On This Date in History: In Antebellum America of the mid 19th
Century, a message could be sent from New Orleans to Maine in a
matter of minutes. But, that same message might take two weeks
to get to London as it was unthinkable to be able to lay a cable
all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. Unthinkable to everyone
but Cyrus Field. Field was a paper merchant who had been so
successful in business that he was able to retire by age 34 when
he came up with a plan to lay a transatlantic cable. He thought
that it wasn’t quite a difficult as it sounded because he
figured that the cable could rest on an underwater plateau
between Newfoundland and Ireland. He was so certain of success,
that in 1856 he formed the Atlantic Telegraph Company after
meeting a Canadian from Newfoundland looking for investors for
his nearly bankrupt telegraph concern. Even though he had his
own ideas, well-meaning citizens offered their own suggestions.
One suggested have floating call boxes so that passing ships
could stop and send a mess