Ingenuity, Capitalism in the Quest to Link Continents

A THREAD ACROSS THE OCEAN

The Heroic Story of

the Transatlantic Cable

by John Steele Gordon

Walker & Co.

240 pages, $26

These lines from Longfellow serve appropriately as an epigraph to “A Thread Across the Ocean,” which describes a splendid Victorian-age feat of technology, capitalism and unbounded optimism:

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

John Steele Gordon, a deft and fluent writer on business history for American Heritage magazine, briskly tells how in 12 short years in the mid-19th century American entrepreneur Cyrus Field made a common dream his own. To lay the first transatlantic cable that would unite by electric telegraph Europe and America, he assembled the engineers, raised the capital and provided the direction and the push that overcame the several daunting obstacles that stood between his goal and its consummation.

Most of the money and much of the technology that finally finished the project in 1866 came from Great Britain, then still the richest and most advanced industrial society in the world. But some of the skill was from a surging America--Samuel F.B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, was instrumental--and the enterprise was an equal and cooperative venture between the two nations through their navies.

Into “A Thread Across the Ocean” Gordon weaves many engaging snapshots of men and technology in the rapidly developing industrial world during the great European peace of 1815-1914. There is William Thompson, later Lord Kelvin, who first articulated the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He came into the picture because of his interest on electric currents, then not fully understood but necessary to the transmission of electric impulses across a copper cable under the sea. There is, on the American side, Peter Cooper, successful New York entrepreneur, investor in the transatlantic cable and, incidentally, founder of the Cooper Union for the free education of New York working men.

There is the fascinating, towering British engineer Isambard Brunel, who designed the Great Western Railway from London’s Paddington Station to Bristol and suspension bridges, water towers, prefabricated field hospitals, tunnels and ships. It was Brunel who drew the plans for the colossal ship the Great Eastern, launched in 1857, the largest ship afloat until the launching of the ill-fated Lusitania in 1907. And it was the Great Eastern that finally laid the cable that tied together Europe and North America.

A combination steam-powered paddle wheel and sailing ship, the Great Eastern was built large to carry the coal it needed to power voyages throughout the British Empire. And because of her size, she was able to store in her hold all the cable needed to thread the Atlantic from western Ireland to eastern Newfoundland.

When Field’s venture began, the Great Eastern was not yet afloat, and attempts were made by the British and American navies to lay the cable from their respective ships. It didn’t work. The engineers had trouble getting the tension on the cable laying machines right, and the cables broke. Violent storms nearly swamped the chief British ship. The cable kept snapping or mysteriously going dead. And then, when it was nearly laid, they lost it, deep into the Atlantic.

It was typical of the enterprising spirit of the age that setbacks and accidents did not deter the project and its sponsors. Field was asked at the outset by his British sponsors what he would do if he failed. “Charge it to profit and loss,” he replied, “and go to work to lay another.” Which is exactly what he did.

“A Thread Across the Ocean” tells of the men who conceived and engineered and directed and finally put through the great project.

Although Gordon does mention the fearsome labors of the men building the telegraph line across Cape Breton Island toward Newfoundland, he does not linger with those whose strong arms and backs created the great wealth that drove the singular enterprise forward. This is a book about a chapter in the story of successful capitalism and its enterprising managers.

The undertaking, said Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the Treasury and chief justice of the United States, was “an enterprise worthy of this day of great things.” Gordon captures with verve the adventuresome spirit of the age and the absorbing details of this imaginative technological achievement.