Newspaper Article

The Man Who Shrank the Ocean

Yardley, Jonathan

2002

Overview

Walker. 240 pp. $26On July 27, 1866, an immense vessel called the Great Eastern approached the shore of a hamlet in Newfoundland with the memorable name of Heart's Content. The ship had slowly made its way there from England, playing out mile upon mile of copper cable encased in a rubber-like substance harvested in Malaya called gutta- percha. The cable was brought ashore and spliced to cable already in place that linked Newfoundland to New York. Thereupon Cyrus Field, whose unstinting labors and vast financial outlay over a dozen years had made the enterprise possible, cabled the Associated Press. \"We arrived here at nine o'clock this morning. All well. Thank God, the cable is laid, and is in perfect working order.\" So Field and his partners in the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Co., formed in March 1854, were either visionaries or fools. For much of the following decade the latter seemed the more likely, though initially prospects seemed bright. Newfoundland had been chosen as the North American landing site because, as a contemporary oceanographer wrote, \"From Newfoundland to Ireland, the distance between the nearest points is about sixteen hundred miles; and 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.\"

• Publisher: WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post
• Subject: Books-titles / Cables / Gordon, John Steele / History / Nonfiction / Telegraph service / Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable