The Cable That Changed the World: How the Transatlantic Telegraph Link Was Built in 1858

The first message crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1858, carried by a cable stretched across 2,000 miles of sea. It changed everything.

Primal Space tells the story of that cable in a video called The Cable That Changed the World: How Instant Global Communication Began in 1858. The cable was laid between North America and Europe, and it enabled the first direct communication link between the two continents. It did not bring video sharing. It brought the telegraph.

The telegraph was the Victorian Internet, a term borrowed from Tom Standage’s book The Victorian Internet, which inspired the video. The technology is older than the cable itself. Here is how it got there.

Nollet’s Monks

One possible starting point is 1746, when scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet sent a jolt of static electricity down a line of 200 monks. The monks acted as conductors, each passing the charge to the next. It was a crude demonstration, but it showed that information could travel along a wire.

Chappe’s Towers

Another starting point is 1792, when inventor Claude Chappe’s system of semaphoric towers was first implemented. These towers used no electricity at all. A human operator in one tower spotted a change in the signal of the previous tower and rearranged his own semaphores to match. The signal passed from tower to tower down the line.

Volta’s Battery

In 1800, Alessandro Volta’s chemical battery helped make the electric telegraph viable. But nobody knew how best to transmit intelligible messages in the form of electrical pulses. The problem was coding.

Morse’s Code

Nobody was sure until the eighteen-thirties, when a painter named Samuel Morse came up with the dot-and-dash code that now bears his name. He also invented the devices used to encode and decode communications made with it. The code became the standard way to send text over telegraph wires.

Cooke and Wheatstone

At the same time, English inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone had come up with their own telegraph system. Their system did not require a codebook, but it used five wires, which made it more expensive and technologically complex. Both systems competed, but Morse’s eventually won out.

Telegraph Lines Spread

Within a few years, the U.S. and the U.K. had independently built thousands of miles of telegraph lines. The next step was obvious: linking them together. The 1858 cable was the attempt.

The Cable Failed

The cable laid in 1858 failed within months. But its basic concept proved unusually robust. Today, roughly 600 undersea cables carry global internet traffic. Without them, you would not be reading this post.

The story is funny because it shows how far we have come. We now assume that information travels through the air. We forget that it once traveled through wires.

For more on the history of communication, see What the Entire Internet Looked Like in 1973: An Old Map Gets Found in a Pile of Research Papers and A Fascinating 3D Animation Shows the Depths of the Ocean.

The video is worth watching because it tells the whole story in one place. It starts with monks and ends with the internet.

Key Facts Box

• Cable length: 2,000 miles
• Laid: 1858
• First transatlantic communication link
• Failed within months
• Today: Roughly 600 undersea cables carry global internet traffic

Timeline of the Telegraf

• 1746: Scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet sends a jolt of static electricity down a line of 200 monks
• 1792: Inventor Claude Chappe implements his system of semaphoric towers
• 1800: Alessandro Volta’s chemical battery helps make the electric telegraph viable
• 1830s: Samuel Morse invents his dot-and-dash code
• 1858: The cable is laid across the Atlantic Ocean

The cable failed. But the idea lived.

See the video the story is built around at Open Culture.

communications · history · internet · technology · telegraph