Wiring the World

The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks

Simone M. Müller

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780231540261
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: History

The successful laying of a transatlantic cable in 1866 remade world communications. A message could travel across the ocean in minutes, shrinking the space between continents, cultures, and nations. An eclectic group of engineers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and media visionaries then developed this technology into a telecommunications system that spread a particular vision of civilization—but not everyone wanted to wire the world the same way.

Wiring the World is a cultural and social history that explores how the large Anglo-American cable companies won out over alternative visions. Bitter rivalries emerged over telegram prices, visions for world peace, scientific innovation, and the role of the nation-state. Such struggles determined the growth of cable technology, which in turn influenced world history. Filled with fascinating characters and new insights into pivotal events, Wiring the World traces globalization's diverse paths and close ties to business and politics.

1

NETWORKING THE ATLANTIC

It was while thus studying the globe that the idea first occurred to him [Cyrus Field], that the telegraph might be carried further still, and be made to span the Atlantic Ocean.

Henry Martyn Field, History of the Atlantic Telegraph, 26.¹

WITHIN THE grand narrative of the Great Atlantic Cable, this scene is one of the most oft-repeated and the picture of the lonely, yet ingenious entrepreneur one of the most powerful: it was the beginning of 1854 and the American businessman and millionaire Cyrus W. Field was standing in his library studying a globe. He had just received a nighttime visit from the Scottish-Canadian engineer Frederick N. Gisborne, who was involved in a telegraph scheme along the North American east coast. Gisborne’s idea was to speed up transatlantic communication by tapping steamers coming from London at St. John’s, Newfoundland, and pass messages between that point and commercial places like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia via telegraph. After a few miles of cable had been laid and the route for Newfoundland had been surveyed, work stopped for want of funds. Facing bankruptcy, Gisborne attempted to win Field as an investor.² The practical proximity of Newfoundland and Ireland of roughly 1,600 miles, however, impelled Field to think of a different idea: why be content with shortening communication with Europe by a mere day or two by relays of boats and carrier pigeons if one could go all the way across the ocean?³

This image of Cyrus W. Field standing by his globe and mentally reorganizing the structure of the world’s networks of communication usually sets the stage for a master narrative of the wiring of the Atlantic between 1854 and 1866: Field’s “epic struggle” that would require “a decade of effort, millions of dollars in capital, the solution of innumerable technological problems . . . and uncommon physical, financial, and intellectual courage.”⁴ However, “Cyrus the Great,” as the London Times journalist William H. Russell later named him, was neither the first nor the only one to think of an Atlantic telegraph.⁵ At the same time, four or five different schemes were seriously discussed and two undertaken. Only Field’s was brought to a successful completion. Moreover, Field was not the sole and center figure of the Atlantic cable project. Notwithstanding Field’s immense influence, the project’s success depended on the development and cooperation of an Anglo-American group of entrepreneurs, engineers, financiers, mariners, and lawyers that later formed the network of the Class of 1866.

The wiring of the Atlantic is a story of a series of failures and a number of different undertakings. The cable is the first link in a global information and communications network that nourished the acceleration and multiplication of transnational and transcontinental interactions as one of the main characteristics of the nineteenth century.⁶ Yet, the wiring of the Atlantic is also and foremost the story of its actors, denoting a crucial moment in telegraph history from which a group of white, Euro-American, middle-class entrepreneurs formed that influenced the course of globalization. Men like the seaman James Anderson, the cable manufacturer Richard A. Glass, and the merchant John Pender evolved from the project as “Don Quixotes” that had persevered, as “Cable King[s]” of the future.⁷ They represented the rising middle classes of the nineteenth century, which enjoyed the benefits of a capitalist economy and an imperial Euro-American setting.⁸ In their “telegraphic network” of the Class of 1866, they became enablers of the global communication system. As the system’s gatekeepers, they defined its structure and geography and, in consequence, partook in shaping the logic of globalization. Over the years, only a select number of actors, such as William Siemens and John W. Mackay, managed to enter their circle. The sole success of all those attempting to “conquer” the Atlantic by cable helped to create a zeitgeist focused on engineering world projects and a belief in mankind’s mastery (mankind defined as white, male, and Western) of nature and the West’s supremacy over the rest of the world. It was a time when “myths [were] every day becoming realities” and the “apparent extravagancies of Utopians” turned into “realized dreams.”⁹

LAYING THE GREAT ATLANTIC CABLE

In 1854, Cyrus W. Field was not the first to entertain the idea of a telegraph cable across the Atlantic, but the 1850s were exploding with ideas of a telegraph cable between Europe and North America. As early as 1850, even before the first commercial submarine cable of the Brett brothers became a lasting success, the British Spectatory, and similarly the French Journal du Calais, suggested the “most audacious speculation,” namely to “extend [telegraphic] communication to America.”¹⁰ In Europe, the 1850s started off with an economic boom, and interest in telegraphy was not coincidental. British exports never grew more rapidly than at the beginning of the 1850s, and iron exports from Belgium more than doubled. In Prussia, the number of joint-stock companies jumped from 67 to 172 between 1851 and 1857. Politically, governments that had been shaken by the revolutions of 1848 gained time for recovery. Additionally, “new rituals of self-congratulation,” the Great International Exhibitions of 1851 and 1853 in London and New York, punctuated the era, each of them “a princely monument to wealth and technical progress.”¹¹ The first successful experiences with telegraphic connections across land and sea and the extent of the political, economic, social, and cultural ties that Europe had with North America soon turned the crossing of the Atlantic into a key topos. Proposals came from the scientific communities as well as the general public. From 1859 onward, the American Colonel T. P. Shaffner pushed for his scheme of a northern route, via the north of Scotland, the Faroe Islands, south Iceland, the southern tip of Greenland, and Labrador.¹² He was taking up an earlier idea that the British geographer James Wyld had proposed to the Danish government in 1852.¹³

At about the same time, two further enterprises suggested a southern route across the Atlantic: The South Atlantic Telegraph venture proposed a cable between the south of Spain and the coast of Brazil, making stops at various islands in between. The other project preferred a route from Portugal via the Azores to the southern states of North America. Both found little favor.¹⁴ Lastly, in 1854 the American telegraph provider, Western Union, broached the idea of establishing telegraphic communication between Europe and America by means of land wires through Siberia and Alaska. In 1861, Western Union finished the first transcontinental telegraph line across the United States connecting Washington, DC, with San Francisco. This marked a grand success in the spirit of American westward expansion, and it allowed many of the roughly 350,000 Americans who migrated beyond the Mississippi between 1840 and 1867 to communicate more directly and quickly with the eastern United States.¹⁵ The undertaking also signified the rivalry between Cyrus W. Field and Hiram Sibley, head of Western Union, as well as two alternative visions of America’s future, one orienting itself toward Europe and the “Old World” and the other toward the promise of the West.¹⁶ Work started on the Russian–American Telegraph, also called the Collins Overland Line, in 1865. It was intended as a straight line from St. Louis, Missouri, to St. Petersburg, Russia, and was supported by Samuel B. Ruggles of the New York Chamber of Commerce and Samuel F. B. Morse, one of the inventors of an electric telegraph.¹⁷ As an integral part of the formation of the “American Empire,” the project exemplified U.S. American frontier spirit and its westward course and helped put forward a convincing case for the Alaska Purchase in 1867. Furthermore, the Collins Overland Line was conceptualized as part of an even larger network scheme that not only would link the United States with the western part of North America and Russia, but also would include two additional lines to connect the United States with the coastal cities of China and with Central and South America. Collins’s vision was “to link three continents with one continuous telegraph line.”¹⁸ Nevertheless, in February 1867, about half a year after the Atlantic success, Western Union abandoned the project. At the time, Western Union did not think that there would be enough traffic going from the United States to Europe to make up for any further investment in a line that would be slower and more likely to face interruption on its route to Europe than the transatlantic cable.¹⁹

Although Field was neither the first nor the only one to embark upon the project of wiring the world, his group was the first to execute the plan successfully. Knowing “nothing about telegraphy,” Field still recognized the great potential of an Atlantic cable.²⁰ Following his interview with Gisborne, Field made inquiries with two leading American experts, Matthew F. Maury and his later Gramercy Park neighbor, Samuel F. B. Morse.²¹ Maury informed Field about his oceanographic findings later published in The Physical Geography of the Sea, namely the existence of what he called the Telegraphic or Atlantic Plateau: a strip of almost level seabed between Cape Race in Newfoundland and Cape Clear in Ireland, which is nowhere more than 10,000 feet deep and “protected from the abrading action of [the Atlantic’s] currents and the violence of its waves by cushions of still water.”²² Not only all Atlantic cables of the time but also today’s fiber-optic cables follow this route along Maury’s mythical plateau, “which seem[ed] to have been placed there especially for the purpose of holding the wires of a submarine telegraph, and of keeping them out of harms’ way.”²³ Morse showed himself as interested in and supportive of the project as Maury, advising Field on the business and laws of electrical telegraphy. Already in 1843, Morse had foreseen a time when an Atlantic telegraph project would be realized. When the offer came to work as honorary electrician for Field’s undertaking, he accepted it gladly.²⁴

On March 10, 1854, the “cable cabinet,” which included Field and four other American gentlemen of fortune from Field’s Gramercy Park neighborhood, founded the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company to establish telegraphic communication between Europe and America.²⁵ With its incorporation, the company received a fifty-year monopoly on landing rights in Newfoundland. David Dudley Field, Cyrus W. Field’s older brother and legal advisor to the company, was farsighted enough to anticipate that the question of landing rights would be crucial in securing the company’s role in the future. Another company, the American Telegraph Company, was launched in 1855 to operate the terrestrial lines along the American east coast. It later merged with Western Union. In 1856, Cyrus W. Field and Samuel F. B. Morse left for Great Britain, where they found support among some of the most eminent telegraph engineers and scientists of the time, such as John W. Brett, William Thomson, and Charles T. Bright, as well as American expatriates in London.²⁶ Jointly with the telegraph entrepreneur John W. Brett and the engineer Charles T. Bright, Field established the Atlantic Telegraph Company in September 1856.²⁷ Its purpose was to secure British money for the undertaking, since the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company had been incorporated in the United States.²⁸

Similar to his approach in the United States, Field tapped into already existing networks of cable entrepreneurs and circles of financiers in London, predominantly by introduction through John W. Brett.²⁹ Together with his brother Jacob, John Brett had gained fame in 1850/51 when they laid the first commercial submarine telegraph cable across the Strait of Dover; now Brett became Field’s badly needed British advocate and sponsor. From Brett, whom Field had met through Gisborne, Field gained access to people essential for his undertaking. This included not only those financially or politically interested in a cable, such as Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon or Secretary to the Treasury James Wilson, but also those able to manufacture, lay, and operate a cable of such a length. At the time, London was the only place where all these things could be had. One key contact was Richard A. Glass, owner of the cable manufacturing firm Glass, Elliot & Co., which had already supplied the Brett brothers’ Dover-Calais cable of 1851. Moreover, Brett’s Magnetic Telegraph Company and its respective shareholders “presented a presold market and the Magnetic Company’s offices in London, Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool provided outlets for the sale of stock.” In fact, the majority of the capital for the Atlantic Telegraph Company came from investors from the Magnetic, and one of its directors, John Pender, a merchant from Manchester, would later on play a decisive role in the entire cable business.³⁰ Finally, Brett also accompanied Field on travels to Manchester and Liverpool to address their Chambers of Commerce.³¹ Other key contacts for Field were American expatriates such as Curtis M. Lampson, George Peabody, and Junius Spencer Morgan, as well as the American Chamber of Commerce of Liverpool. The Anglo-American fur trader Curtis Lampson had moved to London in 1830 as agent for John Jacob Astor. Later, he established his own business of C.M. Lampson & Co. From 1857 on, he served as director of the Atlantic Telegraph Company.³² George Peabody and Junius S. Morgan, two American investment bankers in London, were among the larger shareholders and, during the 1860s, secured the continuation of the undertaking. George Peabody additionally served as one of the Atlantic Telegraph Company’s directors. With their banking house Peabody, Morgan & Co., which in 1864 was renamed J.S. Morgan & Co., they played a large role in mobilizing European capital for American economic development.³³

While in Great Britain the key to money and cable was an individual, John W. Brett, in the United States it was a place: Gramercy Park. In 1851, as a statement of his wealth and success, Field moved his family to Gramercy Park. This well-to-do neighborhood in downtown Manhattan was established in the 1840s, after the aforementioned Samuel B. Ruggles of the New York Chamber of Commerce had bought up twenty-two acres of swamp and farmland for real estate development. Ruggles had the land drained and set up a London-like square to appeal to the wealthiest residents of the city. They would obtain, by buying up one of the sixty-six lots, exclusive access to their private park through a golden key.³⁴ At Gramercy Park, Field lived in immediate proximity to some of New York’s most prominent citizens, such as the politician Samuel J. Tilden, the industrialist, inventor, and philanthropist Peter Coop...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Class of 1866
• 1. Networking the Atlantic
• 2. The Battle for Cable Supremacy
• 3. The Imagined Globe
• 4. Weltcommunication
• 5. The Professionalization of the Telegraph Engineer
• 6. Cable Diplomacy and Imperial Control
• 7. The Wiring of the World
• Appendix: Actors of Globalization
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index