The Transatlantic Cable That Changed America

September 15, 1875. A message leaves London, and hours later it arrives in New York. Not days, not weeks, hours. The message traveled along a transatlantic cable, a wire that had to be laid on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, two and a half miles below water, in complete darkness, under unimaginable pressure.

Getting this infrastructure project demanded an almost unimaginable human and financial toll. As much as we take instantaneous communication for granted today, getting a message from the United States to Europe in a few hours was nearly 200 times faster than was previously possible prior to modern communications. As we celebrate America's 250th birthday, we look back at an innovation that connected America to Europe. This is the story of the Siemens Brothers' role in connecting the old world and the new.

in the middle of the 19th century if you needed to communicate between europe and america you put a letter on a ship that ship took roughly 12 days to cross the atlantic and then you waited 12 more days for the reply for businesses for governments for anyone making decisions that mattered this was agonizing telegraph cables had already transformed communication on land, but the idea of connecting people who were separated by water with any means other than a boat was considered outlandish and crazy because no one could conceive of how to do it.

One man decided to try anyway. His name was Cyrus Field, an American businessman who had made his fortune in paper, sold his factories at age 34, and devoted the rest of his life to one obsession, connecting Europe and America by a cable under the water. Laying a cable across the Atlantic wasn't just a matter of dropping a line into the water. The cable had to be fed out from the ship at exactly the right speed.

Too fast, and it would snap under its own weight. Too slow, and it would pile up and tangle. All of it happening on a moving ship, in unpredictable weather, with thousands of miles of cable feeding continuously into the ocean below, presented a nearly impossible problem. Let that sink in.

A ship doing this mission had to hold enough cable for the entire 4 mile run from Europe to North America To allow for route deviations and breakage the ship would need to carry closer to 5 miles of cable That cable weighed around 3 metric tons or about 6 million pounds roughly the weight of 1 elephants When Field began his project, there was no cargo ship large enough to hold that much cable. Field's first almost successful attempt in 1858 solved this problem by having one ship head from Europe and the other from America and meet in the middle.

The cable worked for two weeks before it failed. Field and his team realized that one ship laying one cable was far more reliable than two ships meeting in the middle of the Atlantic and splicing the cable, but no such ship existed. Then, in the early 1860s, Field saw an opportunity. An enormous ship called the Great Eastern that had begun life as a passenger ship, but was too large, cumbersome, and plagued with problems to find success in that role.

It was the largest ship ever built at the time, and the only one that could hold the weight of the cable. So Field had it converted into a cable-laying ship, and then experienced years of failed attempts, broken cables, and near bankruptcies. Most people would have quit, but Field persisted. On August 4, 1866, it finally worked.

The first stable transatlantic telegraph connection opened from Valentia Island in Ireland to Newfoundland in Canada. field and his partner the british financier john pender now owned the only wire between the two continents a telegram of 20 words cost 100 which was several times the monthly wage of an industrial worker europe and america were connected but only if you could afford it the monopoly was total and it would take a family of inventors and entrepreneurs, a purpose-built ship, and several near-disasters to break it.

The Siemens family had been building telegraph infrastructure across Europe for decades. Werner von Siemens, the eldest brother, founded Siemens in Berlin in 1847. His brother Wilhelm, who went by William after becoming a British citizen, built out the London operation Siemens Brothers, which specialized in manufacturing and laying submarine cables. Then there was Karl, the youngest of the three brothers in the business, practical and decisive, who joined William in London in 1869.

In 1871 Deutsche Bank approached Werner with a proposal to finance a direct cable between Europe and America Werner wrote to Karl immediately My dear Karl at the general meeting of the Deutsche Bank yesterday the third director asked me whether we would be interested in participating in a direct German cable, for which there was a great deal of support. What do you think about it? Should I take this matter seriously? Karl's reply was cautious at first.

He didn't think the money could be raised given the state of submarine shares at the time. But over the next two years, his position shifted as the Siemens brothers gained more experience in the cable business and access to capital markets improved. By August 1872, Karl was writing to Werner with real urgency. For us, carrying out this project is an almost vital question, because it's only when we've produced a cable to America that we will be worth something as a cable contractor.

Werner remained deeply unconvinced. He had seen too many cables fail. He wrote to Carl how he couldn't bear the idea of not being able to meet his liabilities and that no treasure in the world would make him take the slightest risk with their existence. Meanwhile, Carl kept negotiating with potential investors, kept pushing forward, and commissioned a ship.

At that time, there was only one ship in the entire world built specifically for laying submarine cables. Every other cable project had used chartered merchant ships or warships, retrofitted and imperfect. William Siemens designed his own from scratch. Launched in February 1874 from a Newcastle shipyard, she was named the Faraday, after Michael Faraday, the British scientist and close personal friend of William Siemens, whose discoveries had helped lay the theoretical groundwork for the entire electrical industry.

She was 110 meters long and carried three enormous cable drums in her hold, each up to 13 meters in diameter and 9 meters high, storing those thousands of miles of cable that would pay out slowly into the ocean as she crossed the Atlantic. On May 16, 1874, the Faraday left port with Carl von Siemens in command. What followed was not a triumph, at least not immediately. A competitor, John Pender's Globe Company, countered the moment the Faraday set sail.

They bought up shares in the new direct United States cable company to try and kill it financially, and they ran a propaganda campaign in the press. In July 1874, sources connected to the Globe Company falsely reported that the Faraday had sunk after colliding with an iceberg. Then two months into the voyage, the cable actually did break disappearing into the water Miles below the surface there was no diving no visibility only a thin line somewhere in the darf and the hope that it could be found again News spread immediately that success now seemed highly improbable.

William wrote to Werner that their reputation, their honor, and their fortune all depended on the enterprise being successfully completed. Carl managed to recover the cable, dragging a hook over the seabed, trying again and again to catch a line he couldn't see. But days later, it broke again, and operations halted for weeks. Christmas came and went with Carl still on board the ship.

He wrote to William with words that became something of a motto for the whole enterprise. Be patient. The way goes through the night to the light. Finally, in June 1875, the cable laying was completed, even as a fault in the connection required another round of complex repair work that continued through the summer.

On September 15, 1875, 15 months after the Faraday first left port, the direct United States cable opened for traffic, linking Europe to Rye Beach, New Hampshire. On the very first day, stockbrokers in London and New York organized races to see who could get a dispatch through fastest. And the new Siemens cable beat the Pender cable by over an hour. The monopoly was broken.

Within a few years, American Railway and Telegraph entrepreneur Jay Gould ordered two more transatlantic cables from Siemens Brothers and made a substantial down payment without even signing a contract first. Werner described it as a sign of the full trust that the world now placed in the capability of Siemens. By 1900, of the 16 transatlantic cables laying on the ocean floor, more than half had been laid by the Siemens brothers. The Faraday herself remained in service until 1923, laying over 60,000 kilometers of cable across nearly five decades.

Siemens wasn't first. The cable the Siemens brothers laid in 1875 was the fourth transatlantic telegraph cable, and history largely remembers Cyrus Field in 1866. But while the first cables had made communication across the Atlantic possible, the Siemens brothers helped made this technology usable, breaking the monopoly, lowering costs, and turning transatlantic communication into something businesses could rely on every day. The Siemens cable lasted and helped transform the global economy, and Siemens became the dominant force in the new field of transatlantic communication in the late 19th century.

This project also helped establish a company that, more than 175 years later, remains on the leading edge of infrastructure.