In the middle of the 19th century,
a team of pioneering scientists and entrepreneurs, driven by courage,
tenacity, and vision, came together to realise an ambition
that still defines our world today.
The Atlantic cable, I think of it as the Apollo project of the 19th century.
Three, two, one, zero.
Lift off, we have a lift off.
It's something that everyone said couldn't be done, and then it was done.
Those who came before us, drove the first waves of the industrial revolution,
the first waves of modern invention.
Before the telegraph, no human being had ever experienced
getting information from the other side of the planet, more or less as it happened.
The pioneers of the Atlantic cable imagined that one day people all over
the world could share ideas, emotions, news, and information by electrical pulse.
They were the first to take this adventure and do it and show that, yes,
you can transmit messages and data across continents.
Today, 99% of all internet and mobile communications,
is not relayed by satellite, but by the undersea cables that traverse the oceans of the world..
They changed the world.
They changed the world of the media,
they changed the world of commerce,
they changed how we communicate.
so they were revolutionary.
When it comes down to people looking at their Netflix or looking at their
Facebook or using WhatsApp, we still rely heavily upon these submarine cables.
And this story of the Internet and international communication starts
here at the edge of the world on Valencia Island,
with the first transatlantic cable.
August the fourth, 1857.
The world's attention is on a remote island off Ireland island's western coast,
Valencia Island, County Kerry.
This is ground zero for one of the most ambitious scientific endeavours
of the Victorian age.
We're here on Valencia Island, which is where the story of this
transit Atlantic cable begins.
And over here, people would have gathered to see what was happening.
They wanted to see where they're going to achieve what they set out to do.
And these great ships, the Niagara and the Agamemnon,
came into this harbour because you'v got the wild Atlantic Ocean here,
but this is a nice, quiet, and peaceful harbour.
Recognising the immense geopolitical significance of the project,
the US and British governments have loaned two great ships,
the USS Niagara and the HMS Agamemnon, to the team.
Their mission is to lay 3, 200 kilometers of cable on the floor
of the Atlantic Ocean, at depths of up to three kilometers.
If successful, the transatlantic cable will relay
electrical pulses between Valencia Island and Newfoundland,
which can then be transcoded into data, letters, and numbers,
enabling near instant communications between Europe and North America
for the first time ever.
This mission is the the grandest work which has ever been attempted
by the genius and enterprise of man.
Leading the project is 38-year-old American entrepreneur, Cyrus W. Field.
Cyrus Field's greatest invention is Cyrus Field.
He's basically an entrepreneur,
he's the Elon Musk of the 19th century.
He makes a lot of money early on in life from paper,
which is a medium of communication, which had become suddenly
cheaper through steam production.
With his fortune made by the age of 33, Cyrus Field had been looking
for a new opportunity.
In 1854, Field recognizes that the future lies in global communications,
and gathers a team of experts, including the eminent Belfast-born physicist,
William Thompson.
VOICEOVER: If one took half Einstein and half the talents of Edison and succeeded
infusing such incompletely, compatible gifts into a single person,
the result would be rather like William Thompson.
Thompson was one of the most brilliant scientists of his generation,
and the second law of thermodynamics comes from him.
He talks about how heat can be transferred between one body to another,
if those two bodies are at different temperatures.
By the time Thompson joins Field in Valentia Island, the future Lord Kelvin
has already defined the theoretical concept of absolute zero,
and identified many fundamental scientific principles that underpin our world today.
VOICEOVER: When you are face to face with a difficulty,
you are up against a discovery.
I think what's fascinating is, here you have this figure who is
a pre-eminent physicist of his time, and he wants to spend time working on how
you send the most possible messages through a telegraph cable.
And it gives you a sense of the scale of this.
This is the moonshot of his time.
For a remote community on the western edge of Ireland,
it must have been a source of wonder that cutting edge science
was happening on their doorstep.
In this part of Ireland, most people were speaking Irish.
Most people didn't know how to read and write.
You have people all along that coast, primarily subsisting off potatoes,
in many cases in cabins made of mud, struggling to survive.
A medieval kind of life.
The people of Ireland's west are not alone in having their horizons limited
by poverty and lack of literacy.
In the middle of the 1800s, few people anywhere in the world had
the chance of a school education, and most people would never travel more
than 20 miles from home in their entire lives.
I think people lived more intensely in a particular place space,
but with a much vaguer sense of what was outside of it.
So your sense of space, of how far something is,
the next parish and the parish beyond the next parish was a long way away.
Beyond that, the distance was It was so vast that you almost didn't imagine it.
You suddenly then had the arrival of very sophisticated, very advanced technological
technological characters from Europe and America, using this crazy new technology.
What is this thing, electricity?
It's full of mystical, sacrilegious qualities attached to it.
As leader of the transatlantic cable expedition, Cyrus Field knows that many
have predicted his mission to be impossible and bound for failure.
It was looked upon by 99 out of every 100 men,
as the wild project of a Yankee lunatic.
But Field has staked his reputation and fortune, as well as that of many others,
on this endeavour.
With ceremonies complete in August 1857, the ship set sail into
the vast Atlantic Ocean.
The goal of achieving high-speed long-distance communications,
is as old as civilization itself.
VOICEOVER: Beacon to beacon sped the courier flame.
The moving light sped from the pyre of pine and urged its way in golden
glory like some strange new sun.
Our ancient ancestors dreamed up ingenious ways to communicate over distance.
Some used drums, others, smoke, and carrier pigeons to send
messages to each other.
There is something fundamental about the desire for news,
to have information to keep up with things, goes back to gossip.
Even if you look at the letters of Cicero, he's constantly asking
his friends for news.
He wants to know what's happening in the city when he's out of town.
He's sharing letters with other people.
The fastest that a human being could travel was on a horse, really.
In any practical way.
And that hadn't changed for millennia.
They would have been the same a thousand years earlier.
For centuries, the most reliable system of sharing information had been a letter
written by hand and delivered by hand.
VOICEOVER: "Darling AJ, your last letter has nourished me for six months.
"Now I need another from you, and you will give it to me."
By the early 1800s, the arrival of formal postal services run by the state or
private companies, increases the pace of human connectivity.
The coming of steam speeds things up further.
Even so, delivering news across long distances continues to depend
on a piece of paper being transferred from a writer to a reader.
Information from beyond your locality could take weeks, months, or years to arrive.
Driven by the Industrial Revolution, a rise in education and the relentless
pursuit of scientific discovery, the 19th century is a time
of phenomenal transformation.
Among new technologies developed, one will fundamentally change
how we live on this Earth.
VOICEOVER: The adoption of some system of electrotelegraphic communication has
become for every civilised nation a matter of absolute necessity.
When electricity was first harnessed, it was greeted like supernatural power.
People just didn't know how it was working, but they loved it.
They loved seeing it.
It brought together Victorian thinkers, so philosophers, scientists,
mathematicians, intellectuals, and they used to debate a lot,
discuss and disagree quite a lot with things.
Experiments by scientists like Benjamin Franklin in America,
Alessandro Volto in Italy, and Michael Faraday in England,
show that a wire connected to an electrostatic machine or a battery,
will cause an electrical charge to be felt at the wire's far end.
So the public would want to be part of the experiment.
They'd be wanting to touch the electricity.
They'd want to feel it.
They want to feel the hair standing up on end.
In the early 1800s, experimenters in Britain,
France, and the US, harness electricity to create machines
that generate light, power, and heat.
Crucially, they also discover that electricity can be used to facilitate
long distance communications.
Ever bigger and faster machines and technology are developed.
Steam, steel, and vast engines power massive factories.
And through the heart of it all, electricity pulses.
Electricity changed everything in lots of ways.
I think this makes people imagine new possibilities for what it is to be human.
And it is why you get the advent of science fiction.
People like Jules Verne and other science fiction writers that start to emerge,
imagining humanity living differently as a result of technology.
Early attempts by pioneers to harness
electricity to send messages are too complex.
But in 1837, Samuel Morse, an American artist,
invents a simple code of dots and dashes, which can be translated
into words using a codebook.
Morse's business partner, Alfred Vail expands the code to include
letters and special characters, and in 1844, they successfully send
a message by cable from Washington, DC, to Baltimore.
Morse code will come to dominate the world.
Da-di-da-di....da-da...da-di-di-di.. da-da-di-di...di.
(Morse code beeps)
Cable.
The most frequent letters were the ones to which Vail attributed
the shortest number of characters.
E, a dot, T, a dash,
I, two dots, M, two dashes.
And then when you come to letters which are used very seldom, like J,
the da, da, da, that's one dot and three dashes.
By the late 1840s, a network of telegraph wires,
is erected across America's east.
New York, Washington, and Chicago are connected.
Across the Atlantic, telegraph networks are constructed
connecting the main cities of Europe.
There are engravings where you can hardly see the sky for the festoon of wires.
And a bird couldn't fly from ground upwards without hitting a wire.
Before the telegraph, it could take days for a speech made by a politician
to travel from Chicago to New York.
Once a telegraph happens, those speeches
can get to New York in a matter of hours.
(Beeping)
When the first telegraphs come in in England,
immediately people start trying to use them to transmit
the results of horse races.
You can get that news away from the race course after the result has been declared
and get it into a betting shop in London, before the news reaches the betting shop.
And obviously, you can place a surefire bet.
A lot of people could see the commercial viability of it, that
on both sides of the Atlantic.
Those networks were becoming busy, and the use of them,
particularly for trade and for transmission news
and for stock brokers, was evident.
It's something we still see in modern days.
For years, trading firms would have invested tons of money in getting
the fastest cables to be a microsecond faster in getting data and information
on stocks and other commercial activities, because speed is of great importance.
These land-based telegraphic systems, pulsing with stock market prices
and political news, are the beacons of our modern information age.
Having made his fortune in the paper business,
Cyrus Field understands that the world is shrinking and hungry for fast news.
Now, a chance encounter with British Telegraph pioneer,
Frederick Gisborne, in 1853, gives Field an an opportunity
to enter the cable business.
Frederick Gisborne is a very interesting character.
He's very well-educated.
He takes all of his worldly goods on a sled and walking through
the wilderness to survey different parts of the land.
Gisborne had noticed that lots of ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean
pass by Newfoundland.
Gisborne has figured that if he can erect a line connecting Newfoundland's coast
to the existing telegraph network in North America, he could cut up to five
days off the time it takes to send a message between Europe and America.
It was quite a mad idea because Newfoundland was quite remote
from the rest of North America, and it was very inhospitable.
Backed by private equity, Gisborne sets out full of hope.
But bad weather and even worse luck brings failure.
A team member dies, others abandon him.
He did it at a horrible time of the year, and you're in the interior
of Newfoundland that's undeveloped.
Undaunted, Gisborne asks Cyrus Field for funding for a second attempt.
It was quite a mad idea, but the legend has it that after Gisborne left,
Cyrus Field had an even madder idea,
he looked at his globe, and he realized that if you could lay a cable
all the way from New to St. John's in Newfoundland,
it would not be just easier to lay a cable
the whole way across the Atlantic to Europe.
But laying a 3,200 kilometers long cable
beneath the vast Atlantic Ocean,
is thought impossible by some of the foremost men of science.
VOICEOVER: "It was a mathematical impossibility ability to submerge the cable
"successfully at so greater depth.
"And if it were possible, no signals could be transmitted through so great a length."
Even Samuel Morris, now vastly wealthy from his telegraph
investments, fear as the Atlantic Ocean might be a step too far.
VOICEOVER: "First, can electricity be propelled to a distance
"so great as the width of the ocean?
"Second, this ocean bed had not been sounded.
"Third, can a cable of such length be paid out to such a depth as required?"
But driven by ambition and profit, Field pursues his plans with zeal.
VOICEOVER: "It appears difficult to overestimate the commercial returns that will
"accrue from this undertaking."
Sometimes you do need an outsider to come into a field and say,
'well, hang on a minute, why don't we try this?'
And the people who know all about it will say, 'that can't be done'.
To undertake his mission to connect the world
by cable, in 1856, Field gathers his team of experts.
Among them are the telegraph pioneer, Samuel Morse,
and the ground-breaking physicist, William Thomson.
It's striking at the time,
it was all men that were involved in laying the cable.
Women weren't involved in the engineering or designing,
or any of the operations.
Which is not unusual given how
difficult it was for women to enter certain professions.
There were still notions of a separate sphere,
women belonging rather to the household than out in schools.
And that is something that we see throughout the 19th century.
There's one unexpected addition to Phil's team,
the British art dealer, John Brett.
So John Brett is really interesting.
He goes to the US, and in the US, he brings with him lots
of old masters, paintings from the Renaissance.
He makes a fortune selling these and comes back to London as
a fairly wealthy character.
In the late 1840s, John Brett, with his brother Jacob,
had hatched a plan to lay a submarine cable
connecting Britain and France.
If this succeeded, it would be the first undersea cable to connect
two countries in the world.
The British and French governments grant the Bretts permission
to proceed with their plans.
Of course, the British ruling elite is interested in it.
They see it as a means to control territory,
to control their colonies.
The French also want to connect with their colonies in Africa.
Among the many challenges the Bretts must overcome is that water
and electricity can't mix.
When you're stringing up telegraph wires on land,
you can just put the wire up and you can have your telegraph poles,
and it's all quite straightforward.
You can't do that underwater because water is an electrical conductor.
So if you put a bare copper cable into water, basically the current
will just dissipate into the water.
But after some research, the Bretts find a solution.
Gutta-percha, which was made from the sap of the gutter tree,
which was native to what was then called Malaya,
now Malaysia, in Southeast Asia, or up well to being soaked in water.
Irish chemical entrepreneur,
Henry Bewley, then steps in with his novel design
for a new machine,
which he calls the thermoplastic insulator.
Bewley's machine allows gutta-percha to be stretched into a thin layer,
allowing the latex to be finely wrapped around the cable wire.
Now, with a copper cable safely insulated from the water,
the Bretts were set to go.
Here we have Jacob Brett's personal album on the Origin and Progress
of Submarine Telegraphy,
presented to the institution as a personal record of his work.
And there's Jacob Brett himself.
But it's also got some lovely illustrations, including this one,
showing the start of laying down telegraph cable between
England and France.
We have the boats here.
We've got the Cliffs of Dover here.
And here you can see people actually laying out the cable
from the start through to the ship.
So they've literally got a whole load of wire,
stuck it on the back of a fishing boat, and went across the channel,
spooling the wire out of the back.
And it didn't go terribly well because the wire
floated on the water, so they had
to attach weight to it to get it to sink.
But finally, they get to France, and they were then able to send
messages between Britain and France.
The Bretts' success is acclaimed around the world.
We stand on the threshold of an improvement that may hasten
the progress of our race more rapidly than any other.
Emboldened by success, John Brett attempts to lay a cable
connecting France to Africa, but the Mediterranean Sea is far
deeper and uneven, and the project fails.
Brett does, however,
succeed in connecting Britain to Ireland and continues
the line to Dublin and the south.
Brett foresees that someone will succeed
in laying a cable under the Atlantic,
and when it comes, he will be ready to connect to it.
Along with John Brett, Phil's team also includes the physicist
William Thomson, who has become fascinated
by the theory of undersea telegraphy.
Thomson relishes the challenge of designing a submarine
cable that many in the world of science believe to be impossible.
We may be sure that the American telegraph will succeed.
The corresponding solution of the equation
by which the effect of imperfect insulation may be taken
into account is the change of electrical potential V
in the cable due to imperfect insulation
is equal to 1 over 2...
With his deep understanding of physics,
Thomson was the ideal candidate for the position of chief engineer
of Field's Atlantic Telegraph Company.
But ignorant of the scientific challenges that faced them,
Cyrus Field appoints Thomson as an advisor,
and instead an amateur experimenter, Wildman Whitehouse,
is given the most senior scientific position in the company.
Wildman Whitehouse, appropriately named, yes.
He was a surgeon by training.
He had no background in electricity or engineering,
but not many people involved in the enterprise did.
He was a self-taught telegraph engineer.
He had his own theories.
He'd done lots of research,
but he used his his own special terminology,
and he used his own equipment to measure the properties of wires.
So they go into this with a chief engineer
who doesn't really know what's going on.
I mean, to be fair, hardly anyone does.
With his team in place, now, Field must choose the route.
Initially, a direct line running from New York to Britain or France is
considered until deep sea soundings by the US Navy reveal something
unexpected and providential.
From Newfoundland to Ireland,
the bottom of the sea between the two places is a plateau,
which seems to have been placed there,
especially for the purpose of holding the wires
of a submarine telegraph and of keeping them out of harm's way.
At some level, this felt miraculous.
This must be there for a reason.
God must have put this plateau across the middle
of the Atlantic Ocean so that we could lay the cable,
that this was part of human destiny.
You're talking about a time when people
really saw God's hand in things,
and he was doing it so the humanity could live a better life.
The Atlantic Plateau decides the matter.
Ireland will be the landing point in Europe.
But where in Ireland?
The answer comes from an encounter after between Field
and Peter Fitzgerald, 19th Knight of Kerry.
Knight of Kerry was a member of Parliament in London,
and when Cyrus Field was raising funds,
he befriended Peter Fitzgerald, and Peter,
of course, knew everybody that was important in London,
and he opened the doors for the raising
of finance for Cyrus Field.
The Knight of Kerry, he was actually very innovative and progressive.
He lived on the island,
and very different to other British landlords,
he actually really cared about his Irish tenants
and the local population.
This was shortly after the famine.
In the decade before the first Transatlantic cable attempt,
a devastating famine, triggered by the failure of the potato crop,
had caused the deaths of one million people in Ireland.
Two million more had been forced to emigrate.
Under Fitzgerald's stewardship,
however, the inhabitants of Valentia Island escaped the worst.
Sir Peter Fitzgerald was conscious of ensuring that Valentia
had economic viability.
So he had invested in the growing and weaving of flax for export.
He invested in the development of the slate factory.
Through friends in London, Fitzgerald has secured lucrative contracts
to supply Valentia Slate
to Westminster Palace and the London underground.
Now, Fitzgerald convinces Field that the safe
harbour of Valentia Island on Ireland's westerly coast
is the ideal location for his European base.
The team is assembled.
The launch site agreed.
But the biggest challenge remains ahead.
A cable strong and flexible enough to survive the pressures of the vast
Atlantic Ocean mission must be produced.
The Atlantic Telegraph is now in the process of manufacture.
2,500 miles of cable are to be ready to go to sea by the end of May.
And if no accident happens, electric messages will be passing between
Ireland and Newfoundland before July.
So this is one of the first cables, and as you can see,
there's copper in the middle with gutta-percha
and hemp surrounding it,
and then iron, too, that was twisted around it.
To make a cable strong enough to survive the forces involved,
29,000 kilometers of copper wire must be
wound in 526,000 kilometers of protective iron wire.
That's an iron wire long enough to reach the moon.
The contract to manufacture the cable
goes to two rope and cable manufacturers in England.
The cable required lots of copper.
This copper would have come from Cornwall.
It could have come also from Chile.
And they wind it through the machines, making a core.
They then cover it with gutta-percha.
We had materials being used to make this cable
that came from Cornwall,
that came from Chile, that came from Indonesia.
Workers around the world, thousands of them had to come
together to make this happen.
It was a massive international effort.
This is the moment where we can start to see what we now would
think of as globalisation.
This is where globalisation starts.
The cables are extremely long.
They require tons and tons of gutta-percha.
And the way they harvested the latex was to cut the tree down.
They essentially destroy the forests.
The costs involved for Field and the Transatlantic Telegraph Company
are inevitably substantial.
Field invests much of his own fortune.
For the rest, he turns to the private market.
He goes and raises money from investors.
And a bit like with a modern tech startup,
you have a roadshow, you have a PowerPoint deck,
and he's saying, This is going to be great.
We're all going to make lots of money.
It's going to change the world. World peace.
I don't think the idea that this will make humanity better
is just spin. I think people actually believe it.
I think there's a sense that in some way,
the world has changed on its axis here.
Something different has happened.
Maybe this is humanity entering a better phase.
There's still that belief that technology
could make us better, make us better people,
and to learn to love one another.
August 4th, 1857,
with the international press and large crowds
watching on Valentia Island, the Atlantic Telegraph Company
prepares to transform the world.
On loan from the British and US governments,
the HMS Agamemnon
and the USS Niagara carry half the cable each on board.
The idea is that Niagara will spoil out its half,
and then when they get halfway,
they'll stick on the Agamemnon's half
and do the second half of the cable.
Cable boats today are advanced.
They're purpose-built ships made for this purpose.
They worked 365 days a year, laying cable or fixing faults.
The original guys took navy ships that were not built for purpose.
They modified them to take the cable that they needed.
They were learning as they went.
They were finding problems and fixing them on the go.
But how they took those ships loaded with that weight of cable to start
distributing across the Atlantic is mind-blowing.
Before the ships depart, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,
George Howard, delivers a rousing speech.
We are about to establish a new material link
between the old world and the new.
Our new link, instead of superseding and supplanting the old ones,
is to give a life and intensity which they never had before.
There was bands there.
There was artists depicting what was going on,
and there was huge excitement over this transatlantic cable.
We had so many visitors in the island.
It was a wonder where they got accommodation.
To celebrate the laying of the cable,
the Knight of Kerry had a banquet and a dance,
and these were held in John O'Driscoll's store
in the Slate Yard.
On the eve of this great ocean voyage,
nerves among the sailors and pioneers are on edge.
The whole adventure of the big ship leaving the harbour
with the additional bit of laying this cable out behind it,
fit into a whole set of stories of ocean adventures, I suppose,
going back to Homer, really,
of setting out into the ocean and the ocean being,
in in lots of ways, one of the last frontiers.
Cyrus Field feels the weight of history.
I have no words to express the feelings
which fill my heart tonight.
It beats with love and affection for every man,
woman, and child who hears me.
The following morning, the ships set sail.
In a portent of what may lie ahead,
only hours after leaving port, the cable snaps.
The ships must return to Valentia for repairs.
The next day, they sail out once more.
This time with little fanfare.
But again, almost immediately, calamity strikes.
When they were 280 miles out, as the ocean suddenly got deeper,
the cable was running out,
it was very heavy, and it was running out too fast,
and the braking system wasn't good enough,
and they couldn't control the braking system.
The cable dropped really quickly.
The guys on the ship went, Oh, my God. Help, help.
They pulled a brake and they snapped the cable.
That first cable was really inadequate.
It was really just too thin and too weak to withstand the Atlantic.
New boats today can measure the tension on the cable.
There could be a couple of tons weight
tension on the cable as it goes to the greater depths,
and they can vary and release those
to manage that so it doesn't get stressed.
We're back in the day, the tensions on the cable was causing the snap.
The loss of 480 kilometers of cable is a catastrophe.
Not only has the 1857 mission failed,
it has devoured most of the money Field had raised.
The Atlantic Telegraph Company is an embarrassment to the world.
Field, though, remains determined.
Over winter, the braking system that controls the speed and tension
at which the cable is paid out is improved.
A fresh fundraising round is initiated
with shares of £20 sold to private investors in the US and the UK.
Then a year later, the team is set to go again.
June 10th, 1858,
the two refitted ships depart for the second time
from Plymouth in the UK.
The plan has changed.
The ships will start laying cable together
from the middle of the ocean.
It is proposed that the two ships, each laden with half the cable,
shall proceed together to a point halfway between the two coasts.
The two ends of the cable,
having been carefully joined together,
the vessels will start in opposite directions, one towards Ireland
and the other towards Newfoundland.
Newfoundland in the 1850s is very sparsely populated place.
It's dependent upon seasonal fishery,
cod primarily, hunting seals in the winter.
So it's basically a hunter-gatherer subsistence life.
And if the fish don't come in or if the seals are offshore,
the ice is offshore, there's real hunger.
People actually starve to death in Newfoundland.
The Agamemnon and the Niagara
successfully rendezvous halfway between Europe
and Newfoundland and set off.
But within hours, catastrophe hits again.
The Agamemnon rose heavily
and then went down quickly into the deep trough
of the sea, falling over as she did.
So almost to capsize completely, everything broke adrift.
Equipped to carry 1,250 tons of cable,
the Agamemnon struggles to stay afloat.
Two men are injured as the ship rolls violently.
Cabins are flooded.
The cable is damaged.
It was evident that the ship itself would soon strain into pieces if
the weather continued so.
It takes 10 days for the storm to blow out.
Beaten and battered,
the ship's rendezvous and make repairs,
and field then orders the cable laying to continue.
Again, however, the mission is blighted.
Twice more, the cable snaps.
Long sections are lost several kilometers down to the ocean floor.
After a month of toil,
the ships run perilously low on coal and food, and finally,
they realise they must give up and return to Ireland.
Cyrus Field faces ruin.
The strain on the man was more than the strain on the cable.
We were in fear that both would break together.
Shocked by this second failure,
chairman of the Atlantic Telegraph Company,
Sir William Brown, calls for the entire mission to be
scrapped and what remains of the cable to be sold.
But against all odds, Field persuades the Company Board
to allow him one last attempt.
Quickly, he has the ships reprovisioned,
and just four weeks later,
they sail again.
The mission seems doomed.
Three times more the cable breaks.
Each time, crewmen fish it back from the depths with grappling
lines several miles long.
Confronting each challenge head-on,
the USS Niagara continues across the Atlantic
And on the evening of August 4th, 1858, Cyrus Field,
the man whose drive and vision has sustained this epic journey,
at last enters Newfoundland's Trinity Bay.
Hours later, on the far side of the ocean,
the HMS Agamemnon arrives
at Valentia Harbour to the sound of a massive gun salute.
Five years of toil, persistence, and ingenuity has paid off.
The two continents of Europe and North America,
the old world and the new, have at last been joined together
by a man-made sub-sea communications cable.
Among the first telegraphs Field sends is one to his wife, Mary,
and their seven children in New York.
Arrived here yesterday, all well.
The Atlantic telegraph cable successfully laid.
Please telegraph me here immediately.
Later that day, Field receives a telegram from the
American President, James Buchanan.
I congratulate you with all my heart
upon the success of the great enterprise.
Under the blessings of divine providence,
I trust it may prove instrumental in promoting perpetual peace
and friendship between Kings and nations.
I have not yet received the Queen's dispatch.
The world is completely besotted by this and completely excited.
In some places, all business was suspended.
Men rushed into the streets
and flocked to the offices where the news was received.
There were tremendous celebrations here in Valentia.
There was barrels of porter poured out by the Knight of Kerry.
There were celebrations in Dublin and London,
all over the world, really.
There are massive celebrations in the streets of New York.
There's a fireworks display so big
that it sets the roof of the City Hall on fire.
There's a half-day holiday declared.
There's a piece of the cables paraded down Fifth Avenue.
There are telegraph balls.
There's telegraph merchandise. You could buy a walking stick,
a gentleman's walking stick, that had a piece of the actual cable
built into the shaft, designed by Tiffany's.
Now, I want one of these.
Here in New York, the triumphant pyrotechnics We celebrated
this final and complete subjugation
by man of all the powers of nature,
space and time included.
The phrase is used that this annihilates time and space.
It has a hard to think of a bigger claim to make about anything.
If you could send a message more or less instantly across it,
time was gone, space was gone.
August 16th,
President Buchanan receives a message from the British monarch,
Queen Victoria.
The Queen is convinced that the President will join her
in fervently hoping that the electric cable will prove
an additional link between the nations
whose friendship is founded upon
their common interest and reciprocal esteem.
Glory to God in the highest and to Earth,
peace and goodwill to all men,
was the first message sent on the cable.
It's talked about in terms of uniting humanity.
Cyrus Field appears to have been fully aware
of the future implications of his great endeavour.
The whole earth will be belted with electric current,
palpitating with human thoughts and emotions.
Repeat, please. Repeat, please.
Please send slower for the present.
Repeat, please. How?
How do you receive...
But as the world celebrates, the cable is failing.
Sorry we didn't catch that.
Can you repeat, please?
Repeat, please.
The cable had been unreliable from the start.
From the very first day,
it was quite difficult for the operator
to understand the message being transmitted.
Repeat, repeat, please.
Repeat, please.
Please, just please say, say...
So when you put a cable under the sea
and you make it very long,
what you have is something called retardation.
It would lengthen these pulses, and that meant that the next incoming
pulse overlapped with the previous pulse.
There was no space between the signals.
And that meant the signals at the other end of the cable
were all distorted, so the telegraph operators just heard noise.
Repeat, please. Repeat, please.
Please send these and these.
these and these.
The first message to be sent over was from Queen Victoria
to President Buchanan in the US.
And it was 90 words long, and it took 16 and a half hours
to transmit because of these problems.
In a converted slate house on Valentia Island,
Wildman Whitehouse seeks desperately for solution.
Whitehouse's answer is to turn up the voltage.
He thinks, well, surely this is the way
to make signals travel more effectively
over very long distances.
He then increases the voltage
to around 2000 volts through this narrow cable.
So he thought, okay, well, I'm going to give it a big amount
of voltage on this side of the cable
to the point where it gets to the other
end of the very long cable.
It's still going to have some voltage.
He didn't realise that that's just not how the science works
And what happened was he burnt out the cable,
so the cable was destroyed.
After two weeks of evermore garbled messages,
the company board has enough.
Whitehouse is fired and William Thomson is promoted.
Thomson immediately rectifies the issue
by reducing the power sent through the cable.
But the cable is too damaged to survive.
Within a week, the line is permanently dead.
When news of this gets into the media,
some of the media reports say that the whole thing was
made up, and it was all a complete fake.
There's a big scandal because this cable has been hailed as a...
you know, great breakthrough for mankind,
and that everyone's written it up in the papers.
So a lot of people say "Well, did it ever work?
This whole thing could have been a hoax."
It could have been a way of trying to get money out of investors.
Reliable and unimpeachable evidence is wanting
that one solitary, intelligible sentence ever passed
upon the cable from either continent to the other.
Have the cable managers humbugged the public?
The same obviously happened with the moon landings.
There are still people who say "Oh, yes, it was all a trick."
You know, "They got Stanley Kubrick to do it,
and it was all faked by NASA
on sound stages and this sort of thing."
So these amazing leaps forward are sometimes
so amazing that people can't believe that they really happened.
After the failure in 1858, there was a public inquiry in London,
the first of its kind,
and they brought all the scientists together.
William Thomson and Samuel Morse, and Michael Faraday,
all those people were brought together
to see why the 1858 cable failed.
The inquiry's conclusions,
published in 1861 in a 500-page book, are damning.
Amateurism, lack of proper scientific rigour, money wasted.
Following the inquiry, Cyrus Field now turns to the one man
whose scientific knowledge he hopes can save the cable, William Thomson.
Cyrus Field and the other directors turn to Thomson and say
"We should have listened to you. Tell us what we were doing wrong.
Help us sort it out."
Among Thomson's first recommendations
is that future cables must use only copper wire
of the very highest purity.
Thomson also stipulates that future cables
must be both stronger and more flexible.
Though this will increase costs, the company agrees.
He then invents something called a mirrored galvanometer.
Very sensitive instrument for
measuring the current through a very long cable.
I am never content until I have constructed a mechanical model
of the subject I am studying.
If I succeed in making one, I understand.
Otherwise, I do not.
Thomson's super-sensitive galvanometer
revolutionises undersea telegraphy.
The galvanometer allows signals to be sent over vast distances
using low amounts of electrical current.
A tiny mirror mounted on a light coil of copper wire
twists back and forth
in a magnetic field generated by the electric current.
A beam of light reflecting off the mirror
swings one direction for a Morse code dot,
the other for a dash.
When the inquiry ends,
the irrepressible Cyrus Field prepares for a third attempt.
Events in the US, however, bring plans to a halt.
An estimated 750,000 people
lose their lives in the American Civil War.
The war reveals the strategic value of high-speed communications.
In this brutal long war, both Confederate and Union sides
use telegraphs to command armies.
Meanwhile, the British government's commitment to telegraphy also grows.
In the short window during which the Atlantic cable had worked,
British military command sent messages on it
commanding their troops stationed in Canada
to disregard a previous order calling on them to sail to India.
As the Indian mutiny had since been suppressed,
the soldiers were no longer required.
This saved the British government £50,000 at a stroke,
more than repaying its own investment in the cable.
British Prime Ministers often talked about the telegraph
as a trigger, like a trigger on a gun.
You know, could put an army in place
and you could keep that army in the barracks,
send the telegraph, send the army out,
and it can, you know, go to work or go to war.
After so much failure, raising finance for a new attempt
proves a mammoth undertaking.
Investors have lost fortunes in previous attempts,
and have little interest in being burned again,
but Field remains adamant.
A transatlantic cable will be achieved.
The Atlantic telegraph's value
can hardly be estimated to the commerce
and even to the peace of the world.
Then, in a bold move for his third attempt at the mission,
Field leases an extraordinary asset.
Designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel,
the Great Eastern is the largest ship in the world.
There's this enormous ship, The Great Eastern.
It's never really made any sense.
Turns out it's absolutely brilliant for cable laying.
The Great Eastern is refitted to carry a whopping 10,000 tons
of cable and a crew of 200.
There's a wonderful painting
by the official painter, Robert Dudley,
of the Great Eastern, and there's a normal size frigate beside her,
and then a smaller supply ship beside that.
And you can see, just as a painter, what he's done.
He's put them there for scale.
That you look at the Great Eastern, you think "Oh, a ship."
Then you realise "No, that's a normal-size ship beside it.
That is a beast!"
It's about scale. It's about...
"Look at what we can build."
Bigger, better, but also the kinda conquest of the Atlantic.
"We can conquer not just the surface, but the deeps.
We can conquer the bottom of the ocean."
On July 23, 1865, the world's press descend once again
on Valentia Island to witness the third attempt to connect Europe
to America by cable.
Rich and powerful mingle with less well-off locals.
It was a strange crowd to look at.
Half the men were barefoot, and none of them were decently clad.
The chances are that three or four could have seen the point of a joke
and given a smart answer themselves.
So we're on the most westerly point of Valentia Island now.
Next stop from here is North America.
And see those islands there? They're the Skelligs.
And in 1865, just beyond them
is where the Great Eastern had to anchor
because it was too large to come into this harbour.
So a boat had to come out and collect the shoreline cable,
and bring it back, and connect it
to this purpose-built cable station right here.
With a cable plugged in, Cyrus Field sets out on the Great Eastern,
destination: Newfoundland.
The Great Eastern proves far more reliable than the old navy ships.
Progress is easily made.
The Great Eastern, from her size and constant steadiness
and from the control over her afforded by the joint use
of paddles and screw,
renders it safe to lay an Atlantic cable in any weather.
Everything went quite well
until they were 600 miles off of Newfoundland.
A damaged cable went out and they had to haul it back in.
But when the crew tries to haul the cable up from the depths,
it breaks. (snap)
It flew through the stoppers and with one bound,
leaped over the intervening space and flashed into the sea.
The cable, gone forever, down into that fearful depth.
The cable snaps,
and it's lost to the bottom of the sea.
But this time, unlike in 1857,
they decide to mark the spot
and to come back and recover it.
Though disappointed, the team is optimistic.
For before the cable broke,
operators were sending clear messages
between the Great Eastern and Valentia Island, County Kerry.
Now certain that the cable can function perfectly,
Field raises a new round of finance.
July 13th 1866,
the Great Eastern weighs anchor and departs Valentia Island
for the fourth attempt.
It was so calm that the masts of her convoy
were reflected in the ocean.
A large shoal of porpoises gambled about us for about half an hour.
A glorious sunset, and later, a crescent moon.
This time, there are no significant problems.
After 14 days at sea, the massive ship reaches Newfoundland,
where a new cable station has been built
in the village of Heart's Content.
And then all of a sudden, they look out,
they see six huge masts
coming around the point, of an almost 700-foot ship
coming into the mouth of the harbour
to change the face of the town forever.
The ladies would have wore their Sunday best.
The men would have been in top hats and tails.
They would have had huge celebrations.
Cyrus Field walks off the Great Eastern and he comes ashore,
and he's literally hoisted above the heads of the people.
(cheering and shouting)
And then they send a message and actually say,
"We have now connected the two continents."
It is a glory to our age and nation,
and the men who have achieved it deserve to be honoured
among the benefactors of their race.
Since the discovery of Columbus, nothing has been done
in any degree comparable to the vast enlargement
that has thus been given
to the sphere of human activity.
The world is stunned and thrilled.
Cyrus Field has achieved his dream.
He telegraphs a note to his friend and supporter,
the Knight of Kerry in Valentia.
This was put together by the Knight of Kerry.
And there is this message from Cyrus Field,
sent from Heart's Content
in Newfoundland, so they've got to the other side.
And it says "Ireland and America are united by telegraph.
Please remember me very kindly to all your family."
Sent at 12:30.
With the transatlantic cable successfully relaying messages
between Europe and North America,
Field heads out into the ocean to see if he can find
the cable that had sunk the year before.
After three weeks grappling, the 1865 cable is recovered
from a depth of two kilometres down.
In a characteristic act of showmanship,
Cyrus Field uses the 1865 cable to send a message
from the Great Eastern to the cable hut on Valentia Island,
and from there his message is relayed, via the new 1866 cable,
back to Newfoundland.
And they say he wept as he sent that message.
As I sat in the electrician's room,
a flash of light came up from the deep,
which, having crossed to Ireland, came back to me in mid-ocean,
telling that those so dear to me were well
and following us with their wishes and their prayers.
This was like a whisper of God from the sea,
bidding me keep heart and hope.
The significance of that moment
is when you realise that the world
that we knew had changed forever,
and the way that you communicated had changed forever.
A lot of inspiration that we can take from them
is about perseverance, about being hardworking,
about understanding each other's skillset
and putting the right people in the right place.
The thing that gets me is that
they tried and failed and tried and failed.
And it's like...
just keep trying until you achieve it.
I admire the perseverance and resilience
that Cyrus Field and all of the men back then had,
that they weren't giving up on this challenge.
They were going to succeed and connect the two continents.
That vision and that hope or dream, that's what I take from the story.
It also transforms life on Valentia Island.
Skilled cable operators come from far and wide.
Housing, offices, and a new cable station are built.
And just as the Knight of Kerry had anticipated,
Valentia's economy thrives.
So Valentia Island becomes a global centre of communications.
The local impact is that a lot of well-paid staff arrive
to work in the cable station.
The British gentlemen and their families
lived in the cable station houses.
In the height in Valencia,
when the cable station was in full operation,
there was up to 200 employees,
about 23 English families living there,
and maybe 28 single rooms for British gentlemen.
They set up tennis courts.
There's pictures of them playing croquet.
There's pictures of them taking photographs
in the lawns which they built
in front of the telegraph buildings.
Now, their wages were supposed to be equivalent
to a bank manager at the time.
So you can imagine 200 bank managers here
in an island off the coast.
That had a massive influence on the local economy here.
So they lived in the lap of luxury.
In the first years, all the cable operators are outsiders,
but in time, many Kerry locals will be trained into the plum jobs.
They bring new wealth and status to the island.
On the opposite side of the Atlantic,
the people of Heart's Content
also find their lives enriched.
The families of the employees here
would have enjoyed many different things
compared to the people who were in Heart's Content
prior to the cable.
Things like curling, billiards,
art classes,
all sorts of more European leisure activities.
These people had cash money,
so they were able to order from catalogues,
and these fashions were available to them.
The success of the transatlantic cable
sparks a communications gold rush.
Cables are laid under every ocean and sea
until the entire planet is connected.
For cable pioneers like Cyrus Field,
Samuel Morse, and Wildman Whitehouse,
who redeems his reputation,
telegraphy generates great wealth.
Yesterday, we had 50 messages,
paying us, I suppose, not less than £12,000.
Sending a telegram was really, really expensive.
For 20 words,
you're paying £20 in 1866,
which is an enormous amount of money.
It's more than the annual budget of a worker at the time
working in one of the mills.
It was so completely out of reach
for 99% of the world population.
One of the reasons that the Atlantic Telegraph is so profitable
right away is that traders
and financial types could send messages,
could synchronize markets much more efficiently.
And so we see immediately
an increase in the pace of business information
travelling around the world.
Suddenly, you start to see complaints
from of stockbrokers saying,
We used to have an easy life, and now we're expected to jump
as soon as we receive news about a price changing.
So it was a cause of a lot of stress.
With humanity sharing information
at speeds hitherto thought impossible,
the world seems to shrink.
Life seems to move at a faster pace.
Today, people complain that there's a information overload.
It's too much to deal with.
But imagine how much more traumatic it must have
been for people living
in the second half of the 19th century, because they went from
really not having international communication,
not having telecommunication at all,
to having it in a very short period of time.
Year by year, the technology improves.
Data moves faster.
Photographs can be sent.
News crisscrosses continents in an instant.
Suddenly,
you can get news from around the world very, very quickly.
And they really, I think, went through
a very, very dramatic acceleration in the pace of life.
Newspapers are heavy consumers of it.
So newspapers are now carrying stories from around the world,
maybe a day after they happen, which is revolutionary.
In time, the price of sending a message by cable falls,
but it will take years before sending messages
becomes affordable to ordinary people.
For decades into the first part of the 20th century,
the only telegram worth the price
is one sending news of a birth or a death.
Meanwhile, the overwhelming impact of the cable
continues to make itself felt as the world grows ever smaller.
(explosions)
The big tipping point is the First World War.
They're sending back reports of casualties.
They're sending back the horror of that war
in a way that would run directly counter
to the narrative of heroism
that the same government that paid for the wires
would want to put out.
And suddenly, people in England are getting reports of what's happening
on the battlefield as it happens.
People realized, Well, no, this is horrific.
So it changes our sense of empathy.
It changes our sense of value,
it changes our sense of purpose
of not just what it is to be a people or a nation,
but how that impacts globally.
There's a moment where we glimpse our world coming into being.
The First World War
also acutely reveals the strategic importance of undersea cables.
One of Britain's first moves in August 1914
is to cut Germany's transatlantic cable,
giving the Allies an immediate advantage in the war.
The battle for control of the global information superhighway
had begun.
The years that follow the First World War
bring change to Ireland.
Irish nationalists rise to end centuries of British rule in Ireland
and achieve independence for most of the island in 1922.
Worried for the safety of their communications,
Britain reroutes its Atlantic telegraph connection
from Valentia Island to Cornwall.
In the Carrier System Department,
trained technicians maintain equipment
that transmits hundreds of messages over a single pair of wires.
In the decades that follow, the technology leaps forward.
Radio telegraphy, the telephone, faster data transfer languages,
and satellites come to displace Morse code telegraphy.
Cable stations become increasingly irrelevant,
and in 1966,
the Valentia Island Cable Station shuts its doors for good.
But undersea cables remain the mainstay
of our global communication systems to this day.
99% of international traffic goes via sub-sea cables,
with only 1% via satellites.
Everything from your searches on the Internet,
to your AI learning, to your digitised voice.
We take all those ones and zeros, create an optical signal,
and send it across the sub-sea link.
I think the physics of that alone is phenomenal.
When Samuel Morse sent his first telegraph in 1844,
it read...
What hath God wrought?
In the two centuries since,
the overwhelming scale of what he intended has become clear.
Technology amplifies human nature,
so it amplifies the good things and it amplifies the bad things.
So yes, they allow us to do wonderful things,
to get more information,
share information with our friends, share pictures,
to stay in touch with people,
to communicate, to work from anywhere.
This is all immensely positive and which makes our lives
much easier, much more flexible.
But the pace of life increases,
and this is both exhilarating
and, for some people, quite worrying.
The reality is, of course,
that it didn't bring on world peace.
It soon could become an instrument of war.
So the virtuous utopian idea
that the telegraph was going to lead on to world peace
was just a myth.
The Internet changed our world beyond imagination.
And yes, there are some negatives, but the positives easily,
easily outweigh the negatives.
Even just think about something like the pandemic.
We were still able to educate people because of the Internet.
Just think about health and health information
and medical technology.
You can now operate on on somebody
on a different continent with robotic hands
somewhere else because of the Internet.
I think there's something we take for granted today, and that is
that through a phone,
we can be connected to things that are happening
all around the world instantly.
Before the telegraph, no human being had ever experienced that.
The more we can communicate,
the better we can communicate with distant people,
the more understanding there is, the more empathy there can be,
and the better we can be as human beings.
I think that's worth salvaging.
Cyrus Field's vision and courage change the world.
Though bad investments caused him later to lose much of his fortune,
he was ever conscious of the seismic transformation he had set in motion.
What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.
Peter Fitzgerald, the Knight of Kerry,
fulfilled his dreams of seeing Valentia becoming a key nodal point
of the Global Communications Network.
For his contributions to science,
William Thompson was ennobled as Lord Kelvin.
He is buried in Westminster Abbey,
surrounded by a floor of Valentia Slate.
Those who periled the original Atlantic Telegraph
were impelled by a sense of the grandeur of their enterprise
and of the worldwide benefits which must flow from its success.
Science, even in its most lofty speculations,
can promote the social and material welfare of man.
These are unsung heroes in the world.
They were the pioneers to lay these communication systems,
this cable, across the Atlantic.
They were the first to take this adventure
and do it and show that, yes,
you can transmit messages and data across continents.
So it was far more than just physics.
They had an attitude to serve the society
with the solution that they had in mind, and that's amazing.