- [Narrator] Decades before the telephone,
a century before the internet,
long-distance communication is done by telegraph-
- Telegraph allows a real integration of communications.
- [Narrator] Unless there's an ocean in the way.
- Europe can integrate with Asia,
because telegraphs can go across land,
but they can't go across water.
- America was cut off.
- [Narrator] To become a superpower,
the United States needs to connect.
And one man sees the answer.
- What if messages from Europe didn't take weeks?
- [Narrator] A telegraph cable across the ocean floor.
- It was brilliant or insane.
- The transatlantic cable is the precursor
to the internet that we know today.
- [Narrator] And he's not the only one trying.
- I need Russia's blessing.
Are you in?
- The ambition to build a cable
from the US to Russia was just insane.
- [Narrator] The two rivals risk millions.
- You're sinking your fortune and your reputation
into this almost impossible project.
- [Narrator] Face one disaster after another-
- [Ainissa] They think it's a complete hoax.
- You're fired.
- All of the work that they had done was completely lost.
- [Narrator] And are forced to fight
for their very survival-
- The boat might even sink.
- Any sign of the Agamemnon?
- [Narrator] In hopes of achieving the impossible.
- Whichever cable works first wins,
and whichever cable doesn't take loses everything.
(intense music)
(soft dramatic music)
- [Narrator] In the mid-1800s,
at a time when politics and business
are starting to go global
and an age of innovation is about to dawn,
one thing hasn't changed since the time of the pilgrims:
Getting a message to or from Europe still takes weeks.
- The United States in the 1850s
is really on the cusp of a dramatic revolution.
Productivity is about to really boom.
But to sell stuff, you need information,
and the Atlantic Ocean is cutting off the United States
from global markets.
- In 1850, if we were gonna communicate with Europe,
information had to travel by boat.
- [Narrator] Domestically, the US uses
an American innovation to communicate long-distance:
Samuel Morse's telegraph,
which already covers the East with 20,000 miles of cable.
But communicating overseas is a problem.
- The telegraph allows a real integration of communications.
It allows markets to integrate, politics to integrate,
people to integrate their lives.
So, Europe can integrate with Asia
because telegraphs can go across land,
but they can't go across water.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] In New York,
an entrepreneur who made his fortune
from the last communication boom, newspapers,
is taking early retirement.
At just 34, he's one of the youngest members
of a new class of American elites called millionaires.
- [Woman] Are you going somewhere?
- We are.
I think we could use a vacation.
(woman laughing)
- Cyrus Field left his home in Massachusetts
when he was very young with just a few bucks in his pocket,
started off as a stock boy
and, in an order of like 15 years, became a millionaire.
He went from nothing to a lotta something.
- Field had been very sickly as a child.
And as an adult,
he almost acted like he was making up for lost time.
He worked relentlessly hard.
He drove himself so hard
that his doctors told him he needed to take a break.
- [Narrator] Though Field is in forced retirement,
he grants a meeting request
with someone who piques his curiosity:
the grandnephew of Sir Isaac Newton, Frederic Gisborne-
- Mr. Field, thank you for seeing me.
- [Narrator] A telegraph engineer seeking investment
to finish his pet project connecting New York
to easternmost Canada by underwater cable.
(tense orchestral music)
- If they can wire their messages ahead
to New York from Newfoundland, that could cut three days
off the transatlantic communication time.
- Unfortunately, it turned out to be
much more expensive than he had thought it would be.
- Thank you for your time, Mr. Gisborne.
I wish you luck.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Despite his rejection,
Field finds himself fixated on Gisborne's idea.
- He looks at the distance that Gisborne mentions
from Newfoundland to New York.
And then he also looks at the distance
between Newfoundland and the furthest point from Europe,
which is Valentia, Ireland,
and he sees that it's about the same distance.
He's like, "Well, instead of shaving off two days,
"why don't we just have instant communication?"
- A storm in the Atlantic delayed the mail ship by a week.
Still mapping out our trip?
- What if messages from Europe didn't take weeks?
What if you could get them in a single day?
- Stringing a telegraph cable over 2,000 miles
in between the United States and Europe
underwater at the bottom of the sea,
that would greatly change the political and economic climate
and relationship between the United States and Europe.
- That 12- or 15-day gap with London
was an infinity of time
when you're buying and selling securities.
And so, if a cable was built,
the New York and London prices would merge
and they'd operate as one market, and that would be huge.
- [Narrator] But at the time,
using an electrical cable underwater
across the width of the Atlantic is considered impossible.
- That was a little bit like somebody in the 1950s saying,
"Well, hey, let's have a manned expedition to Mars."
- You have to protect that precious cable from the ocean,
which is trying to eat it
in terms of corrosion, infiltration, shorting it out.
It's an inhospitable environment for that thin copper wire
that conducts the telegraph signal.
- [Narrator] But Field is already obsessed with the idea.
- Cyrus Field is not an engineer.
He's a businessman, he's a visionary,
but he doesn't necessarily have the best grasp
of the technical challenges.
So, in his mind, this is a doable project.
- It was fortunate that Cyrus Field
had no idea what he was getting into
because he said later that had he known,
he would never have started.
- [Narrator] In January of 1854,
Cyrus Field takes himself out of retirement,
devoting his life and the equivalent of $100 million today
to developing a transatlantic telegraph cable.
(tense orchestral music)
Field buys out Gisborne's unfinished Canadian cable,
inviting him to stay on as an engineer.
- The project that Cyrus Field was undergoing
was actually two parts.
First was to wire Newfoundland all the way down to New York.
And the second part of the project
was the transatlantic cable.
- [Narrator] After two years of trial and error,
Field has 1,400 miles of telegraph wire
between New York and Newfoundland,
60 of them underwater.
And now he's ready to see if it works.
(rising suspenseful music)
(telegraph key clicking)
(telegraph sounder clicking)
(rising triumphant music)
- It works.
The cable works.
- [Narrator] But unbeknownst to Field and Gisborne,
halfway around the world, another American is working on
an international telegraph connection,
only this one's almost entirely over land, through Russia.
His name: Perry Collins.
- Collins, always looking for the next opportunity.
He's thinking about-
The same sorts of developments
that are happening in the Western United States,
well, he sees those opportunities
in Siberia and in Eastern Russia.
- [Narrator] His vision: Avoid what he sees
as an impossible under-ocean route
by building a land-based telegraph cable
from San Francisco
that connects all the way to St. Petersburg, Russia,
and all of Europe.
- At a time when people were contemplating
a transatlantic cable, he said,
"No, no, no, I've got a better idea,"
a much longer route up through Canada, Alaska,
and then a relatively short underwater route
across the Bering Strait.
- [Narrator] If approved,
Collins' plan to link the US from the west
could beat Field to a European connection
and end his expensive cross-Atlantic dream.
As Perry Collins seeks Russia's buy-in...
(pensive music)
In New York, Cyrus Field works to improve his cable design.
60 miles underwater to Newfoundland is one thing.
But this time, it's 2,000 miles to Ireland.
To help, Field brings in
the father of the telegraph himself, Samuel Morse,
and pioneering electrical engineer Michael Faraday.
With the support of other elite investors,
they develop a state-of-the-art cable design
to withstand the forces of the Atlantic.
- Mother Nature is uniquely good
at consuming manmade materials.
The telegraph cable has to be protected
from the environment, the intense pressure.
If seawater gets in, shorts out the line,
that's it, game over.
- [Narrator] A layered design is the key to its success.
- So, we have copper in the middle,
we have got a gutta-percha, which is an insulator,
and then you have steel wires,
which provide mechanical protection.
- [Narrator] With his wire design complete,
Field rush-orders 2,500 miles of it.
- Cyrus Field is so excited.
He's pushing everything as fast as he can
because he wants this to happen.
(uneasy piano music)
- [Narrator] But at over a ton per mile,
his cable weighs over six million pounds.
- There was not a ship in the world
capable of carrying that much cable.
- [Narrator] Cyrus Field will soon be in possession
of a state-of-the-art telegraph cable
long enough to stretch from North America to Europe
with no way to deploy it.
(dramatic music)
But if Perry Collins connects his land route to Russia,
it won't matter
because that would make Field's undersea cable obsolete
before it even hits the water.
In 1856, Cyrus Field has put into motion
a communications project like the world has never seen.
A plan to connect two continents' telegraph systems
by stringing a 2,000-mile cable
across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
If successful, the undersea telegraph cable
will reduce communication time with Europe
from weeks to just minutes.
But the biggest problem is getting it to sea.
- Laying cable out of a boat in 1857
was not an easy challenge.
The cable had a copper core,
it was surrounded by a resiny insulating layer,
and then that was surrounded by iron wire,
so it was quite heavy.
They simply didn't have one boat big enough
to carry 2,000 miles' worth of cable,
so they were forced to use two boats.
- [Narrator] Field needs to find two state-of-the-art ships
sturdy enough to handle the job.
He sets his sights on battleships
from both sides of the Atlantic.
From Britain, the 91-gun battle-hardened HMS Agamemnon,
fresh from service in the Crimean War.
And from the United States,
the newly-commissioned 162-ton frigate, the USS Niagara.
- Cyrus Field had that American drive,
so he went straight to the government of the UK
and he's like, "I need a boat."
And he went to the government of the United States
and he's like, "I need a boat."
And so, he was able to get some of the biggest warships
that were repurposed so that they could store the cable
and then move the cable across the Atlantic.
- [Narrator] With the combined strength
of the US and British navies,
Field's mission to conquer the Atlantic is underway.
(seagulls squawking)
In August 1857, a crew of 120 men painstakingly coil
over a thousand miles of cable onto each ship.
The USS Niagara's cable is connected to the Irish mainland,
where its chief engineer will monitor the signal strength
throughout the voyage.
(pensive music)
- All good here, Dr. Whitehouse?
- Assuming everyone's followed my instructions.
Once we read each other, you are free to set sail.
- Dr. Edward Whitehouse is a physician.
And in those days, if you are a doctor,
you have all the esteem
to be considered to be a man of science.
And the differentiation between opening up a body
and doing electrical experiments,
there's not too much of a difference to
the everyday person.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Both ships sail to the middle
of the North Atlantic,
where the USS Niagara drops its cable first
as deep as two miles below to the ocean floor.
(waves breaking)
Once the ship's thousand miles are laid,
the plan is to splice the two cables together
and continue on to Newfoundland
as the second ship lays its thousand miles of cable.
- Cyrus Field's got the weight of the world on him.
He has gotten all these investors involved
and two international governments
wondering if he's going to be able to do this
because if he succeeds, this will change the world.
- [Narrator] Back in Ireland,
Whitehouse monitors the signal of the line
as it's laid along the ocean floor.
- The cable is extremely heavy,
so it goes through this payout machine,
which allows it to monitor
how fast it's going into the water.
Because if you go too slow,
then you have too much coiling at the bottom
and you're wasting cable
and it could kink and you'll have other problems.
And if it's going too fast,
well, you can possibly break it.
- 250 miles laid.
All well.
- [Narrator] Until, only 400 miles into their journey,
the North Atlantic changes her mood.
- On August 11th, 1857,
as they are unfurling this telegraph wire into the water,
a gigantic wave hits the ship.
(dramatic music)
- The engineer thought it was going off too quickly,
and so they put on the brakes.
- There's just too much strain on the cable and it snaps.
- To the horror of everyone onboard,
all of the work that they had done was completely lost.
- [Narrator] Nearly 1,000 miles
of state-of-the-art telegraph cable
are now lost two miles below the sea,
and Cyrus Field returns to New York empty-handed
(pensive music)
while, 4,000 miles away,
Perry Collins learns of the failure.
- When Field fails in his attempt
at laying a transatlantic cable,
this actually encourages Collins.
His concept seems perhaps even more achievable
than the transatlantic cable
because you just have to place it
across 50 miles of the Bering Strait.
- [Narrator] But without the approval
of the Russian governor, his plan is at a standstill,
so he sets sail for Russia to try to strike a deal.
(tense music)
But Cyrus Field isn't ready to throw in the towel.
With his initial investors becoming less generous,
Field throws in today's equivalent of
another $150 million dollars.
to replace the cable and try again.
He soon discovers that the bad weather
was only part of the problem.
- Field and his team realize
that they weren't able to manage the tension
and the speed of deploying this cable with enough subtlety.
At any given time,
that cable hanging off of the back of the ship
might've been 8,000 pounds' worth of cable
just dangling there.
And if they got it wrong,
they had a risk of all that weight just snapping the cable.
- And so they designed a payout machine
that doesn't just clamp down and hold it in place,
but that it would slow it down,
sort of like antilock brakes.
It has an auto release so you don't have to worry about
breaking the cable at the payout machine.
- [Narrator] But it's another change to their original plan
that could have the most impact.
To reduce their exposure to the storm-prone North Atlantic,
rather than sailing together
and dropping their cables one after the other,
the ships will separate and both lay cable simultaneously.
- Cyrus Field intends to have two ships go out
basically to the middle of the Atlantic.
From there, they fuse the cable together
and then the two ships sail in opposite directions.
One goes to Newfoundland, the other's going to Ireland.
And once they get to their respective sides,
we'll have a transatlantic cable.
- [Narrator] The new plan to connect the lines mid-ocean
should cut the cable-laying time by half.
- The most important step to all of this
is being able to connect these two wires
at this particular spot
before it finally was sent down to the ocean.
It's the weakest part of the cable.
If it is not strong, it's just going to snap again.
- [Narrator] While Field gets ready for another shot-
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Collins lands a meeting
with the governor of East Siberia
and looks to seal the deal.
- Only 55 miles across the Bering Strait.
The rest is over land.
I need Russia's blessing.
(suspenseful music)
- This all makes far more sense for a lotta people
than trying to run an electric cable across an ocean
submerged in more than two miles deep of water.
- [Narrator] Perry Collins finally has a green light
to build the longest telegraph cable
the world has ever seen.
His plan will trace the Pacific Rim from San Francisco
north to Alaska, across the Bering Strait,
and through the tundra of Siberia.
But he's running out of time
because off the coast of Ireland,
Field is back in the game and setting sail.
- We won't make the same mistakes.
Providence,
fate,
God are on our side.
(waves sloshing)
- [Narrator] But 10 days into the voyage,
approaching their meeting point
in the middle of the Atlantic, (lightning cracking)
Mother Nature intervenes again.
- On the way, there is an awful storm.
It had to be ranked as one of the worst Atlantic storms
in history. (suspenseful music)
- The Agamemnon gets blown 200 miles off-course.
They are absolutely out of sight of each other.
- [Narrator] With two top-heavy ships
each carrying three million pounds of cable,
finding each other takes a backseat to simply surviving.
(pensive music)
Cyrus Field and two warships are on a mission:
meet in the middle of the Atlantic,
splice together 2,000 miles of telegraph cable,
and sail in opposite directions,
dropping the cable to the ocean floor.
It's a risky bid to connect the US telegraph network
to Europe and on to Asia.
(thunder rumbling)
- The telegraph revolutionized
the way people can get and receive information.
There's a fundamental problem for Americans, however.
There was no way to communicate across the Atlantic,
except the same way you've been doing it for centuries,
which is by ship.
- [Narrator] With thousands of tons of cable onboard,
the two top-heavy ships
face one of the biggest Atlantic storms in history.
- Many thought that they might have to
throw the cable overboard or that the boat might even sink.
- When you have a storm like that,
you can't see to the horizon.
- All they can do is go to their rendezvous point
and both hope that the other's there.
- [Narrator] For eight long days,
neither ship knows the other's fate.
- Any sign of the Agamemnon?
(somber music)
(waves crashing)
- [Narrator] But on the ninth day,
Cyrus Field and the crew of the Niagara spot the Agamemnon
30 miles from their mid-Atlantic meeting point.
- It is kind of extraordinary
that the ships are able to finally meet each other,
kind of unbelieving that they even survived it.
The most important part of everything
is how to adjoin these two cables from these two ships.
This is mid-19th century.
We don't have modern tools.
It is the weakest point of the entire wire.
- [Narrator] With the two cables fused,
the ships separate from their mid-Atlantic meeting point,
now tethered by a single 2,000-mile telegraph cable,
and head for opposite coasts.
- Those two ships would actually be connected
as they were laying it down in the ocean.
This required, of course,
just absolutely precise navigation.
(cranks turning)
- While they're laying out the cable,
they're sending signals back and forth.
And the signals were basically like,
"Is this thing on? (laughing)
"Is this still working?
"Do we still have a connection?"
'Cause they knew if they lost a connection,
that would mean the cable had failed at some point.
The transatlantic cable project
was like a pressure cooker of stress.
You can only imagine what that meant
for someone whose health wasn't that good to begin with.
You're sinking your fortune and your reputation
into this almost impossible project.
- Cyrus Field, though, was obsessed with his project
at this point.
He couldn't just say, "Okay, I've left it in good hands.
"Send me a message over the cable when you finish."
That wasn't the way he worked.
(pensive music)
- Is that land?
(Cyrus laughing)
Is that land?
We made it.
- When Cyrus Field sees land, I mean, he must feel euphoric.
All these sacrifices, being away from home,
all this money, the failed attempts...
Here's his moment.
This is huge.
- [Narrator] At 1:54 a.m. on August 5th, 1858,
after four-and-a-half years of failure and frustration,
Cyrus Field makes land.
- One can only imagine what Cyrus Field felt
when the ship pulls into Newfoundland
and there have been no problems.
- [Narrator] At roughly the same time,
the Agamemnon approaches the shores of Ireland
with the other end of the cable.
Once linked to the telegraph network,
for the first time in history,
the United States and Europe are connected.
- It means that America was officially on the world stage.
Now it had a direct line to the hub of the world,
which was London, so this was a huge day for America.
- [Narrator] For Perry Collins, the news isn't so welcome.
With a working cable
now running between New York and Europe,
his plan to connect the US to Russia could be worthless.
- Now, this is really concerning for Collins
because this is a zero-sum, winner-take-all scenario.
Whichever cable works first wins,
and whichever cable doesn't take loses everything.
- [Narrator] But as Collins regroups
and the nation celebrates, there's a problem.
- They realize something's amiss.
The signals aren't clear.
They're almost indecipherable.
The signal strength is low.
There is something wrong with the system.
- [Narrator] Cyrus Field faces another disaster,
which could be the lucky break Perry Collins needs.
(waves crashing)
On August 16th, 1858, Cyrus field successfully connects
a 2,000-mile telegraph cable from Europe to North America.
For the first time, words are carried across the Atlantic,
not by ship taking weeks but along the ocean floor
at the speed of an electric current.
- When the cable was finally done
in the second attempt in 1858, it was a worldwide event,
one of the great moments in the 19th century.
- At last, a successful message is sent
from England to the United States
from Queen Victoria herself.
- [Narrator] But unfortunately for Field,
the message takes longer than expected.
- That message that comes from Queen Victoria,
that was only 98 words.
It took about 16-and-a-half hours
for it to get to the United States.
- The reason that this took so long
is that the signal was pretty weak,
so the morse code that was coming through,
they needed to confirm that everything that was being said
was what the queen intended.
- They would write to the other side
and say, "Can you resend that?"
Cyrus Field is not too happy about this.
- [Narrator] Despite the lag in communication,
the very next day, the wire opens to commercial messages
at an exorbitant fee.
- It was very expensive.
It was $10 a word with a 10-word minimum.
So, it was $100 to send a cable,
and $100 was a comfortable monthly income for a family.
- [Narrator] But money's not the only problem.
(tense music)
The message gets a little weaker and weaker
with each thing that's being sent.
And then, eventually, the messages stop coming entirely.
- [Narrator] Cyrus Field's faith in his chief electrician,
Edward Whitehouse, is waning,
so he enlists the talents of another member of the team,
physicist William Thompson.
- Thompson is part-Einstein, part-Edison
because he was theoretical,
but he also did a lotta hands-on experiments.
- [Narrator] Thompson will go on to determine
the temperature absolute zero
and be ennobled Lord Kelvin by Queen Victoria.
But for now, he's trying to fix Field's connection.
- Thompson makes something that's so important
for determining the health of the cable.
The mirror galvanometer is a very, very clever device.
It relies on the fact that electricity and magnetism
are always present with each other.
And so, he makes this little device.
It's a little magnet hanging on a piece of mirror.
And when the coil has electricity going around it,
that piece of glass moves a little bit.
- So, when they shined a light on that mirror,
they could see from how the light moved
when the current was on and when it was off.
That meant that instead of requiring a lotta power
to run a traditional telegraph system that buzzes at you,
you could have a visual system
with much lower levels of power.
- You see anything, Thompson?
- Not coming through.
- Give it more voltage.
- You'll fry the cable.
- What's your solution?
- Well, not burning out the cable would be a start.
- Look- - Enough!
He's right.
- In the mid-1800s, the notion of electricity and magnetism
is still almost magical.
It's not very well understood.
So, from Whitehouse's perspective,
the obvious solution is just to increase the voltage,
basically forcing a stronger signal through the cable.
- [Narrator] Refusing to give in,
Whitehouse pushes the cable to its limit.
- I'm gonna try 2,000 volts.
(telegraph clicking)
(electricity humming)
- When you pass electricity through a wire,
if you push too much energy through it,
you essentially burn it out.
When Whitehouse increases the voltage to 2,000 volts,
it eventually consumes the wire itself
because it just gets too hot.
(dramatic music)
- And so, the cable died
about 25 days after it was initially installed.
- [Narrator] After four-and-a-half years
of tireless work,
the modern equivalent of $250 million invested personally,
and a transatlantic cable that's worked less than a month,
Cyrus Field's dream of connecting two continents
is once again dead in the water.
(pensive music)
In the fall of 1858,
Cyrus Field has gone from American hero
to having absolutely no credibility in the public's eye.
- When the cable dies,
Cyrus Field being the man of the hour to mud
took no time at all.
It was just in a day.
They think it's a complete hoax.
They think he had put this thing in place
and was gonna buy the stock
and then sell the stock at a certain time
and make a lotta money.
- [Narrator] But instead of focusing on the scandal,
Field turns to the cause.
(uneasy music)
- I told you not to turn up the voltage.
- The cable was faulty.
It should've handled the voltage easily.
- Thompson is taking over as chief electrician.
- I'm telling you if it had been manufactured-
- I don't care!
You're fired.
- Without me, you'll never get that cable to work.
- [Narrator] It's now up to physicist William Thompson
to build a new underwater cable.
- Cyrus cannot believe that he has to do this again.
He figures, "It did work for a very short period of time,
"so all we need to do
"is just make everything better and stronger."
- [Narrator] While Field gears up
for another mission across the sea,
on the other side of the country,
Perry Collins pitches his Russian-American cable
to a powerful prospective investor:
the head of one the country's largest telegraph companies.
- Cyrus Field was single-minded, single-focused.
And Perry Collins had the same determination,
but didn't really care how it happened.
He starts talking to Hiram Sibley,
who's the boss of Western Union.
- I'm telling you, Mr. Sibley,
Alaska is the gateway to Asia,
and I get 10% of whatever Western Union makes.
(pensive music)
- They're perfect for each other.
Collins brings a knowledge of Russia.
He has already laid the groundwork.
Sibley, meanwhile, has the gravitas.
He has the company that can actually build all this stuff
and the deep pockets to do it.
- [Narrator] With Western Union's backing
and an upfront payment from them equal to $3 million today,
Collins is pushing to make his Russian-American cable
a reality before Cyrus Field gets back on the water.
(birds chirping)
Then, suddenly, the entire country stops
(men yelling) (cannons firing)
as fighting breaks out between Southern Confederates
and Northern Unionists, the start of a four-year civil war.
- The Civil War delayed everything.
Basically, this was an impossibility until
the war was over.
I mean, for one thing, the United States needed
all the ships it had.
And also, there were Confederate raiders
out in the Atlantic. (telegraph clicking)
- [Narrator] But soon, the telegraph becomes
a strategic tool for Abraham Lincoln.
- It's no exaggeration to say
Lincoln is our first wired-in president.
He knows within hours of the victory,
sometimes within minutes of the victory or defeat.
Previous commanders could only have found out within weeks.
And consequently, Lincoln winds up spending
a whole lotta time in the War Department's telegraph office.
- [Narrator] As the war progresses,
Western Union convinces Lincoln
to extend the reach of the telegraph,
all the way west to the Pacific Ocean,
playing right into Perry Collins's plan.
And as the Civil War ends in April 1865,
Collins has the men he needs to build his cable to Alaska
and on to Siberia.
(tense music)
The news lights a fire under Field, and he ups the ante.
For his next attempt, he has a secret weapon
in the race to connect the continents:
the biggest steamship ever built.
- Great Eastern, which was by orders of magnitude
the biggest ship in the world.
No ship would be bigger than the Great Eastern,
which was launched in 1858,
until the Lusitania was launched in 1907.
- [Narrator] With a single ship
big enough to lay the entire line across the sea,
Cyrus Field is ready to take on the Atlantic one more time
and win.
It's the spring of 1865.
As Perry Collins and Western Union
race to install their telegraph cable
connecting the Pacific coasts of North America and Russia,
Cyrus Field launches his third attempt
to bridge the Atlantic after losing the modern equivalent
of an astronomical quarter-billion
dollars personally on his first two tries.
- William Thompson designed the new cable
and it was just much more robust, much better designed,
and it had been fully tested underwater
over its whole length to make sure that it worked.
- [Narrator] In tests, Thompson's redesigned cable
not only works, it's 80 times faster than the previous line.
- The cable that William Thompson designed
was the standard cable up until fiber optics replaced it
in the late-20th century.
- [Narrator] Out of money,
Field secures new investors from Britain
and retrofits a massive 19,000-ton passenger ship
to lay the new cable.
- The Great Eastern is the largest ship in the world.
Previously, there had been no vessel that was large enough,
but finally they were able to store all of it
on just that one ship.
- [Narrator] In its cargo hold are 18 million pounds
of Thompson's new and improved telegraph cable.
It's now or never for Field.
And on July 13th, 1866,
the Great Eastern departs from Valentia, Ireland.
Meanwhile, 4,000 miles away,
Collins's Western Union crews are moving at a glacial pace,
installing telegraph poles
through the frozen Russian tundra.
- The crew, they're breaking their shovels
against the frozen ground.
Their supply ships are crushed by ice.
This is a difficult endeavor.
And it's the elements,
it's nature that is fighting against them all the way.
- [Narrator] As Collins and Western Union struggle,
(pensive music)
Field is taking no chances with his fragile cable.
- They're walking with it
and making sure it coils out smoothly.
A whole gang of men is down in the cable tank,
walking the cable around, night and day.
- [Narrator] After 10 days at sea,
1,200 working miles of line have been laid.
- This entire process is terrifying every single second
because it doesn't matter how far you get.
If something goes wrong in the last five minutes, it's over.
There's no partial completion.
This is either 100% perfect or it's a failure.
- [Narrator] Finally, on July 27th, 1866,
after two weeks of calm seas and careful cable-laying,
the Newfoundland coast is in sight.
The Great Eastern is too big to make port,
so local fishermen help carry the cable to shore,
and Field's 12-year odyssey
may have finally established a communication link
between the United States, Europe, and Asia-
- All's well, thank God. (telegraph clicking)
The cable is laid.
- [Narrator] But only if the line
is carrying a clear signal.
(telegraph sounder clicking)
(Cyrus exhaling)
With a working telegraph line in place,
clear messages can be sent across the Atlantic
in minutes, not hours.
America and Europe have been in continuous communication
ever since.
- Now that there is a final
permanent underwater telegraph cable that works,
things change for the United States, right?
Now we can talk to our international allies.
The men of Wall Street can now cheer
because now they're connected
to all of those foreign markets.
- Cyrus Field has been through the wringer.
And finally, when this cable's connected,
this is vindication.
It demonstrates that all of his crazy ideas
weren't so crazy after all.
He's just thinking so much bigger
than the rest of the world.
- [Narrator] News of Field's success
forces Western Union to pull the plug
on Perry Collins's cable dream.
- When the Atlantic cable is completed,
Perry Collins' adventure is over.
It's done.
In fact, the workers at the end of the line
even drape their last post in black.
They mourn the loss of their line.
And with that, it more or less rots.
- [Narrator] Though unsuccessful with his telegraph line,
Perry Collins lives well on the advance money
he earns from the partnership.
Western Union goes on to lay its own cables
across the Atlantic
before its telegraph
operations are bought out
by the American Telephone
& Telegraph Company,
better known as AT&T.
- The transatlantic cable is the precursor
to the internet that we know today
in terms of a way to transmit information and knowledge.
- The achievement of the transatlantic cable,
it was the building block our modern world is built upon.
We have satellites above,
but even they are tethered to a system,
a network that is built on cables.
- [Narrator] Today, there are over 400 undersea cables
crisscrossing the world's oceans
and dozens more are being laid every year
because despite handheld wireless communication,
99% of all international data traffic
is still carried by undersea cables.
Thanks to the successes and failures
of two men who risked everything
to link the US to the world,
our planet is forever connected in a web of wires.