Book Review

Book Review; Ingenuity, Capitalism in the Quest to Link Continents

Day, Anthony

2002

Overview

Into \"A Thread Across the Ocean\" [John Steele 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.

• Publisher: Los Angeles Times Communications LLC
• Subject: Books-titles / Gordon, John Steele / History / Nonfiction / Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable