History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy

	History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications from the first submarine cable of 1850 to the worldwide fiber optic network
Atlantic Cables 1857-58, 1865-66

Introduction: After the success of the first submarine cables in the early 1850s, the laying of short cables became routine, but longer cables presented more problems. It was, of course, of considerable financial and political interest to span the Atlantic Ocean, and the attempts in 1857, 1858, and 1865, and the eventual success in 1866, attracted much attention.

This section of the Atlantic Cable website provides a convenient central directory of the large amount of material on these cables.

Bill Burns

1857-1858 Cables

The Atlantic Cable Projectors - where it all began: 1854-1895

Professor Hall's Floating Stations - an unsuccessful 1857 proposal

Cabot Strait Cable and 1857-58 Atlantic Cables by Bill Glover

The landing of the Irish shore end of the 1857 cable

On Submerging Telegraphic Cables - paper presented in February 1858 to the Institution of Civil Engineers

Henry M. Field's account of meeting the Telegraph Squadron in June 1858

The 1858 cable expedition as reported by Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, New York

David Dudley Field's speech on September 1st 1858 at the Crystal Palace celebration of the laying of the cable

The 1858 cable celebration in New York

Messages Carried by the 1858 Atlantic Telegraph Cable

Interlude

Index to the Report of the Joint Committee Appointed by the Lords of the Privy Council for Trade and the Atlantic Telegraph Company to Inquire into the Construction of Submarine Telegraph Cables [1861]

The Northern Line – The Arctic Cables by Steven Roberts

Tal Shaffner

Henry O'Rielly and the Russo-American Telegraph

Cyrus Field's Banquet - London, April 1864

1865-1866 Cables

William Russell and Robert Dudley's book: The Atlantic Telegraph - high resolution scans of the cover, title page, and the tinted lithographs from the book recording the events of the 1865 Great Eastern cable expedition

John C. Deane's diary of the 1865 expedition

Original letter from Sir Daniel Gooch describing the loss of the cable on the 1865 Great Eastern expedition

Henry O'Neil's accounts of the 1865 and 1866 cable expeditions

Portraits on the Voyage - photographs and sketches of some of the key figures of 1865

The Manufacture of the 1865 and 1866 Atlantic Cables

Letter from Sir Robert Peel to John C. Deane, later Secretary of the Anglo-American Telegraph Company, concerning the loss of the 1865 cable

Atlantic Telegraph Cable - address of Professor William Thomson to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on the 1865 cable

Detailed description of the Recovery of the Cable in 1866, from Henry M. Field's book

On The Causes Of Failure Of Deep-Sea Cables - 1884 article by James Graves

Sample Case: Atlantic Cables of 1858, 1865, 1866

Bern Dibner’s book The Atlantic Cable, published in 1958, is an excellent reference for the 1857 -1866 Atlantic cables, and is available on line at the Smithsonian Institution's website.

Cable Signalling Speeds

Comparision of transmission speeds from early to modern cables

Last revised: 6 August, 2008

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Research Material Needed

The Atlantic Cable website is non-commercial, and its mission is to make available on line as much information as possible.

You can help - if you have cable material, old or new, please contact me. Cable samples, instruments, documents, brochures, souvenir books, photographs, family stories, all are valuable to researchers and historians.

If you have any cable-related items that you could photograph, copy, scan, loan, or sell, please email me: billb@ftldesign.com