Today we will be reminded that Lincoln was assassinated 150 years ago by John Wilkes Booth on April 14th. When today’s stories are published they will be viewed around the world in just seconds. But what they won’t report is that in 1865 reports of Lincoln’s assassination would take weeks to move around the world. 
England and France, for example, would wait 11 days to hear the news. Barbara Rimkunas, an historian in Exeter, recently wrote about when a young Exeter man and friend to the Lincolns, Edward Tuck, learned of Lincoln’s death while serving in France. He wrote his father on Friday, April 28th, “The horrible news first reached Paris on Tuesday afternoon.”
Underwater Cable Development. When I think back to what the world had for knowledge and technology 150 years ago, I am amazed we were able to lay a cable across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean that could transmit messages electronically. And, thanks to a few entrepreneurial leaders, it had already been done when Lincoln was assassinated, but unfortunately that cable had failed and was a year away from being repaired and working.
The telegraph began in 1839 and entrepreneurs started hanging above ground wires everywhere. Samuel Morse, the inventor of Morse code, was an early proponent of an underwater cable and by 1850 there was one across the English Channel between England and France. At the same time In Newfoundland a Catholic bishop, John Mullock, inspired entrepreneurs including Cyrus Field to lay a cable 400 miles across the mouth of the St. Lawrence River to Nova Scotia. That was finished in 1854 and messages could then be sent from across North America to Newfoundland.
Cyrus W. Field and First Try. Cyrus W. Field was a Massachusetts entrepreneur, who had made his money in the paper industry. Field was passionate about connecting North America to Europe and so he created the Atlantic Telegraph Company and raised money from private investors and both the American and British governments. Beginning in 1857 a cable line was laid between Ireland and Newfoundland and when it was finished in 1858 a short message in Morse code was successfully sent from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan. Because this was the first technology it took 17 hours for the message to get through. Within weeks, though, the cable broke and it would be eight years before another message could be sent.
Two Technical Problems. The first problem was electrical. The science of transmitting electricity through a wire thousands of miles under several thousand feet of water is complex. And two senior engineers, Lord Kelvin and a Dr. Whitehouse, could not agree on how to do it. Whitehouse prevailed and his method proved incorrect and weakened the cable.
The second problem was because the cable was being frayed on underwater mountains. Field and his engineers thought the bottom of the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland was a flat trench or plateau. But, as we now know, there are many mountains and so the cable was actually hanging from underwater mountaintop to mountaintop like Christmas lights. Over a short amount of time the cable frayed and snapped.
Success Finally. Cyrus Field, who watched this first company collapse after the cable failure, marched on. With financial help from Thomas Brassey and John Pender, he raised new capital and began a new project in 1865 to lay a second cable and repair the first one. (I must say reading about how they found, recovered, and repaired broken cables thousands of feet down in 1865 is fascinating, if you enjoy the technical issues.)
In 1866 Field and his team finally laid a successful cable and transmissions across the Atlantic began. By then they had solved the electrical transmission issues and built a better cable, too. The speed in 1866 was eight words a minute, which was 80 times faster than in 1858. After 1866 underwater cable networks spread rapidly and the world became “connected.”
Today. And, if you think undersea cable is an old technology, you might be surprised to know it is critical today. In a Science Friday story called Undersea Cables String Together the Global Internet with their guest Nicole Starosielski, author of the book The Undersea Network, they report “Ninety-nine percent of the data zipping between continents travels not via satellite, but through cables strung along the bottom of the world’s oceans.”
