The First Transatlantic Cable

“Maybe it is a crazy idea!” The year was 1854 and the speaker was an engineer named Frederick N. Gisborne. He was telling Cyrus W. Field how he had almost given up the fight to carry out his idea of running a cable under the Gulf of St. Lawrence to connect Nova Scotia with Newfoundland. Mr. Field didn’t think the idea was crazy at all. He went even further. He began to dream of a transatlantic cable. But could it be done? Could anybody even make a waterproof cable line two thousand miles long? How could it be laid on the ocean floor, if the ocean had a floor? And could the “lightning” travel for such a distance—between two continents? It would be the greatest gamble ever attempted. In The First Transatlantic Cable, Adelc Gutman Nathan tells the fascinating story of how some of the most brilliant scientists, businessmen, statesmen, inventors and soldiers of fortune joined with Mr. Field in playing for the great stakes and making the dream come true. Personalities like Samuel F.B. Morse, the genius of the telegraph, Matthew Fontaine Maury, the “Father of Oceanography,” and Isambard Kingdom Brunei, the Little Giant of engineering, come to life in these pages. Here is the adventure story of one of the most thrilling chapters in history.