Great History of the First Transatlantic Cable - Connecting the World - Full Documentary

a cable under the Atlantic the dream of instantaneous communication between the new world and the old in its day equivalent to landing a man on the moon its creator a man once called the greatest American a man most Americans today cannot name now the amazing voyage of the transatlantic cable on modern marvels [Music] mid-pacific 1996 a chef pays out a tiny 1 inch diameter fiber-optic submarine cable this single cable will connect 75% of the world's population to the average modern telephone user submarine cables mean little yet they are one of the single most important links to international communications even in the space-age modern fiber-optic cables transmit voice and data traffic with much higher reliability and at a cheaper rate than satellite transmissions do with over 320 active submarine cables lying on our ocean floors carrying over 2 billion minutes of voice and data traffic per year submarine cables have become the mainstay of our global village [Music] but this ease and speed of contact that underwater tables make possible it's relatively new a little over a hundred and fifty years ago there were no submarine cables at all let alone any that link continents together when the telegraph was invented in 1837 engineers dreamed of communicating across oceans lakes and rivers it was the inability to waterproof pressurize and insulate a cable from the oceans conductive medium that stalled for years any progress of telegraphy through the water it just so happens that in the 1840s something that had been known for a long time in Southeast Asia and Malaya was made available in Europe is called gutta-percha it's sort of like rubber and it's a sap from a tree but instead of being stretchy like rubber it's it's really a plastic it's very good insulator and it's not bothered by pressure or water so became the ideal insulin for Telegraph cables one of the first successful gutta-percha submarine Telegraph cables to be installed was across New York's Hudson River in 1848 by 1852 submarine cables up to 300 miles long were connecting England Holland Germany Denmark and Sweden others were even connecting Italy with Corsica and Sardinia but something is grand is stringing a 3,000 mile cable across the Atlantic Ocean was still nothing more than a dream [Music] you you [Music] Cyrus Westfield is considered by many historians as one of the greatest Americans of the 19th century yet there are a few who remember him this man one know Ward's cured no illnesses saved no lives his greatest accomplishment lies buried in sludge at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and has for a hundred and fifty years field was born in 1819 he was a sick child and he spent his first several years in bed and the rest of the family always said he was making up for a long time during the rest of his life he was described as a squirmy young man always starting projects always extremely busy never an idle moment at the age of 15 field went to work for a dry goods store in New York City it was there he learned the fundamentals of running a business and the art of negotiating financial transactions field wouldn't last long as a store clerk by the age of 18 he had created his own paper making company to satisfy a growing demand for high-quality stationery products cyrus field grew enormously wealthy he drew himself relentlessly it was up sometimes nearly 24 hours a day working eventually this caused his health to fail virtually exhausted and under doctor's orders field was forced to retire at the age of 33 he was planning to spend the rest of his life leisurely traveling around the world with his wife [Music] however in January of 1854 one late night meeting changed fields life forever he met with an English engineer named Frederick Gisborne who had been in charge of building a telegraph line across Newfoundland it was an extremely important project it would decrease by several days the length of time it took for news to cross the Atlantic steamers from Europe could arrive in st. John's and flash urgent messages ahead to New York unfortunately the costs far exceeded the original budget and the Newfoundland electric telegraph company went bankrupt leaving Gisborne with a substantial debt [Music] Gisborne met with field in hopes of raising more capital to finish this important project field relaxing after vacation to South America had no intentions of investing in any new business ventures people lightly listened but promised nothing later that evening while alone in his library Syrus examined his globe and suddenly realized that the Newfoundland Telegraph would be just one link in a far more important project why wait for steamers to bring news from Europe make the Telegraph to the entire job well I mean that's a sort of simple simple minded approach than any of us would take who had nothing no knowledge whatsoever the technology I mean he didn't have the slightest idea of what the problems were whether this was technologically feasible or not so he contacts two people at first first field contacted lieutenant Matthew Morey a prominent oceanographer and head of the National Observatory in Washington his timing was perfect Morey had just completed a series of soundings across the North Atlantic jenna mourey told the field coincidentally that he and his team of scientists had this recently discovered a plateau which ran all across the North Atlantic the plateau was relatively smooth and soft and would be ideal for laying a cable across it had a soft mucky sediment on the top and the cable could sink gently into that sediment this comparatively narrow and flat area between America and Europe is exaggerated here for clarity its presence was great news to feel the Atlantic Ocean has much deeper sections which would have made cable-laying impossible due to pressures incurred at such depths not to mention the many more miles of wire that would have been needed to slink up and down the oceans mountains next field contacted Samuel Morse the great pioneer in telecommunications in the 19th century it was of course Morris who not only perfected and built first telegraph in the United States 1844 but also developed the telegraphic code that bears his name Morse code Morse responded promptly to fields inquiry he said yes in his opinion telegraph signals could be broadcast via a wire across the Atlantic Ocean ironically eleven years earlier professor Morse had prophesied fields dream with the endorsement of Morrie and the support of Morse field became obsessed with laying a transatlantic Telegraph cable he didn't know how but he knew it would take lots of money that would be the easy part but what lay ahead were years of technical setbacks and disasters [Music] from the time he had the idea for the transatlantic cable it took Cyrus field just three months to organize a company and raise the money modern marvels will return we now return to the transatlantic cable on modern marvels [Music] Cyrus field had no trouble finding backers for his transatlantic cable venture so maybe the number wealthy friends that field had who were eager to help him in the project there was the great iron magnate and philanthropist Peter Cooper there was Moses Taylor a banking fame and Marshall Roberts of the Erie Railroad several of the industrial giants of America helped to form a company which became known as the New York Newfoundland and London Telegraph company the company's first project was to finish the Telegraph cable across the 400 mile width of Newfoundland the easternmost part of North America when completed in 1856 the company's Telegraph Network spanned nearly 1,000 miles from New York to st. John's Newfoundland total cost for the project was well over a million dollars now one has to remember that a million dollars in those days relative value of the dollar means about 50 million dollars in today's dollars the average eastern working man put in 12 hours a day for a single dollar so a million dollars was a serious outlay of capital unfortunately completing the cable tune of Finland was a lot bigger job than anyone anticipated and they ended up using all of their resources just on that leg of the project it was time to regroup and seek new investors and work on figuring out where they were going to get a ship to do it and where they were going to get a cable long enough to lay across the ocean floor [Music] though field had many people convinced that his project was feasible there were some who thought it was preposterous corpora giant Western unions both out strongly against fields venture they had their own grand plan to reach Europe by way of teleports their route required only 56 miles of submarine cable across the Bering Strait via Alaska Western Union had one outfit in Alaska and another outfit in Siberia their job was to gather poles for the telegraph wires and to negotiate with the natives for a right away along the proposed route of the Telegraph while they found plenty of timber in Alaska they found almost no trees in Siberia and this meant they had some almost insurmountable obstacles to overcome but Western unions view was that any route would be more feasible than something as risky as stretching a cable across 3,000 miles of water field ignored Western unions logic he was convinced the transatlantic route was possible and proceeded to lock down landing rights on both continents for his future wire it was important to take the shortest route possible across the Atlantic because it's a long ways they settled on a direct route from westernmost part of Ireland across to Newfoundland which is the closest part of the North American continent to Europe now with a mere 2,500 mile route established field was more confident than ever he and his associates were able to get the British government to supply two ships a small convoy and money for the operation this was in exchange for the transmission of government messages on the new cable should it ever work unfortunately in fields homeland America it wasn't so easy Western Union had begun work on its telegraph line through Alaska not many investors in the US would doubt the expertise of such an immensely powerful and profitable corporation that strongly opposed the transatlantic cable field pleaded with the US government for support in the form of naval ships he needed them to make a pass the convoy to get the wire across the ocean the needed resolutions in Congress barely passed and President Franklin Pierce signed them into law on his last day in office March 3rd 1857 Fields next priority was to begin manufacturing the submarine wire since cable laying in the North Atlantic was restricted to summer months due to weather conditions he needed the cable immediately filled and as usual impatient manner only gave glass Elliott and company the entity that was manufacturing the cable only four months to produce the cable as a result the cable probably wasn't as good as they could have been you can't just dump this wire in the water because it shorts out so what you do then is you coat it with some material called gutta-percha gutta-percha has virtually no strength and the copper doesn't have very much so you put iron wires around the outside you look inside and there's our copper wire in the middle I've got a birch around it now we've got this protective layer on the outside in order to carry and pay out 2500 tons of this cable the two ships provided by the American and British governments had been extensively modified with circular tanks to store the massive wire they loaded the cable onto two ships it took a hundred and twenty men three weeks to load the 2,000 some odd miles of cable onto the two both the plan was to start off in Ireland with one of the ships laying the cable at mid-ocean they would place the cable to the second ship and the second ship would carry on to new finland on the morning of august fifth 1857 with cyrus field on board the cable was connected to the Irish Shore with a huge celebratory send-off to ensure that the cable remained intact signals were continuously broadcast over the line from ship to shore but only five miles were laid down when the cable got caught up in the ship's machinery and broke this was quickly repaired and the mission continued but then 10 days and 300 miles into the mission a real disaster struck an anxious engineer fearing that the cable was paying out too fast suddenly applied the brakes the brakes locked and the cable snapped and the severed end of the cable representing a half million dollars worth of cable the laboring time five million in today's dollars plunged into the sea disappeared a portion of fields original table was recently pulled from the ocean though over 100 years old it could still conduct electricity the transatlantic cable will continue on modern marvels we now return to the transatlantic cable on modern marvels the failure of the 1857 expedition made many skeptical of the ambitious project Western unions plan now appeared better than ever as they continued to string their cable through Alaska however Cyrus field remained optimistic although this unfortunate accident will postpone the completion of this undertaking for a short time the result has been to convince all the took part on this experiment that with some slight alteration in the paying out machinery there appears to be no great difficulty in laying down the cable Cyrus field 1857 field again raised more capital to launch a second attempt the company ordered 700 miles of new wire to replace the lost cable engineers and scientists were hired to review every detail of the cable laying procedure they made many revisions to equipment on board and devised a new payout method which included anti-lock brakes [Music] it was decided for the expedition in 1858 that instead of starting with one ship Lanta cable in Ireland and then another shift picking up with that one left off in mid-ocean they decided this time that the two ships would meet mid-ocean splice the cable together one would head for Ireland and another one would head for New Finland that way it'd take half the time to lay the cable and climb with of the Athens given weather conditions and all On June 10th 1858 both ships fully loaded and their convoy departed England for the middle of the Atlantic Ocean they're under Cyrus fields watchful eye engineers spliced together the two cables and the ship's parted ways connected by the wire they were able to communicate back and forth via Telegraph but before the two ships even lost sight of each other just three miles apart the cable broke both ships returned reefs Pleiss and once again parted ways three or four times to do this in the last time they've actually gotten fair distance and it breaks and they've agreed that if they get more of them every 200 miles of cable okay down then they wouldn't have any left over to complete the enterprise and then they just take off for home well it's very close to that amount in fact they've reached that limit the ship's headed back to Ireland to restock in hopes that field could convince the board of directors for a fourth try several board members resigned in disgust but once again fields persistence prevailed field always the optimist says let's go again the calculation is made about how much cable is left on board and lo and behold there is just enough to get across the Atlantic July 29th 1858 the two ships were back in the middle of the Atlantic splicing cable again for the fourth time they were about to achieve both success and failure in the highest degree amazingly within just two weeks time both ships having successfully laid over a thousand miles of cable each finally reached the coasts of Newfoundland and Ireland now the first time in history North America and Europe were linked and Britain had instant communication with the colonies she had lost 75 years earlier this was an epic moment in history in the world knew it overnight from being the private room six they became heroes field was called Field the great to Queen Victoria knighted two of the British contingent and there was great rejoicing on the streets of New York fireworks much eating much drinking they have parades up Fifth Avenue Sunday there were pronouncements from pulpits in New York and Boston and Syracuse this was bonding the two english-speaking worlds together it was bonding the Christian nations together and the cables were seen as a spreading word about our economic systems our Christian heritage the celebrations were comparable to the ending of a war on August 16 1858 Queen Victoria send a congratulatory 96 word message to President Buchanan that prompted even more celebrations the amount of fireworks filling the skies caused New York City Hall's Tower to burn down almost taking the entire building with it but what the public didn't know was that there were already problems with the new capable serious problems the public went wild this kind of concern filled because he knew the cable wasn't perfect they were having problems messages were coming across garbled although they were coming across it would take an hour to get a word across meanwhile all this pandemonium is breaking out and field I think became more and more concerned about the health of the cable and ultimately during the peak of celebrations the cable stopped one day short of a month the line went dead public reaction quickly turned field was considered by many a master crook there were some who doubted that the cable had been laid at all one newspaper reporter proves that it hadn't now Western unions plan seemed confirmed as the correct one the cable of 1858 billed in part because the electrical engineer of the project was of the opinion that the bigger the voltage the better ran a current of two thousand volts through the line and as a result he basically fried the cable just what went wrong as a matter of conjecture most likely it was a two thousand volt current that the engineer sent pulsing through the line but several other reasons for the failure have been suggested also all of them related to quality control to an understanding of electricity to an understanding of the magnetizing process but whatever the reason may be certain fail or Cyrus field organizing another attempt wouldn't be as easy as before the United States was on the verge of a civil war resulting in more pressing issues for potential investors and governments to worry about it would be 8 long years before America and Europe would speak to each other again across the bed of an ocean after the failure of the cable field was vilified by the public many believed he was a charlatan acquaintances crossed the street to avoid it modern marvels will return by 1861 the United States was in full civil war all the fields US telegraph facilities were quickly put at the disposal of the Union the United States government wanted to keep in constant communication with its Union forces from Washington DC during the beginning of the Civil War filled statham fairly close contact with Abraham Lincoln Lincoln consulted with field because despite fields failure with the 1858 expedition he acquired an immense amount of knowledge regarding the practicalities of lame telegraphic cable along this Syrus field was extremely patriotic in fact a selfless patriot he was a real supporter of the Union at no cost to the government extended his Telegraph service to the War Department and to the Navy Yard and other strategic points around the Capitol his services proved invaluable to the Union but during America's Civil War field kept his dream alive of a transatlantic cable travelling between America and England 31 times during the four-year war he was eventually successful in raising capital British investors again rose to the challenge of backing such an attempt Americans on the other hand were still partial to the advice of Western Union nevertheless field got his money it was time to order cable this time instead of fabricating the wire and pieces the entire cable all 2,600 miles of it was made in one piece the manufacturers kept their factory going 24 hours a day seven days a week in order to complete the cable on schedule it took eight months to make at approximately 14 miles per day the finished cable weighed in at 9,000 tons of course this one piece 9,000 tons meant that the factory had to be right on the waterfront and so the cables then poured from the factory tanks we were a line of police and Court and the tanks on the ship incidentally this is exactly how it's done these days chance that 9,000 tons of cable was a heck of a lot of cable there's only one ship in the world large enough to carry such a load and that was great history the Great Eastern was the world's largest steamship of its day a ship so large it was unable to turn a profit and had bankrupted three previous owners but for laying cable it was perfect so it was basically available and that was added to the arsenal of the Atlantic cable entrepreneurs they got it it and put table tanks down the hole and now the entire cable could be carried by this one ship a crew of 500 men was needed to operate the ship of which 200 were needed merely to raise its anchor supporting this crew and feeding it meant the great eastern carried a dozen oxen for deck work plus 20 pigs for breeding meat while at sea one cow 120 sheep and a whole poultry yard of fowl when finally loaded the Great Eastern weighed 21,000 tons [Music] [Music] July 23rd 1865 the Great Eastern set sail westward with little fanfare no parties no speeches just serious business they got about 80 miles out and a defect was noticed in the cable it looked as though a pin had been embedded in the cable they cut out the bad section spliced it back together continued on several days later they noticed another in the cable at that time field and others became suspicious of what was going on and suspected sabotage field was in a rage and he promptly posted a 24-hour security watch over the cable tanks often it was filled himself or stood guard he was taking no chances field was on board for every attempt to a label on a cable he spent many nights on deck he was just obsessed with the whole project nothing was going to get in the way of him sabotage money political problems the possibility of sabotage would turn out to be only a minor setback with only 600 miles of wire left Thule disaster struck again the cable fouled in the machinery and snapped would be like a snake that broken into the cable plunged into the sea is the dismayed crew looked on five million dollars worth of cable a quarter of a billion dollars in today's money sunk into the Atlantic Ocean into one of its deepest sections and disappeared the future of international communications at stake the crew struggled to grapple the cable and bring it to the surface they turned the enormous ship perpendicular to the cable and zigzag back and forth while dragging a grappling hook on the ocean floor they spent nine days and nights flattening Collor cable they recovered it on occasions but before they could post it to the surface and fast the ship approached the game this happened a number of times and that finally they're running short of fuel and provisions and the decision was made to return to to Ireland Western unions plan to go around the world the long again looked to be the best after the failure of the 1865 expedition field was still enthusiastic about the project he knew it could be done his enthusiasm rubbed off on others around him and he eventually was able to drum up the capital to order another 2,500 miles of even better cable than previous expeditions but field didn't forget about the previous year's cable with better grappling equipment he knew it was possible to salvage the lost wire and complete that circuit to [Music] On June 13 1866 the 700 foot long Great Eastern left Valencia Ireland paying out the new cable all the way to heart's content Trinity Bay Newfoundland Landing the shore and on July 27 without incident one can only imagine the elation siress feel must have felt this was 12 long years in the making for major attempts and millions of dollars finally he had beaten the odds on the banks of Newfoundland greeting the great ship were hundreds of men women and children who helped bring in the shore end of the cable over a floating bridge of 40 fishing boats from heart's content field immediately sent the following message to Ireland we arrived here at nine o'clock this morning all well thank God the cable is laid and is in perfect working order but fields job was not over there was still the lost cable of the previous year sitting on the bottom of the ocean they ordered the ship back out to sea 680 miles east several days later the crew began grappling for the broken cable of 1865 they grappled for the lost cable 30 times before it was eventually found and lifted out of the water on September 1st 1866 the wire was then spliced and the rest of the previous year's cable paid out the Great Eastern once again landed in Newfoundland completing a second parallel circuit across the Atlantic Ocean from that point on with only you know occasional interruptions this country America and Europe England so forth have been in constant electrical communication with the news of fields successful transatlantic Telegraph cable Western Union the company many Americans thought to be infallible finally accepted defeat on February 27th 1867 after having its project stalled by Siberian winters Western Union abandoned its attempt to reach Europe by way of Alaska and Siberia siress fields great obsession for epic projects didn't end with the transatlantic cable he was always ready for new challenges in fact he had a voracious appetite for them he went on to help build at the New York elevated railroad unfortunately field partnered up with the infamous Jay Gould and Russell Sage Field thought that tariffs for the railroad should be as low as possible so that everyone could use them and ultimately that would be better business Russell Sage and Jay Gould were of the school that you squeezed as much money as you could out of field prevailed in terms of keeping their rates low on the railroad unfortunately both Jay Gould and Russell Sage held it against them for the rest of their lives and they ultimately squeezed them on a stock transaction and the Cyrus field lost five million dollars in one day and died a broke man [Music] field died on December 2nd 1891 but his dream lived on by 1915 there were no less than 15 transatlantic Telegraph cables stretching across the floor of the Atlantic while the cables performed flawlessly there was one major drawback because of the enormous length of the cable the wires couldn't handle the complex and high-speed impulses of speech which now dominated the majority of land Telegraph cables thanks to Alexander Graham Bell's invention the telephone after 40 years of faithful service the Telegraph and its cables were now in trouble the price of a telegram to Europe in 1866 was a dollar 25 forward today allowing for inflation it is 60 times cheaper modern marvels we'll be right back we now return to the transatlantic cable on modern marvels with the invention of the telephone in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell Telegraph's moved from the mainstay of global communications to a secondary role but it would take some time before engineers could make telephones work over great distances such as the Atlantic Ocean a telegraph signal is just on or off pulses of electricity is so simple a telephone signal is much more complex it's a very complex electrical wave the very complex waveform of your voice so it requires a much greater information carrying capacity than was available in the deep-sea Telegraph cables a telephone signal would need to be amplified in order to be discernible across long distances by 1912 AT&T had perfected the vacuum tube invented just six years prior into a workable amplifier as a result by early 1915 the first transcontinental telephone line opened connecting the east and west coasts of the United States unfortunately for the submarine cable industry vacuum tubes also enabled the newly invented radio to amplify its signals great distances too in the 1920s radio technology comes in with that almost overnight the cable industry takes a no time because the wireless technology is so much cheaper that for 90% of the time they can carry messages instead of the cables and do it as it's a much much more cheaply so the first route for transatlantic telephone service was radio telephone again you're using vacuum tube amplifiers to amplify the radio signal radio telephone service opened up between the United States and initially England and then the rest of Europe in 1927 initially the capacity was one one call at a time so you place your name in the queue and when you got to the head of the line the operator would call you and say it's your turn however wireless telephone service soon proved itself to be unreliable with radio callers are at the mercy of the atmosphere and weather conditions which are neither simple nor stable a more reliable means of transatlantic telephone communications was needed once again business looked to the submarine cable [Music] it wasn't until the early 1950s that the vacuum tube amplifier had been perfected for deep-sea use in 1955 America's AT&T and the British post office began laying the first amplified telephone cable onto the floor of the Atlantic Ocean early transatlantic telephone communications required two cables across the ocean one handled the west to east portion of the conversation the other handled the east-to-west portion it would take two years to lay the cable a year for each direction thanks to the experience gained from past submarine cable ventures dating back to the days of Cyrus field most of the kinks and problems laying wire into the depths of the Atlantic were now solved it was smooth sailing for two summers on August 14 1956 90 years and 18 days after the Great Eastern had landed the end of the first successful Telegraph cable of the same waters workers made the final splice in the telephone cable known as t81 transatlantic telephone cable one on September 25th 1956 the chairman of the board of AT&T mr. Cleo Craig picked up the phone and called Her Majesty's Postmaster General dr. Charles Hill on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean this is doctor here in London is that you mr. Craig never desert must be Craig well it's very good to hear your voice and to join with you and our friends in Canada in inaugurating the this the first transatlantic telephone cable service within a few hours one of the 20th century's greatest technical achievements passed quietly into everyday use after the success of t81 in 1956 cables were laid not just across the Atlantic but in almost every other direction and in the years after that cables have been laid connecting every continent on earth by the mid-1970s copper cables which carry electrical impulses in waves began to be replaced by fiber-optic wires these cables use extremely fine flexible glass or plastic fibers which transmit light pulses instead of electricity with modern fiber-optic technology great distances for submarine cables are no longer an obstacle On June 17 1997 a cable project named flag fiber-optic link around the globe was completed this 1.2 billion dollar cable lies at the bottom of 12 different oceans crosses three continents touches 12 countries and is able to carry 600,000 simultaneous telephone calls per section this cable touches 75% of the world's population the flag cable is the longest submarine cable that has been built today it is a 28,000 kilometers system that extends from Port Colonel and UK to Miura at the south end of Tokyo Bay in Japan this cable provides considerably more bandwidth than has been provided in the same region and it provides a synchronous low error rate performance better by far than satellites in addition to being extremely expensive a satellite call must traveled 27,000 miles from earth to the satellite and then another 27,000 miles back a transatlantic cable call need only travel about 2,500 miles point-to-point at the speed of light this helps eliminate the annoying delays and echoes of a satellite telephone call furthermore there's a problem of security the satellite signals are broadcast anybody can pick them up whereas the the cable is a point-to-point secure system thanks to fiber-optic submarine cables such as flag many countries have an affordable reliable means of communicating outside their country finally virtually all parts of our world are connected we can now fax a note around the world watch our favorite movie on television speak to someone 3,000 miles away and download something off the internet all simultaneously through one cable there will be no limits on global communications all because of the ability to sync cables to our oceans floors I think I'm a relatively young man but when I started I'm a telegraph cable and now I'm involved in projects where we're talking about cables with capacities of five million telephone circuits or simple Kiowa that's the one-inch diameter line we'll see better and this across any of the oceans of the world they did possible see the full size of the market but it obviously is going to be huge beyond the commission of anybody view beyond our imagination [Music] though

Channel: Wisdom Land

Views: 10,343

Rating: 4.8347106 out of 5

Keywords: Communication, History, Transatlantic Cable, iberoptic, fiber optic, Atlantic, Ocean Sea, Telephone, Transmit, telegraph, Challenge, History Channel, Documentary, Ship b, boat, Laid, Wire, Copper, Cable, Story, Morse code, North America, England, europe, undersea, Underwater, link, connecting, First

Id: 2UTrqHZf7Cg

Length: 45min 21sec (2721 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 20 2017