The Cable Read online

  Cyrus Field was thirty-four years old and had already retired from business. He was then worth $250,000. Born in 1819 the son of a Congregational minister in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, from a modest start he had made a fortune, lost it, repaid his debts and acquired enough money to step down from his company when advised by doctors that he was overworking. As a boy, Field had turned down a college education, instead serving his apprenticeship at a dry goods store in New York. He learned to sell, discovering the pitfalls of commerce in 1837 when a panic brought ruin to large numbers of enterprises. He attended evening classes in book-keeping and penmanship, and after three years in the city returned to his home state to join his brother in a paper-making business. Field was engaged mainly in sales, through which he made many contacts with wholesalers in New York such as Elisha Root and Chandler White, and with other paper manufacturers in New England.

  Field started a business of his own, but gave it up when invited to join Root as a partner. Unknown to him, Root was already insolvent. Within six months the business failed and Field found himself responsible for huge debts. He re-established his own firm, taking over Root’s customers and contacts. He also brought in some of his acquaintances from Massachusetts, building up a network of suppliers and customers there. Root’s liabilities he settled at 30¢ in the dollar. His product was a better one than Root’s, and despite the generally depressed markets, he had found a good time to move into high-quality paper, for which demand was huge, and growing. In three years from 1846, he sold an astonishing $1 million-worth of paper. But by 1849, the effort had taken its toll, and Field was sent to Europe to convalesce.

  Cyrus Field. (Institution of Engineering and Technology)

  It was Field’s maiden trip across the Atlantic – the first of what would be more than thirty visits to Britain – and the start of his love affair with England and things English. It was at the time when Brett’s cross-channel cable was being planned, and Field may have heard about it then. He returned to New York, where his fortune had grown in his absence, putting him among the city’s top three dozen richest men, and did further good to his reputation by settling fully all the money owing to Root’s creditors. His business, left to the management of others, continued to make vast amounts of money without needing Field’s active involvement. On his return from Europe, Field moved into Gramercy Park, on the southern end of Lexington Avenue. Sometimes called the American Bloomsbury, Gramercy is the nearest thing to a London square that New York can offer. At its centre is a park kept exclusively for residents. The newly-built house into which Field moved in about 1852 has not survived, but there is still a plaque commemorating the role of this neighbourhood in advancing the cause of the transatlantic cable.

  Field’s new neighbours were rich and influential New Yorkers – newspapermen, politicians, artists and businessmen. Next door was Peter Cooper, a self-made industrialist who had dabbled in railroads and land telegraphy, and who owned a factory in New Jersey which made telegraph wire. Cooper, then in his sixties, had much in common with Field despite the age difference, and the two became close. Another brother of Field, David Dudley Field, a lawyer, was also a neighbour. Through the social gatherings of Gramercy Park, Field and Cooper made many useful contacts, among them Samuel Morse.

  For a while, Field’s attention was taken up with his home. He was the first New Yorker to hire an interior decorator from France. His house was fitted out with heavy Italian drapes, Greek statues, marble and frescoes. Field recruited an English butler, who served dinner on Minton china. Mary Field, whom he had married when he was twenty, just before the Root failure, had the first private greenhouse in New York. Her husband delighted in his library. Behind the house, in the still rural surroundings of the reclaimed swampland, the Field family kept a cow along with their horses.

  This inactive life, though, did not satisfy Field. ‘I never saw Cyrus so uneasy as when he was trying to sit still,’ said his brother Matthew. At this point, Matthew Field, between contracts after years away in the southern and western states building railroads and bridges, fell into conversation with Frederic Gisborne in the lobby of the Astor House hotel in January 1854. Gisborne described his struggling project, and the civil engineer recognised its possibilities. He saw that his wealthy and under-occupied brother may want to be involved, and took Gisborne to Gramercy Park to explain the scheme.

  Cyrus Field knew very little about telegraphy and was ignorant of the geography of the British provinces north of the United States. He was not enthused by the limited project to link Newfoundland to New York, but the idea of a transatlantic, and maybe then a global, cable gripped his imagination. From the start he saw this telegraph line as a means of deepening international understanding and harmony, especially between the two countries he loved, the United States and Britain. Of course, commercial life would also benefit from improved communications. Not least, investors in the cable stood to make a great deal of money.

  It was disputed later who within the company had first seriously proposed spanning the Atlantic with a cable. Gisborne certainly knew at the time the English Channel was crossed successfully by a telegraph line in 1851 that this new technology had the potential to link Newfoundland to the North American continent. Later he hinted that an Atlantic cable had also been on his agenda, explaining that he had not publicised the idea:

  I was looked upon as a wild visionary by my friends, and pronounced a fool by my relatives for resigning a lucrative government appointment in favor of such a laborious speculation as the Newfoundland connection. Now had I coupled it at that time with an Atlantic line, all confidence in the prior undertaking would have been destroyed, and my object defeated.

  Field’s admirers, though, disputed whether Gisborne’s transatlantic plan had ever gone further than a vague notion that such a thing may be possible at a distant time in the future.

  But by 1854 the idea of a cable across the ocean had already progressed far beyond an abstraction. Immediately after his meeting with Gisborne, Field started to take the best technical advice that was available. He wrote to the oceanographer Lieutenant Matthew Fountaine Maury, head of the Naval Observatory in Washington, and also to Samuel Morse. He already knew Maury slightly, having corresponded with him the previous year when planning a trip to South America. When Field’s letter arrived, Maury was at that very moment analysing results from a survey of the ocean bed taken in 1853 by Lieutenant Ottway H. Berryman of the US brig Dolphin. It is clear from Maury’s reply to Field that the US government was already thinking on the same lines of a transatlantic cable.

  Deep-sea soundings were still a crude affair. A cannon ball was dropped on the end of a long line, an unreliable way to measure depth as currents carried the twine away from the vertical. There had been slight improvements to this basic system, but most of the Atlantic Ocean remained unsurveyed. It was known, though, that in many places the seabed was broken and irregular, with sharp peaks and crested ridges. This could be fatal to a cable. Any direct route between Europe and the United States would also have to cover an extraordinary distance, perhaps 3,000 miles, and contend with extreme depths of ocean. A relay point in the Azores would break the length, but that meant that the cable would suffer great physical risks across the western reaches of the Atlantic. There were also dangers from volcanic activity on the seabed in the approaches to the Azores. Potential routes to the north of Newfoundland were quickly discounted because of the stormy seas and dangers of floating ice. In any case the seabed there was unsuitable, and landline connections difficult because of the climate and terrain.

  The shortest direct route also turned out to be the best in terms of the depth and the composition of the seabed. The US naval survey had the best possible news – the ocean bed between Newfoundland and Ireland might have been made with a cable in mind. Maury reported to Field that between the closest points of the Old and New Worlds – the west coast of Ireland and the east coast of Newfoundland – lay a distance of 1,600 nautical miles. Yet, he s
aid:

  the bottom of the sea between the two places is a plateau, which seems to have been placed there especially for the purpose of holding the wires of a submarine telegraph, and of keeping them out of harm’s way. It is neither too deep nor too shallow; yet it is so deep that the wires, but once landed, will remain for ever beyond the reach of vessels’ anchors, icebergs, and drifts of any kind, and so shallow that the wires may be readily lodged upon the bottom. The depth of this plateau is quite regular, gradually increasing from the shores of Newfoundland to the depth of from 1,500 fathoms to 2,000 fathoms as you approach the other side.

  A wire laid along the shortest route would conveniently avoid the Grand Banks and rest on this ‘beautiful plateau’.

  Maury had sent samples from the seabed for microscopic examination at West Point. The floor of the ocean was found to be entirely made up of microscopic shells – ‘not a particle of sand or gravel exists in them’. Nothing lived at these depths, but the shells had been carried from the tropics by the Gulf Stream and gradually accumulated where they dropped on to the ocean bed. Once there, they did not move, as there were no currents to disturb the depths. The surrounding water was as quiet as the bottom of a millpond. ‘Consequently, a telegraphic wire once laid there, there it would remain, as completely beyond the reach of accident as it would if buried in air-tight cases.’ In a few years’ time, more of this harmless deposit would completely cover the cable.

  Maury’s discoveries were decisive in setting the course of the cable. Nature, it was said, had ‘beneficently decided the question’. Newfoundland stretched forth as the hand of the New World, to meet the grasp of the Old, the British Isles:

  The course of the telegraph cable is precisely marked out by a natural tracing across the depths of the ocean. There is one line, and only one line, in which the work can be accomplished. Providence has designed that the Old World and the New, severed at the first by a great gulf, shall be re-connected by electrical sympathies and bonds, and Providence has prepared the material means for the fulfilment of the design.

  Maury had written to the United States legislature to that effect, and he christened the route ‘the telegraph plateau’. Others called it ‘Maury’s plateau’, and the lieutenant, a self-educated scientist, received many plaudits and honours through his work on behalf of the cable.

  While this news was very welcome, Maury had also been contemplating some of the other difficulties that lay in the way of the cable. He raised a question for Field’s consideration. It was in truth several questions: of ‘the possibility of finding a time calm enough, the sea smooth enough, a wire long enough, a ship big enough, to lay a coil of wire 1,600 miles in length.’ His tone, though, was optimistic: ‘I have no fear but that the enterprise and ingenuity of the age, whenever called on with these problems, will be ready with a satisfactory and practical solution of them.’

  Morse’s vision a decade earlier, that a magnetic current could cross the Atlantic, ‘startling as this may now seem’, was starting to look less utopian. Events since the experiments in New York harbour in 1842 had only strengthened his faith in his original judgement. Field met Morse and was further heartened. He then set about recruiting men of wealth and probity who would, like him, recognise the public and commercial benefits as well as the scheme’s financial promise. His brother Dudley agreed to be the project’s legal advisor. An obvious candidate to join any scheme was Field’s neighbour Peter Cooper, ‘one of the great capitalists of the New World’. Field knew that Cooper had money to invest and some technical understanding, though the older man was preoccupied with other projects, many of them charitable. But Cooper seems to have been quickly taken by the idea, and proved to be Field’s chief support through the long and arduous years ahead:

  It was an enterprise that struck me very forcibly the moment [Field] mentioned it. I thought I saw in it, if it was possible, a means through which we would communicate between the two continents, and send knowledge broadcast over all parts of the world. It seemed to me as though it were the consummation of that great prophecy, that ‘knowledge shall cover the earth, as the waters cover the deep’, and with that feeling I joined him in what then appeared to most men a wild and visionary scheme; a scheme that fitted those who engaged in it for an asylum where they might be taken care of as little short of lunatics. But believing as I did, that it offered the possibility of a mighty power for the good of the world, I embarked on it.

  Religious vision and the promotion of peace were to be recurring themes around the Atlantic cable. The involvement of Cooper brought in other, more prosaic, characters. First was Moses Taylor, an importer and later president of the City Bank, who sat and listened to Field for an hour without saying a word. Taylor then immediately agreed to the proposal. Field and Taylor, who had not previously known each other, were to become close friends. Taylor introduced his friend Marshall O. Roberts, like Taylor a self-made man, the son of Welsh immigrants, who had made his money from railroads and a steamer line to gold-rush California via Panama. Another recruit to the project was Field’s old friend Chandler White, the paper wholesaler, who had by then retired. White had moved out of the city to Fort Hamilton, a retreat with panoramic views of the New York harbour, and seemed to have left the cares of commerce behind him. Yet he too allowed himself to be convinced by Field’s enthusiasm. Samuel Morse agreed to be the company’s electrician.

  This group of five or six first met at the Clarendon Hotel, where a total of $40,000 was pledged, and Cooper was nominated as company president, a role he would fill for two decades. Later anniversaries marked 10 March 1854 as the launch of the Atlantic project. That was the date of the first of four consecutive evenings when the company gathered in Field’s dining room, the Minton porcelain moved aside to make space on the table for maps and charts. The company drew up detailed plans and costings, and speculated as to the likely profits. Every one of them agreed to join the undertaking, on condition that the government of Newfoundland improved the terms of the existing company’s charter.

  It was imperative to talk directly to the Newfoundland authorities. Within four days Cyrus and Dudley Field and Chandler White, accompanied by Gisborne, embarked on a journey from New York to Boston, where they took a steamer for Halifax and then a smaller ship, Merlin, to St John’s. Dudley Field later recalled the trials of the last leg of this journey:

  Three more disagreeable days, voyagers scarcely ever passed, than we spent in that smallest of steamers. It seemed as if all the storms of winter had been reserved for the first month of spring. A frost-bound coast, an icy sea, rain, hail, snow and tempest, were the greetings of the telegraph adventurers in their first movement towards Europe. In the darkest night, through which no man could see the ship’s length, with snow filling the air and flying into the eyes of the sailors, with ice in the water and a heavy sea rolling and moaning about us, the captain felt his way round Cape Race with his lead, as the blind man feels his way with his staff, but as confidently and as safely as if the sky had been clear and the sea calm; and the light of morning dawned upon deck and mast and spar, coated with glittering ice, but floating securely between the mountains which form the gates of the harbor of St John’s.

  The visitors were first introduced to Edward M. Archibald, attorney-general of the colony, who warmly welcomed the scheme. He introduced them to the Governor of Newfoundland, Kerr Bailey Hamilton, who called together the island’s council to meet the group and hear their plans. Newfoundland, established in 1583 as Britain’s first colony, was about to become self-governing. Its leaders saw that the telegraph venture could open up the island and give it an important position in the wider world. Within hours they confirmed an offer guaranteeing the interest on £50,000 worth of bonds, an immediate grant of fifty square miles of land, with more to follow once the transatlantic telegraph was in place, and a donation of £5,000 towards the building of a bridle path across the island on the line of the land telegraph.

  The necessary charter was not then
confirmed, but Cyrus Field was hopeful enough to leave St John’s after three days, returning to New York to buy a steamer, the Victoria, for the new company. White and Dudley Field were left behind to deal with the legal arrangements. The old Electric Telegraph Co. had to be dissolved, and a new one established which would bear a longer title – the New York, Newfoundland & London Electric Telegraph Co. – to take account of its wider ambition. Dudley Field had drafted the new company’s charter while on the voyage to St John’s. It stated categorically that a telegraph line would be established between America and Europe via Newfoundland. No other company was to be allowed to land cables in Newfoundland or its dependencies, which included Labrador, for fifty years.

  The new company, seemingly through the efforts of Gisborne, also acquired generous concessions on Prince Edward Island and a twenty-five-year exclusive right to land cables on the coast of Maine, giving it in total concessions covering 2,000 miles of coastline. These valuable rights gave considerable power to the company in the following years, when other parties were attempting to move into the world of long-distance deep-sea cables.

  After some weeks of negotiation, the agreement was finally approved by Newfoundland’s legislature. Dudley Field and Chandler White threw a banquet in St John’s for forty invited guests to mark the signing of the deal. The atmosphere was one of excitement and optimism, as the isolated colony looked forward to being put on the map. Sensing that they had long been neglected, Newfoundlanders eagerly anticipated the increased trade and notice that the cable would bring. Bryan Robinson, a lawyer and member of the executive council, addressed the diners on behalf of the island authorities: ‘The establishment of an electric telegraph from St John’s to the United States, to be connected with England by powerful steamships, involves consequences so stupendous to the interests of this country that it is not easy to know where to begin in the enumeration of them.’ He looked forward to the finest steamers in the Atlantic regularly visiting St John’s. Robinson praised the company, a group of ‘enterprising and wealthy American citizens’, but did not overlook the efforts of the engineer, Frederic Gisborne. ‘Let it not be forgotten that if it had not been for the scientific acumen of Mr Gisborne, who devised the scheme, and with indomitable perseverance in spite of checks, reserves and disheartening disappointments, still adhered to it, and induced the present corporation to embark in the project.’