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
Cyrus W. Field

Born in 1819, Cyrus West Field began work at age fifteen as an office boy for A. T. Stewart & Co., New York City's first department store. By age twenty, he was a partner in a paper manufacturing company, and at thirty-three he retired from business a wealthy man. Click here for an article on Field as paper merchant.

In 1854 Field began the quest to lay a telegraphic cable across the Atlantic Ocean. After several failed attempts, in August 1858 Field arranged for Queen Victoria to send the first transatlantic message to President James Buchanan, and New York erupted in celebrations, lauding Field, telegraph inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, modern technology, and American ingenuity in general. But the cable broke after just three weeks, and Field did not complete his project until 1866.

Field posed for the portrait in 1858, and in an unusual departure, Brady added two telling props - a length of wire cable and a globe.

(from the description of the portrait at the National Portrait Gallery)

Mathew Brady Studio, Imperial salted-paper print, 1858. 44.8 x 35.7 cm (17 5/8 x 14 1/16 inches)
Image courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

From Isabella Field Judson's book Cyrus W. Field, His Life and Work. Credited to Mathew Brady, 1860

Carte de visite photograph
by Matthew Brady

Photographer unknown,
portrait from the book
The Atlantic Telegraph (1865),
published in London, so
perhaps a British photograph.

Charles D. Fredricks
& Co. "Specialite"
587 Broadway, New York

Another pose from the same
session by Fredricks.
Image courtesy of Bill Varsell

Field's library globe
on display at the
Smithsonian National
Museum of American
History's exhibit:
Underwater Web:
Cabling the Seas

Cyrus Field's Globe

When Frederick Gisborne met with Cyrus Field early in 1854, it was with the intention of persuading Field to invest in his Newfoundland telegraph company. Field was not very enthusiastic about this project, but his brother, Henry, reports:

“After (Gisborne) left, Mr. Field took the globe which was standing in the library and began to turn it over. It was while thus studying the globe that the idea first occurred to him, that the telegraph migh be carrier further still, and be made to span the Atlantic Ocean.”

The globe appears in Mathew Brady's portraits of Field, and in other photographs, and is featured in Daniel Huntington's painting, The Atlantic Cable Projectors.

After Field's death in 1892 his family offered many of his possessions to the Smithsonian, and Field's globe is now in the National Museum of American History. Cyrus Field's will gives details of a number of his cable-related presentation pieces and souvenirs.

A young Cyrus Field,
photographer unknown

Engraving after the
Brady carte de visite
photograph above

CDV by Rockwood,
839 Broadway, New York
About 1860?

CDV by John & Chas Watkins, 34 Parliament St., London. A little later than the Brady photographs, perhaps early 1860s.
Click to see the
photographers' backstamp.

Another Watkins CDV,
a different printing of the same image, with a
different backstamp

CDV by Sarony,
680 Broadway, N.Y.
Photographer's backstamp

CDV by Sarony,
680 Broadway, N.Y.

CDV by Sarony,
680 Broadway, N. Y.
Image courtesy of Jim Kreuzer

Cabinet card by Sarony,
680 Broadway, New York

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year of 1872, by Happy Hours Company, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D.C.

Photograph by Falk (c.1875),
Madison Square, New York

Cyrus Field, from a 1910 tobacco card in the series "Men of History", free with Royal Bengals Little Cigars.
Click here to see the back of the card.

From Isabella Field Judson's book Cyrus W. Field, His Life and Work

Cyrus Field, from The Prominent Men of the New York Stock Exchange Collection,
Harper & Brothers, 1885

Engraving by A.B. Walter,
from the book Men of our Day
by L.P. Brockett, Philadelphia, 1872.

Giants of America -
perhaps a page from a book?

Smithsonian Cyrus Field Large.jpg (165425 bytes)

Portrait by Daniel Huntington.
Original in Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York

Keith Walk-Over Shoes postcard

From the 1858 sheet music:
Ocean Telegraph March

J.I. Austen postcard,
many inaccuracies in
the text on the reverse

testing 1865 cable CF2.jpg (84490 bytes)

Cyrus Field on board Great Eastern, 1866, observing the test of the recovered cable of 1865.
From The Illustrated London News, Oct 13, 1866.

Mount Field
from the Peaks of the Canadian Rockies website. Named in 1883; Field visited the area in 1884 as a guest of the CPR.

Cable Cabinet cigar box label, circa 1895. From the left: Cyrus Field, Chandler White, S.F.B. Morse, Moses Taylor, Marshall O. Roberts, Peter Cooper.
This is a re-creation of the 10 March 1854 meeting at Cyrus Field's home in Gramercy Park, New York.

Samuel Morse was not present at the meeting, but as company electrician he was publicly associated with the project and the artist included him here.

See The Atlantic Cable Projectors for more information on this meeting.

These checks were included with a copy of Cyrus W. Field, His Life and Work. A pencilled note inside the back cover of the book reads: "100 of the checks were found in Kalamazoo Paper Mill Waste about 1920". One of the checks is for $512,050.00, payable to H.R. Bishop, director of construction for the New York Elevated Railroad company, which Field had taken over in 1877; the other is to Tiffany & Co., who sold the souvenirs of the 1858 cable, and printed the 25th anniversary invitations in 1879.


1926 Interstate News Service Card No. 102 "Laying the First Atlantic Cable"

W. Duke Sons & Co., Life of Cyrus W. Field

16-page booklet, 2-3/4" x 1-1/2", published in the
1880s by Knapp & Company of New York as one
of a series of cigarette cards for Duke's Cigarettes.
The series title was Poor Boys Who Have
Become Rich, And Other Famous People.

Cyrus Field's country home "Ardsley"
at Irvington on Hudson, New York

Cyrus Field lived for 40 years in Gramercy Park in Manhattan, at Lexington Avenue and 21st Street (Gramercy Park North). His house (shown in 1886, above left) was replaced long ago with another building, although similar houses can still be found on the other side of the park. The building on the former site of his house has a historical marker, shown in these photographs taken in October 2001.

Cyrus Field's former house in 1903. At that time it was the Henry William Poor residence, Mr Poor having rebuilt the interior in 1902.

Cyrus Field's Beekman Street Warehouse from a contemporary advertisement

Stereoview of the 1859 fire at Cyrus Field's
Beekman Street warehouse.
Anthony's Instantaneous Views No. 255.
Image of the back of the card

Stereoview of the Cyrus Field
Building in New York

The Cyrus W. Field Building at the Battery and
Broadway, New York. E.H. Kendall, Architect
From The American Architect and Building News, October 9th 1886

Cyrus Field's letterhead gives the address as
"Washington Building, 1 Broadway"

Cyrus Field medals now have their own page, which also includes other cable-related medals and tokens

Portraits and photographs of Cyrus W. Field in public collections in the US are listed at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. Click on this link to see the list of Field portraits.

Descendants of Cyrus W. Field. Diane Druin Gravlee, Cyrus Field's great-great-granddaughter, has done extensive research on Cyrus Field and his descendants. Click on this link to view her comprehensive list of descendants.

Field Family Portraits. Peter Christian Hall and Alix-Marie Hall, New York City-based siblings whose great-grandfather was Frederick Joseph Stone, Cyrus Field's nephew, share images of paintings of of Cyrus Field and his parents, wife, and sons.

The Brothers Field - Russell Carpenter's history of the five brothers of the Field family who held among them a total of 10 academic and honorary degrees from Williams College.

Cyrus W. Field, Junk Dealer. Field made his fortune as a paper manufacturer and wholesaler and needed a constant supply of rags as raw material. To this end he was licensed by the City of New-York and included in the Corporation's “list of the licensed keepers of junk shops”. This was, of course, only incidental to his main business, although his enemies sometimes referred to him as a “junk dealer”.

Last revised: 15 August, 2008

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