The first transatlantic telegraph cable, completed on…
August 1858 CE
Although the jubilation at the feat is widespread, the cable itself is short-lived: it will break down three weeks afterward, and will not not reconnected until 1866.
Business earnings had permitted Field to partially retire at the age thirty-four with a fortune of $250,000 and build a home in Gramercy Park.
He had financed the expedition of Frederic Edwin Church in 1853 that led the painter into the Andes Mountains seeking new landscapes for his art.
Field had turned his attention to the telegraphy after he was contacted in January 1854 by Frederick Newton Gisborne, a Canadian engineer, who aimed to establish a telegraph connection between St. John's, Newfoundland and New York City, started the work, but failed due to the lack of capital.
Later that year he, with Peter Cooper, Abram Stevens Hewitt, Moses Taylor and Samuel F.B. Morse, joined the so-called Cable Cabinet of entrepreneurs, investors and engineers.
Through this Cable Cabinet, Field became instrumental in laying a four hundred-mile (six hundred and forty kilometer) telegraph line connecting St. John's, Newfoundland with Nova Scotia, coupling with telegraph lines from the U.S.
American investors had taken over Gisborne's venture and formed a new company called the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company (N.Y.N.L.T.C.) after Field persuaded the Cable Cabinet to extend the line from Newfoundland to Ireland.
The next year the same investors formed the American Telegraph Company and began buying up other companies, rationalizing them into a consolidated system that run from Maine to the Gulf Coast; the system is second only to Western Union's.
In 1857, after securing financing in England and backing from the American and British governments, the Atlantic Telegraph Company began laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable, utilizing a shallow submarine plateau that runs between Ireland and Newfoundland.
During the Panic of 1857, Field's paper business suspended, and Peter Cooper, his neighbor in Gramercy Park, was the only one that kept him from going under.
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