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Gentle, low-voltage signals sent with patience and precision, monitored by ultra-sensitive instruments, rather than brute force attempts to push more power through a cable than it could safely handle.
1:19:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Second, the cable itself was redesigned, incorporating improvements in manufacturing quality, insulation thickness, and overall durability, based directly on careful analysis of what had gone wrong with the earlier cables.
1:20:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Engineers and scientists had spent years studying the failures, understanding exactly how insulation degraded under stress, exactly how much voltage, a cable of a given design, could safely tolerate, and exactly what manufacturing standards needed to be met, to ensure a more reliable, longer-lasting connection, and third, perhaps most dramatically,
1:20:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The entire logistical approach to actually laying the cable changed, thanks to the availability of a genuinely extraordinary vessel that simply hadn't existed during the earlier attempts.
1:20:51
[SPEAKER_00]: A ship called the Great Eastern, the Great Eastern, was by the standards of its era, almost unbelievably large.
1:21:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It had originally been built years earlier as a passenger and cargo vessel, intended for long distance voyages to destinations like India and Australia, and at the time of its construction, it was, by a significant margin, the largest ship ever built by human hands.
1:21:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It's sheer scale dwarfed every other vessel in operation, including the Niagara and Agamemnon
1:21:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The two warships that had struggled and strained to carry even half of the original 1858 cable between them.
1:21:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The Great Eastern, as a commercial passenger vessel, had actually struggled financially in its original intended role, proving too large and too expensive to operate profitably on standard passenger and cargo routes.
1:21:46
[SPEAKER_00]: But for the purposes of laying a transatlantic telegraph cable, this enormous commercially disappointing ship turned out to be exactly what the project desperately needed.
1:21:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Unlike the earlier attempts,
1:21:58
[SPEAKER_00]: which had required splitting the cable between two separate warships and performing a terrifying mid-Ocean splice in the middle of a storm.
1:22:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The Great Eastern was large enough to carry the entire length of cable required for a complete crossing, all by itself in a single vessel.
1:22:16
[SPEAKER_00]: This eliminated in one stroke, one of the most dangerous and failure-prone elements of the previous attempts.
1:22:24
[SPEAKER_00]: There would be no need for a mid-Ocean rendezvous.
1:22:27
[SPEAKER_00]: No need for two separate crews to coordinate a delicate splice, while floating in open water, fully exposed to whatever weather happened to roll through.
1:22:36
[SPEAKER_00]: One ship, one continuous length of cable, a single, simpler, far more controllable operation.
1:22:43
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1865, Cyrus Field and his team made another attempt using the Great Eastern, and once again, despite all of the lessons learned, despite the improved cable design, despite the safer logistics offered by the massive single ship, the cable snapped partway through the voyage.
1:23:02
[SPEAKER_00]: lost once again to the depths of the Atlantic.
1:23:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It must have felt to everyone involved, including Cyrus Field himself, like a cruel repetition of history, as though the ocean simply refused to be conquered, no matter how much had been learned, no matter how carefully the project had been redesigned.
1:23:22
[SPEAKER_00]: but field remarkably persisted yet again and in the summer of 1866 the team tried one more time.
1:23:29
[SPEAKER_00]: This attempt succeeded fully, completely and permanently.
1:23:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The great eastern successfully laid a complete continuous cable across the Atlantic Ocean, from Ireland to Newfoundland, and this time the cable held.
1:23:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The improved insulation, the more careful electrical approach
1:23:52
[SPEAKER_00]: the safer single ship logistics.
1:23:54
[SPEAKER_00]: All of it came together to produce finally.
1:23:58
[SPEAKER_00]: After more than a decade of effort, failure, heartbreak and renewed determination, a transatlantic telegraph connection.
1:24:06
[SPEAKER_00]: that actually worked reliably for the long term.
1:24:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And remarkably, the team didn't stop there.
1:24:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Using techniques developed during this successful 1866 expedition, they were also able to locate, recover, and repair the cable that had been lost during the failed 1865 attempt, just one year earlier, successfully completing that line as well.
1:24:32
[SPEAKER_00]: giving the world almost overnight, not just one, but two working transatlantic telegraph connections.
1:24:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The impact of this achievement once it had actually proven durable and reliable.
1:24:45
[SPEAKER_00]: was every bit as transformative as Cyrus Field had originally imagined.
1:24:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps even more so, simply because this time, the connection didn't fade away after a few celebratory weeks.
1:24:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It endured.
1:24:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Messages could now travel reliably between Europe and North America, not in 10 to 14 days by ship, not in 16 hours for a single short message.
1:25:09
[SPEAKER_00]: but in a matter of minutes, consistently, dependably, day after day, year after year.
1:25:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The economic, political and social implications of this achievement rippled outward in ways that touch nearly every aspect of life on both sides of the Atlantic.
1:25:28
[SPEAKER_00]: news could now travel essentially instantly between the two continents.
1:25:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Financial markets in London and New York became for the first time, genuinely interconnected in something approaching real time, with price information and trading activity flowing between the two cities far faster than ever before.
1:25:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Diplomatic communications between governments no longer required the agonizing patients of waiting weeks for a ship to deliver a message and weeks more for a reply.
1:25:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The entire pace of international relations, commerce and information flow shifted permanently irreversibly into a faster, more interconnected mode that would only continue accelerating in the decades that followed.
1:26:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Cyrus Field, who had endured public humiliation, financial strain, and more than a decade of repeated failure, finally received the recognition his persistence had earned him.
1:26:27
[SPEAKER_00]: He became genuinely and permanently this time, one of the most celebrated figures of his era.
1:26:33
[SPEAKER_00]: honoured both in the United States and in Britain for his role in achieving what many had once dismissed as an impossible, almost delusional ambition.
1:26:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And here, as we bring our story to its close, I want to slow down one final time and ask you to sit with a thought that I think carries a quiet, almost meditative kind of weight.
1:26:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The deep ocean cables, laid in the 1860s, did not simply become historical curiosities, relics of a bygone era of telegraph operators and mirror galvanometers, eventually replaced and forgotten as newer technology emerged.
1:27:14
[SPEAKER_00]: In a very real, very direct sense, the fundamental concept established by Cyrus Field,
1:27:26
[SPEAKER_00]: never actually went away.
1:27:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It simply evolved.
1:27:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The telegraph cables of the 1860s were eventually replaced by telephone cables.
1:27:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, by coaxial cables capable of carrying far more information and eventually,
1:27:41
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 20th century, by fibre optic cables, capable of carrying unimaginable quantities of data, using pulses of light rather than electrical signals through copper wire.
1:27:53
[SPEAKER_00]: But the basic concept, along carefully insulated cable, laid along the bottom of the ocean, connecting one continent to another, carrying information across the vast emptiness of the Atlantic.
1:28:07
[SPEAKER_00]: never disappeared.
1:28:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It's simply got faster, thinner, and dramatically more capable.
1:28:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's the detail that I find genuinely remarkable.
1:28:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The thought I want to leave you with tonight, as your eyes grow heavy and the story winds down towards its close.
1:28:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The modern internet,
1:28:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The system that allows you to send an email instantly to someone on another continent that allows video calls to connect people across oceans with barely a flicker of delay that carries the overwhelming majority of all international data traffic between Europe, North America, and the rest of the world.
1:28:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Still relies fundamentally on cables laid along the bottom of the ocean.
1:28:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Modern fiber optic cables, carrying almost the entirety of international internet traffic, very often follow routes strikingly similar to the paths first explored, mapped, and laid by those original 19th century expeditions.
1:29:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The same general corridors across the North Atlantic Sea floor that Cyrus Fields ships first ventured into, blind, isolated, and uncertain.
1:29:15
[SPEAKER_00]: and 1858.
1:29:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The terrifying isolation those sailors felt, floating in the middle of an unmapped ocean, watching a tiny flickering beam of light for any sign that their fragile connection still held.
1:29:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Listening to thousands of tons of cable, groan and shift in the darkness below deck during violent storms, enduring sleepless nights, staring at delicate instruments
1:29:42
[SPEAKER_00]: against every reasonable expectation that their wire would survive the crushing pressure and unknown terrain of the deep ocean floor laid quite literally the foundation the actual physical and conceptual bedrock for the hyper connected world you are living in right now in this exact moment
1:30:10
[SPEAKER_00]: every international email.
1:30:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Every piece of data that travels between a server in one country and a device in another.
1:30:18
[SPEAKER_00]: All of it, in some deep, almost poetic sense, traces its lineage back to that first thin wire, wrapped in tree sap rubber and iron wire.
1:30:28
[SPEAKER_00]: dropped into the dark, unknown waters of the Atlantic Ocean by a paper merchant with no engineering background and a self-taught electrician whose theories nearly destroyed the entire project.
1:30:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Working alongside sailors who endured genuine physical danger and profound psychological isolation simply because they believed against all reasonable evidence that the gap between two continents could be closed.
1:30:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It took multiple failures.
1:30:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It took snapped cables lost forever to the ocean floor.
1:31:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It took near-capsized ships and sleep-deprived crews staring at flickering lights in the dark.
1:31:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It took a triumphant celebration followed by a quiet heart-breaking collapse.
1:31:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And it took, finally, years later, a return with better technology, better understanding, and a bigger ship to finally make the connection permanent.
1:31:23
[SPEAKER_00]: But it worked.
1:31:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, after all of that struggle, it worked and it has, in one form or another, kept working, kept connecting continents, kept shrinking the world ever since.
1:31:38
[SPEAKER_00]: that brings us to the end of tonight's journey across the Atlantic, and through more than a decade of 19th century ambition, failure, and quiet, hard-won triumph.
1:31:50
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're still awake at this point, congratulations!
1:31:52
[SPEAKER_00]: You made it through the whole story, but honestly, if you drifted off somewhere around the second or third chapter, that's exactly what this show is here for.
1:32:01
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no test at the end.
1:32:03
[SPEAKER_00]: No quiz on the exact specifications of good-to-perature insulation.
1:32:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending these quiet hours with sleepless history.
1:32:12
[SPEAKER_00]: If you enjoyed tonight's journey into the depths of the Atlantic, consider settling in for another one of our episodes another night.
1:32:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And as always, sleep well, rest easy, and we'll see you next time.
1:32:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Good night!