- Gordon, John Steele.
A Thread Across the Ocean.
New York: Harper Perennial, 2002.
ISBN 978-0-06-052446-3.
-
There are inventions, and there are meta-inventions. Many
things were invented in the 19th century which contributed to the
wealth of the present-day developed world, but there
were also concepts which emerged in that era of “anything
is possible” ferment which cast even longer shadows. One of
the most important is entrepreneurship—the ability
of a visionary who sees beyond the horizon of the conventional
wisdom to assemble the technical know-how, the financial capital,
the managers and labourers to do the work, while keeping all of
the balls in the air and fending off the horrific setbacks that
any breakthrough technology will necessarily encounter as it
matures.
Cyrus W. Field
may not have been the first entrepreneur in the modern mold, but he
was without doubt one of the greatest. Having started with almost no
financial resources and then made his fortune in the manufacture of paper,
he turned his attention to telegraphy. Why, in the mid-19th century,
should news and information between the Old World and the New move
only as fast as sailing ships could convey it, while the telegraph
could flash information across continents in seconds? Why,
indeed?—Field took a proposal to lay a submarine cable from
Newfoundland to the United States to cut two days off the
transatlantic latency of around two weeks to its logical limit:
a cable across the entire Atlantic which could relay information in
seconds, linking the continents together in a web of
information which was, if low bandwidth, almost instantaneous compared
to dispatches carried on ships.
Field knew next to nothing about electricity, manufacturing of
insulated cables thousands of miles long, paying-out mechanisms
to lay them on the seabed, or the navigational challenges in
carrying a cable from one continent to another. But he was
supremely confident that success in the endeavour would enrich
those who accomplished it beyond their dreams of avarice, and
persuasive in enlisting in the effort not only wealthy backers
to pay the bills but also technological savants including
Samuel F. B. Morse and William Thompson
(later Lord Kelvin), who invented the mirror
galvanometer which made the submarine cable viable.
When you try to do something audacious which has never been
attempted before, however great the promise, you shouldn't
expect to succeed the first time, or the second, or the
third…. Indeed, the history of transatlantic cable was
one of frustration, dashed hopes, lost investments, derision
in the popular press—until it worked. Then it was the
wonder of the age. So it has been and shall always be with
entrepreneurship.
Today, gigabytes per second flow beneath the oceans through the
tubes. Unless you're in continental Eurasia, it's
likely these bits reached you through one of them. It all had
to start somewhere, and this is the chronicle of how that
came to be. This may have been the first time it became evident
there was a time value to information: that the news, financial
quotes, and messages delivered in minutes instead of weeks were
much more valuable than those which arrived long after the fact.
It is also interesting that the laying of the first successful
transatlantic cable was almost entirely a British operation.
While the American Cyrus Field was the promoter, almost all of the
capital, the ships, the manufacture of the cable, and the scientific
and engineering expertise in its production and deployment was
British.
October 2012 