Volume 50, Number 10 · June 12, 2003
Triumph at Heart's Content
By Jean Strouse
A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable
by John Steele Gordon
Walker, 240 pp., $26.00
On August 6, 1858, the day after teams of men organized by the American entrepreneur Cyrus W. Field finished laying two thousand miles of copper telegraph cable on the floor of the Atlantic between Britain and North America, the lead article in the London Times proclaimed that not since 'the discovery of Columbus' had the world seen anything comparable to the 'vast enlargement which has thus been given to the sphere of human activity.' The piece went on, with a certain irrational exuberance: 'In regard to the great American Republic [the Atlantic telegraph] has half undone the declaration of 1775, and has gone far to make us once again, in spite of ourselves, one people.' (In spite of themselves, the Times's writers had granted their coun-try's former colony an extra year of independence.)
Review, 3978 words
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