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00:00:00In the middle of the 19th century, a team of pioneering scientists and entrepreneurs
00:00:23driven by courage, tenacity and vision came together to realise an ambition that still
00:00:29defines our world today.
00:00:35The Atlantic Cable, I mean I think of it as the Apollo project of the 19th century.
00:00:48It's something that everyone said couldn't be done, and then it was done.
00:00:50Those who came before us drove the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves
00:00:58of modern invention.
00:00:59Before the telegraph, no human being had ever experienced getting information from the other
00:01:05side of the planet, more or less as it happened.
00:01:08The pioneers of the Atlantic Cable imagined that one day, people all over the world could
00:01:13share ideas, emotions, news and information by electrical pulse.
00:01:19They were the first to take this adventure and do it and show that yes, you can transmit messages
00:01:25and data across continents.
00:01:30Today, 99% of all internet and mobile communications is not relayed by satellite, but by the undersea
00:01:37cables that traverse the oceans of the world.
00:01:50They changed the world.
00:01:53They changed the world of the media, they changed the world of commerce, they changed
00:01:57how we communicate.
00:01:58So they were revolutionary.
00:02:01When it comes down to people looking at their Netflix or looking at their Facebook or using
00:02:06WhatsApp, we still rely heavily upon these submarine cables.
00:02:11And this story of the internet and international communication starts here, at the edge of
00:02:15the world, on Valencia Island, with the first transatlantic cable.
00:02:19August 4th, 1857.
00:02:41The world's attention is on a remote island off Ireland's western coast, Valencia Island,
00:02:48County Kerry.
00:02:50This is ground zero for one of the most ambitious scientific endeavours of the Victorian age.
00:02:57We're here on Valencia Island, which is where the story of this transatlantic cable begins.
00:03:01And over here, people would have gathered to see what was happening.
00:03:04They wanted to see, were they going to achieve what they set out to do?
00:03:07And these great ships, the Niagara and the Agamemnon, came into this harbour, because
00:03:11you've got the wild Atlantic Ocean here, but this is a nice, quiet and peaceful harbour.
00:03:17Recognising the immense geopolitical significance of the project, the US and British governments
00:03:22have loaned two great ships, the USS Niagara and the HMS Agamemnon, to the team.
00:03:30Their mission is to lay 3,200 kilometres of cable on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean,
00:03:35at depths of up to three kilometres.
00:03:38If successful, the transatlantic cable will relay electrical pulses between Valencia Island
00:03:44and Newfoundland, which can then be transcoded into data, letters and numbers, enabling near-instant
00:03:51communications between Europe and North America for the first time ever.
00:03:58This mission is the grandest work which has ever been attempted by the genius and enterprise
00:04:03of man.
00:04:06Leading the project is 38-year-old American entrepreneur Cyrus W. Field.
00:04:15Cyrus Field's greatest invention is Cyrus Field.
00:04:19He's basically an entrepreneur.
00:04:20He's the Elon Musk of the 19th century.
00:04:24He makes a lot of money early on in life from paper, which is a medium of communication
00:04:28which had become suddenly cheaper through steam production.
00:04:33With his fortune made by the age of 33, Cyrus Field had been looking for a new opportunity.
00:04:40In 1854, Field recognises that the future lies in global communications and gathers
00:04:46a team of experts, including the eminent Belfast-born physicist William Thompson.
00:04:54If one took half Einstein and half the talents of Edison and succeeded in fusing such incompatible
00:05:00gifts into a single person, the result would be rather like William Thompson.
00:05:06Thompson was one of the most brilliant scientists of his generation, and the second law of thermodynamics
00:05:11comes from him.
00:05:12He talks about how heat can be transferred between one body to another if those two bodies
00:05:18are at different temperatures.
00:05:20By the time Thompson joins Field in Valencia Island, the future Lord Kelvin has already
00:05:25defined the theoretical concept of absolute zero and identified many fundamental scientific
00:05:31principles that underpin our world today.
00:05:37When you are face to face with a difficulty, you are up against a discovery.
00:05:44I think what's fascinating is here you have this figure who is a preeminent physicist
00:05:48of his time, and he wants to spend time working out how you send the most possible messages
00:05:53through a telegraph cable.
00:05:55And it gives you a sense of the scale of this.
00:05:57You know, this is the moonshot of his time.
00:06:07For a remote community on the western edge of Ireland, it must have been a source of
00:06:12wonder that cutting-edge science was happening on their doorstep.
00:06:17In this part of Ireland, most people were speaking Irish.
00:06:21Most people didn't know how to read and write.
00:06:23You have people all along that coast, primarily subsisting on potatoes, in many cases in cabins
00:06:30made of mud, struggling to survive on that evil kind of life.
00:06:37The people of Ireland's west are not alone in having their horizons limited by poverty
00:06:41and lack of literacy.
00:06:43In the middle of the 1800s, few people anywhere in the world had the chance of a school education,
00:06:49and most people would never travel more than 20 miles from home in their entire lives.
00:06:56I think people lived more intensely in a particular place, but with a much vaguer sense of what
00:07:02was outside of it.
00:07:04So your sense of space, you know, of how far something is, you know, the next parish and
00:07:10the parish beyond the next parish was a long way away.
00:07:14Beyond that, the distance was just so vast that you almost didn't imagine it.
00:07:24You suddenly then had the arrival of very sophisticated, very advanced technological
00:07:30characters from Europe and America, you know, using this crazy new technology.
00:07:37What is this thing, electricity?
00:07:38You know, it's full of mystical, sacrilegious kind of qualities attached to it.
00:07:44As leader of the transatlantic cable expedition, Cyrus Field knows that many have predicted
00:07:49his mission to be impossible and bound for failure.
00:07:54It was looked upon by 99 out of every 100 men as the wild project of a Yankee lunatic.
00:08:01But Field has staked his reputation and fortune, as well as that of many others, on this endeavour.
00:08:07With ceremonies complete in August 1857, the ship set sail into the vast Atlantic Ocean.
00:08:29The goal of achieving high-speed, long-distance communications is as old as civilisation itself.
00:08:38Beacon to beacon sped the courier flame, the moving light sped from the pyre of pine and
00:08:43urged its way in golden glory like some strange new sun.
00:08:50Our ancient ancestors dreamed up ingenious ways to communicate over distance.
00:08:56Some used drums, others smoke and carrier pigeons to send messages to each other.
00:09:03There is something sort of fundamental about the desire for the news to have information
00:09:07to keep up with things, goes back to gossip.
00:09:11Even if you look at the letters of Cicero, he's constantly asking his friends for news.
00:09:15He wants to know what's happening in the city when he's out of town.
00:09:18He's sharing letters with other people.
00:09:25The fastest that a human being could travel was on a horse, really, in any practical way.
00:09:32That hadn't changed for millennia, they would have been the same a thousand years earlier.
00:09:39For centuries, the most reliable system of sharing information had been a letter written
00:09:44by hand and delivered by hand.
00:09:47Darling, Ege, your last letter has nourished me for six months. Now I need another from
00:09:53you, and you will give it to me.
00:10:00By the early 1800s, the arrival of formal postal services run by the state or private
00:10:06companies increases the pace of human connectivity.
00:10:11The coming of steam speeds things up further.
00:10:15Even so, delivering news across long distances continues to depend on a piece of paper being
00:10:21transferred from a writer to a reader.
00:10:26Information from beyond your locality could take weeks, months or years to arrive.
00:10:37Driven by the Industrial Revolution, a rise in education and the relentless pursuit of
00:10:42scientific discovery, the 19th century is a time of phenomenal transformation.
00:10:49Among new technologies developed, one will fundamentally change how we live on this earth.
00:11:00The adoption of some system of electro-telegraphic communication has become for every civilized
00:11:06nation a matter of absolute necessity.
00:11:10When electricity was first harnessed, it was greeted like supernatural power. You know,
00:11:16people just didn't know how it was working, but they loved it. You know, they loved seeing it.
00:11:21It sort of brought together Victorian thinkers, so philosophers, scientists, mathematicians,
00:11:27intellectuals, and they used to debate a lot, discuss and disagree quite a lot with things.
00:11:33Experiments by scientists like Benjamin Franklin in America, Alessandro Volto in Italy and
00:11:38Michael Faraday in England show that a wire connected to an electrostatic machine or a
00:11:43battery will cause an electrical charge to be felt at the wire's far end.
00:11:49So the public would want to be part of the experiments. They'd be wanting to touch the
00:11:53electricity. They'd want to feel it. They'd want to feel the hairs standing upon end.
00:12:06In the early 1800s, experimenters in Britain, France and the U.S. harnessed electricity
00:12:12to create machines that generate light, power and heat. Crucially, they also discovered
00:12:18that electricity can be used to facilitate long-distance communications.
00:12:26Ever bigger and faster machines and technology are developed. Steam, steel and vast engines
00:12:33power massive factories, and through the heart of it all, electricity pulses.
00:12:41Electricity changes everything in lots of ways. I think this makes people imagine new
00:12:46possibilities for what it is to be human, and it is why you get the advent of science
00:12:50fiction. You know, people like Jules Verne and other science fiction writers that start
00:12:54to emerge imagining humanity living differently as a result of technology.
00:13:01Early attempts by pioneers to harness electricity to send messages are too complex, but in 1837
00:13:18Samuel Morse, an American artist, invents a simple code of dots and dashes which can
00:13:24be translated into words using a codebook. Morse's business partner, Alfred Vale, expands
00:13:31the code to include letters and special characters, and in 1844 they successfully send a message
00:13:38by cable from Washington D.C. to Baltimore. Morse code will come to dominate the world.
00:13:55Cable. The most frequent letters were the ones to which Vale attributed the shortest
00:14:05number of characters. E, a dot. T, a dash. I, two dots. M, two dashes. And then when
00:14:16you come to letters which are used very seldom, like J, da-da-da-da, that's one dot and three
00:14:22dashes. By the late 1840s, a network of telegraph wires is erected across America's east. New
00:14:32York, Washington and Chicago are connected. Across the Atlantic, telegraph networks are
00:14:39constructed connecting the main cities of Europe. There are engravings where you can
00:14:46hardly see the sky for the stone of wires. And a bird couldn't fly from ground upwards
00:14:56without hitting a wire. Before the telegraph, it could take days for a speech made by a
00:15:05politician to travel from Chicago to New York. Once a telegraph happens, those speeches can
00:15:12get to New York in a matter of hours. When the first telegraphs come in in England, immediately
00:15:26people start trying to use them to transmit the results of horse races. You can get that
00:15:31news away from the race course after the result has been declared and get it into a betting
00:15:36shop in London before the news reaches the betting shop and obviously you can place
00:15:41a surefire bet. A lot of people could see the commercial viability of it, that there
00:15:49were telegraph networks on both sides of the Atlantic. Those networks were becoming busy
00:15:55and the use of them, particularly for trade and for transmitting news and for stockbrokers,
00:16:00was evident. It's something we still see in modern days. For years, trading firms would
00:16:06have invested tons of money in getting the fastest cables to be a microsecond faster
00:16:12in getting data and information on stocks and other commercial activities because speed
00:16:17is of great importance. These land-based telegraphic systems, pulsing with stock market prices
00:16:25and political news, are the beacons of our modern information age.
00:16:37Having made his fortune in the paper business, Cyrus Field understands that the world is shrinking and hungry for fast news.
00:16:51Now a chance encounter with British telegraph pioneer Frederick Gisborne in 1853 gives Field an opportunity to enter the cable business.
00:16:59Frederick Gisborne is a very interesting character. He's very well-educated. He takes all of his worldly goods on a sled and walking through the wilderness to survey different parts of the land.
00:17:22Gisborne had noticed that lots of ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean pass by Newfoundland. Gisborne
00:17:28has figured that if he can erect a line connecting Newfoundland's coast to the existing telegraph
00:17:33network in North America, he could cut up to five days off the time it takes to send
00:17:38a message between Europe and America. It was quite a mad idea because Newfoundland
00:17:43was quite remote from the rest of North America and it was very inhospitable.
00:17:49Backed by private equity, Gisborne sets out full of hope. But bad weather and even worse
00:17:55luck brings failure. A team member dies. Others abandon him.
00:18:01He did it at a horrible time of the year and you're in the interior of Newfoundland. It's undeveloped.
00:18:13Undaunted, Gisborne asks Cyrus Field for funding for a second attempt.
00:18:19It was quite a mad idea but the legend has it that after Gisborne left, Cyrus Field had
00:18:25an even madder idea. He looked at his globe and he realised that if you could lay a cable
00:18:29all the way from New York to St. John's in Newfoundland, would it not be just easier
00:18:33to lay a cable the whole way across the Atlantic to Europe?
00:18:45But laying a 3,200 kilometres long cable beneath the vast Atlantic Ocean is thought impossible
00:18:53by some of the foremost men of science. It was a mathematical impossibility to submerge
00:19:01the cable successfully at so great a depth and if it were possible, no signals could
00:19:07be transmitted through so great a length. Even Samuel Morris, now vastly wealthy from
00:19:14his telegraph investments, fears the Atlantic Ocean might be a step too far.
00:19:21First, can electricity be propelled to a distance so great as the width of the ocean?
00:19:26Second, this ocean bed had not been sounded. Third, can a cable of such length be paid
00:19:33out to such a depth as required? But driven by ambition and profit, Field pursues
00:19:40his plans with zeal. It appears difficult to overestimate the commercial
00:19:46returns that will accrue from this undertaking. Sometimes you do need an outsider to come
00:19:52into a field and say, well, hang on a minute, why don't we try this? And the people who
00:19:55know all about it will say, well, that can't be done.
00:20:03To undertake his mission to connect the world by cable, in 1856, Field gathers his team
00:20:16of experts. Among them are the telegraph pioneer Samuel Morris and the groundbreaking physicist
00:20:22William Thomson. It's striking at the time, it was all men
00:20:28that were involved in laying the cable. Women weren't involved in the engineering or designing
00:20:33or any of the operations. Which is not unusual given how difficult it
00:20:39was for women to enter certain professions. There were still notions of a separate sphere,
00:20:47women belonging rather to the household than out in school. And that is something that
00:20:52you see throughout the 19th century. There is one unexpected addition to Field's
00:21:06team, the British art dealer John Brett. So John Brett's really interesting. He goes
00:21:13to the US and in the US he brings with him lots of old masters, you know, paintings from
00:21:19the Renaissance. He makes a fortune selling these and comes back to London as a fairly
00:21:24wealthy character. In the late 1840s, John Brett, with his brother
00:21:30Jacob, had hatched a plan to lay a submarine cable connecting Britain and France. If this
00:21:35succeeded, it would be the first undersea cable to connect two countries in the world.
00:21:41The British and French governments grant the Bretts permission to proceed with their plans.
00:21:47Of course the British ruling elite is interested in it. They see it as a means to control territory,
00:21:52to control their colonies. The French also want to connect with their
00:21:59colonies in Africa. Among the many challenges the Bretts must
00:22:05overcome is that water and electricity can't mix.
00:22:11When you're stringing up telegraph wires on land, you can just put the wire up and
00:22:15you can have your telegraph poles and it's all quite straightforward. You can't do that
00:22:19under water because water is an electrical conductor.
00:22:23So if you put a bare copper cable into water, basically the current will just dissipate
00:22:28into the water. But after some research, the Bretts find a
00:22:41solution. Gutter Percha, which was made from the sap
00:22:48of the gutter tree, which was native to what was then called Malaya, now Malaysia, in South
00:22:52East Asia, bore up well to being soaked in water.
00:22:56Irish chemical entrepreneur Henry Bewley then steps in with his novel design for a new machine
00:23:03which he calls the Thermoplastic Insulator. Bewley's machine allows gutter percha to be
00:23:09stretched into a thin layer, allowing the latex to be finely wrapped around the cable
00:23:14wire. Now, with their copper cable safely insulated
00:23:18from the water, the Bretts were set to go.
00:23:23So here we have Jacob Brett's personal album on the origin and progress of submarine telegraphy
00:23:31presented to the institution as a personal record of his work.
00:23:38And there's Jacob Brett himself. But it's also got some lovely illustrations, including
00:23:45this one showing the start of laying down telegraph cable between England and France.
00:23:50We have the boats here. We've got the cliffs of Dover here. And here you can see people
00:23:57actually laying out cable from the start through to the ship.
00:24:03So they've literally got a whole load of wire, stuck it on the back of a fishing boat,
00:24:08and went across the channel spooling the wire out of the back. And it didn't go terribly
00:24:12well because the wire floated on the water, so they had to attach weights to it to get
00:24:17it to sink. But finally, they get to France, and they were then able to send messages between
00:24:21Britain and France.
00:24:24The Bretts' success is acclaimed around the world.
00:24:29We stand on the threshold of an improvement that may hasten the progress of our race more
00:24:34rapidly than any other.
00:24:37Emboldened by success, John Brett attempts to lay a cable connecting France to Africa,
00:24:43where the Mediterranean Sea is far deeper and uneven, and the project fails.
00:24:53Brett does, however, succeed in connecting Britain to Ireland, and continues the line
00:24:58to Dublin and the South.
00:25:01Brett foresees that someone will succeed in laying a cable under the Atlantic, and when
00:25:07it comes, he will be ready to connect to it.
00:25:14Along with John Brett, Field's team also includes the physicist William Thomson, who has become
00:25:20fascinated by the theory of undersea telegraphy.
00:25:24Thomson relishes the challenge of designing a submarine cable that many in the world of
00:25:28science believe to be impossible.
00:25:31We may be sure that the American telegraph will succeed. The corresponding solution of
00:25:36the equation by which the effect of imperfect insulation may be taken into account is the
00:25:42change of electrical potential V in the cable due to imperfect insulation is equal to one
00:25:47over two...
00:25:48With his deep understanding of physics, Thomson was the ideal candidate for the position of
00:25:53chief engineer of Field's Atlantic Telegraph Company. But ignorant of the scientific challenges
00:25:59that face them, Cyrus Field appoints Thomson as an advisor, and instead an amateur experimenter,
00:26:06Wildman Whitehouse, is given the most senior scientific position in the company.
00:26:12Wildman Whitehouse appropriately named, yes. He was a surgeon by training. He had no background
00:26:18in electricity or engineering, but not many people involved in the enterprise did.
00:26:26He was a sort of self-taught telegraph engineer. He had his own theories. He'd done lots of
00:26:31research, but he used his own special terminology and he used his own equipment to measure the
00:26:36properties of wires. So they go into this with a chief engineer who doesn't really know
00:26:43what's going on. I mean, to be fair, hardly anyone does.
00:26:49With his team in place, now Field must choose the route. Initially, a direct line running
00:26:55from New York to Britain or France is considered, until deep sea soundings by the U.S. Navy
00:27:02reveal something unexpected and providential.
00:27:07From Newfoundland to Ireland, the bottom of the sea between the two places is a plateau,
00:27:13which seems to have been placed there especially for the purpose of holding the wires of a
00:27:17submarine telegraph and of keeping them out of harm's way.
00:27:23At some level, this felt miraculous. This must be there for a reason. God must have
00:27:31put this plateau across the middle of the Atlantic Ocean so that we could lay the cable,
00:27:37that this was part of human destiny. You're talking about a time when people really saw
00:27:43God's hand in things and he was doing it so that humanity could live a better life.
00:27:52The Atlantic Plateau decides the matter. Ireland will be the landing point in Europe.
00:27:58But where in Ireland? The answer comes from an encounter between Field and Peter Fitzgerald,
00:28:0519th Knight of Kerry.
00:28:07The Knight of Kerry was a Member of Parliament in London and when Cyrus Field was raising funds,
00:28:13he befriended Peter Fitzgerald and Peter, of course, knew everybody that was important
00:28:18in London and he opened the doors for the raising of finance for Cyrus Field.
00:28:30The Knight of Kerry, he was actually very innovative and progressive. He was very
00:28:35innovative and progressive. He lived on the island and very different to other British
00:28:41landlords. He actually really cared about his Irish tenants and the local population.
00:28:47This was shortly after the famine.
00:28:51In the decade before the first transatlantic cable attempt, a devastating famine,
00:28:56triggered by the failure of the potato crop, had caused the deaths of one million people in Ireland.
00:29:03Two million more had been forced to emigrate.
00:29:06Under Fitzgerald's stewardship, however, the inhabitants of Valencia Island escaped the worst.
00:29:13Sir Peter Fitzgerald was conscious of ensuring that Valencia had economic viability. So he had
00:29:20invested in the growing and weaving of flax for export. He invested in the development of the
00:29:27slate factory. Through friends in London, Fitzgerald has secured lucrative contracts
00:29:33to supply Valencia slate to Westminster Palace and the London Underground.
00:29:38Now Fitzgerald convinces Field that the safe harbour of Valencia Island
00:29:43on Ireland's westerly coast is the ideal location for his European base.
00:29:51The team is assembled, the launch site agreed.
00:29:55But the biggest challenge remains ahead. A cable strong and flexible enough to survive
00:30:00the pressures of the vast Atlantic Ocean must be produced.
00:30:04The Atlantic Telegraph is now in the process of manufacture.
00:30:092,500 miles of cable are to be ready to go to sea by the end of May.
00:30:14And if no accident happens,
00:30:16electric messages will be passing between Ireland and Newfoundland before July.
00:30:24So this is one of the first cables and as you can see there's copper in the middle with gutta
00:30:30percha and hemp surrounding it and then iron too that was twisted around it.
00:30:37To make a cable strong enough to survive the forces involved, 29,000 kilometres of copper wire
00:30:44must be wound in 526,000 kilometres of protective iron wire. That's an iron wire
00:30:52long enough to reach the moon.
00:30:57The contract to manufacture the cable goes to two rope and cable manufacturers in England.
00:31:07The cable required lots of copper. This copper would have come from Cornwall,
00:31:11it could have come also from Chile and they wind it through the machines making a core.
00:31:16They then cover it with gutta percha.
00:31:19We had materials being used to make this cable that came from Cornwall, that came from Chile,
00:31:24that came from Indonesia. Workers around the world, thousands of them,
00:31:27had to come together to make this happen. It was a massive international effort.
00:31:32This is the moment where we can start to see what we now would think of as globalisation.
00:31:36This is where globalisation starts.
00:31:39The cables are extremely long, they require tonnes and tonnes of gutta percha
00:31:44and the way they harvested the latex was they cut the tree down.
00:31:47They essentially destroy the forests.
00:31:56The costs involved for Field and the Transatlantic Telegraph Company are inevitably substantial.
00:32:02Field invests much of his own fortune. For the rest, he turns to the private market.
00:32:09He goes and raises money from investors and a bit like with a modern tech start-up,
00:32:13you have a roadshow, you have a PowerPoint deck and he's saying,
00:32:16this is going to be great, we're all going to make lots of money, it's going to change the world,
00:32:19world peace.
00:32:22I don't think the idea that this will make humanity better is just spin. I think people
00:32:26actually believe it. I think there's a sense that in some way the world has changed on its axis here.
00:32:32Something different has happened. Maybe this is humanity entering a better phase.
00:32:37There's still that belief that technology could make us better,
00:32:42make us better people and to learn to love one another.
00:32:55August 4th, 1857. With the international press and large crowds watching on Valencia Island,
00:33:02the Atlantic Telegraph Company prepares to transform the world.
00:33:07On loan from the British and US governments, the HMS Agamemnon and the USS Niagara carry
00:33:13half the cable each on board. The idea is that Niagara will spool out its half and then when
00:33:19they get halfway, they'll stick on the Agamemnon's half and do the second half of the cable.
00:33:27Cable boats today are advanced, they're purpose-built ships made for this purpose.
00:33:33They work 365 days a year laying cable or fixing faults.
00:33:41The original guys took navy ships that were not built for purpose, they modified them to take the
00:33:47cable that they needed. They were learning as they went, they were finding problems and fixing them
00:33:51on the go. But how they took those ships loaded with that weight of cable to start distributing
00:33:59across the Atlantic is mind-blowing.
00:34:04Before the ships depart, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland George Howard delivers a rousing speech.
00:34:12We are about to establish a new material link between the old world and the new. Our new link,
00:34:19instead of superseding and supplanting the old ones, is to give a life and intensity which they
00:34:26never had before. There was bands there, there was artists depicting what was going on
00:34:33and there was huge excitement over this transatlantic cable. We had so many visitors
00:34:40in the island, it was a wonder where they got accommodation. To celebrate the laying of the
00:34:45cable, the Knight of Kerry had a banquet and a dance and these were held in John O'Driscoll's
00:34:50store in the Slate Yard. On the eve of this great ocean voyage, nerves among the sailors
00:34:58and pioneers are on edge. The whole adventure of the big ship leaving the harbour, with the
00:35:04additional bit of laying this cable out behind it, fit into a whole set of stories of ocean
00:35:11adventures, I suppose, you know, going back to Homer really, of setting out into the ocean and
00:35:15the ocean being, in lots of ways, one of the last frontiers.
00:35:23Cyrus Field feels the weight of history. I have no words to express the feelings which
00:35:30fill my heart tonight. It beats with love and affection for every man, woman, and child who
00:35:37hears me. The following morning, the ships set sail. In a portent of what may lie ahead,
00:35:51only hours after leaving port, the cable snaps. The ships must return to Valencia for repairs.
00:35:59The next day, they sail out once more, this time with little fanfare,
00:36:04but again, almost immediately, calamity strikes.
00:36:09When they were 280 miles out, as the ocean suddenly got deeper, the cable was running
00:36:16out very heavy, and it was running out too fast, and the braking system wasn't good enough,
00:36:21and they couldn't control the braking system.
00:36:24The cable dropped really quickly. The guys on the ship went, oh my god, you know, help, help.
00:36:30They pulled the brake, and they snapped the cable. That first cable was really inadequate. It was
00:36:36really just too thin and too weak to withstand the Atlantic. New boats today can measure the
00:36:42tension on the cable. You know, there could be a couple of tons' weight tension on the cable,
00:36:46as it goes to the greater depths, and they can vary and release those to manage that,
00:36:51so it doesn't get stressed. But back in the day, the tensions on the cable was causing the snap.
00:36:57The loss of 480 kilometers of cable is a catastrophe. Not only has the 1857 mission
00:37:04failed, it has devoured most of the money Field had raised.
00:37:09The Atlantic Telegraph Company is an embarrassment to the world. Field, though, remains determined.
00:37:16Over winter, the braking system that controls the speed and tension at which the cable is paid out
00:37:22is improved. But the cable is not the only thing that has been lost.
00:37:29The Atlantic Telegraph Company is the largest telegraph company in the world.
00:37:34The braking system that controls the speed and tension at which the cable is paid out
00:37:39is improved. A fresh fundraising round is initiated, with shares of £20 sold to private
00:37:46investors in the US and the UK. Then a year later, the team is set to go again.
00:37:52June 10th, 1858. The two refitted ships depart for the second time from Plymouth in the UK.
00:38:07The plan has changed. The ships will start laying cable together from the middle of the ocean.
00:38:15It is proposed that the two ships, each laden with half the cable,
00:38:19shall proceed together to a point halfway between the two coasts.
00:38:23The two ends of the cable having been carefully joined together,
00:38:27the vessels will start in opposite directions, one towards Ireland and the other towards Newfoundland.
00:38:37Newfoundland in the 1850s is a very sparsely populated place.
00:38:42It's dependent upon seasonal fishery, cod primarily, hunting seals in the winter.
00:38:50So it's basically a kind of hunter-gatherer subsistence life.
00:38:56And if the fish don't come in, or if the seals are offshore, the ice is offshore,
00:39:00there's real hunger. People actually starve to death in Newfoundland.
00:39:04The Agamemnon and the Niagara successfully rendezvous halfway between Europe and Newfoundland
00:39:11and set off. But within hours, catastrophe hits again.
00:39:21The Agamemnon rose heavily and then went down quickly into the deep trough of the sea,
00:39:27falling over as she did, so almost to capsize completely. Everything broke adrift.
00:39:34Equipped to carry 1,250 tons of cable, the Agamemnon struggles to stay afloat.
00:39:41Two men are injured as the ship rolls violently. Cabins are flooded. The cable is damaged.
00:39:53It was evident that the ship itself would soon strain into pieces if the weather continued so.
00:40:03It takes 10 days for the storm to blow out. Beaten and battered, the ships rendezvous and
00:40:09make repairs, and Field then orders the cable laying to continue. Again, however, the mission
00:40:16is blighted. Twice more the cable snaps. Long sections are lost several kilometres down to
00:40:23the ocean floor. After a month of toil, the ships run perilously low on coal and food,
00:40:30and finally they realise they must give up and return to Ireland. Cyrus Field faces ruin.
00:40:39The strain on the man was more than the strain on the cable. We were in fear that both would break together.
00:40:47Shocked by this second failure, chairman of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, Sir William Brown
00:40:52calls for the entire mission to be scrapped and what remains of the cable to be sold.
00:40:59But against all odds, Field persuades the company board to allow him one last attempt.
00:41:06Quickly, he has the ships reprovisioned, and just four weeks later, they sail again.
00:41:12The mission seems doomed. Three times more the cable breaks.
00:41:18Each time, crewmen fish it back from the depths with grappling lines several miles long.
00:41:35Confronting each challenge head-on, the USS Niagara continues across the Atlantic,
00:41:41and on the evening of August 4th, 1858, Cyrus Field, the man whose drive and vision has
00:41:48sustained this epic journey, at last enters Newfoundland's Trinity Bay.
00:41:54Hours later, on the far side of the ocean, the HMS Agamemnon arrives at Valencia harbour
00:42:01to the sound of a massive gun salute.
00:42:07Five years of toil, persistence and ingenuity has paid off.
00:42:14The two continents of Europe and North America, the old world and the new,
00:42:19The two continents of Europe and North America, the old world and the new,
00:42:24have at last been joined together by a man-made subsea communications cable.
00:42:31Among the first telegraphs Field sends is one to his wife, Mary, and their seven children in New York.
00:42:40Arrived here yesterday all well. The Atlantic telegraph cable successfully laid.
00:42:46Please telegraph me here immediately.
00:42:49Later that day, Field receives a telegram from the American president, James Buchanan.
00:42:56I congratulate you with all my heart upon the success of the great enterprise.
00:43:02Under the blessings of divine providence, I trust it may prove instrumental in promoting
00:43:08perpetual peace and friendship between kings and nations.
00:43:11I have not yet received the Queen's dispatch.
00:43:22The world is completely besotted by this and completely excited.
00:43:28In some places all business was suspended.
00:43:31Men rushed into the streets and flocked to the offices where the news was received.
00:43:36There were tremendous celebrations here in Valencia.
00:43:39There was barrels of porter poured out by the night to carry.
00:43:46There were celebrations in Dublin and London, all over the world really.
00:43:52There are massive celebrations in the streets of New York.
00:43:57There's a fireworks display so big that it sets the roof of the city hall on fire.
00:44:02There's a half-day holiday declared.
00:44:04There's a piece of the cable that's paraded down Fifth Avenue.
00:44:10There are telegraph balls.
00:44:14There's telegraph merchandise.
00:44:16You could buy a walking stick, a gentleman's walking stick, that had a piece of the actual
00:44:21cable built into the shaft, designed by Tiffany's.
00:44:25You know, I want one of these.
00:44:27Here in New York, the triumphant pyrotechnics celebrated this firework display.
00:44:33Final and complete subjugation by man of all the powers of nature, space and time included.
00:44:41The phrase is used that this annihilates time and space.
00:44:47It's hard to think of a bigger claim to make about anything.
00:44:52People send a message more or less instantly across it.
00:44:56Time was gone.
00:44:57Space was gone.
00:45:04August 16th, President Buchanan receives a message from the British monarch, Queen Victoria.
00:45:11The Queen is convinced that the President will join her in fervently hoping that the
00:45:16electric cable will prove an additional link between the nations, whose friendship is founded
00:45:22upon their common interest and reciprocal esteem.
00:45:26Glory to God in the highest and to Earth, peace and goodwill to all men, was the first
00:45:31message sent on the cable.
00:45:34It's talked about in terms of uniting humanity.
00:45:39Cyrus Field appears to have been fully aware of the future implications of his great endeavor.
00:45:45The whole Earth will be belted with electric current, palpitating with human thoughts and
00:45:51emotions.
00:45:52Palpitating with human thoughts and emotions.
00:46:04Repeat, please.
00:46:06Repeat, please.
00:46:08Please send slower for the present.
00:46:11Repeat, please.
00:46:13How?
00:46:13How do you receive?
00:46:15But as the world celebrates, the cable is failing.
00:46:19I wouldn't catch that.
00:46:21Can you repeat, please?
00:46:23Repeat, please.
00:46:25The cable had been unreliable from the start.
00:46:26From the very first day, it was quite difficult for the operators to understand the message
00:46:31being transmitted.
00:46:32Repeat, repeat, please.
00:46:33Repeat, please.
00:46:35Repeat, please.
00:46:36Please, just please say.
00:46:38So when you put a cable under the sea and you make it very long, what you have is something
00:46:44called retardation.
00:46:45It would sort of lengthen these pulses, and that meant that the next incoming pulse overlapped
00:46:53with the previous pulse.
00:46:54There was no space between the signals.
00:46:59And that meant the signals at the other end of the cable were all distorted.
00:47:03So the telegraph operators just heard noise.
00:47:06Repeat, please.
00:47:07Repeat, please.
00:47:08Please send these and these.
00:47:10These and these.
00:47:11Please send these and these.
00:47:12Please send these and these.
00:47:14The first message to be sent over was from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan in the
00:47:19US, and it was 90 words long, and it took 16 and a half hours to transmit because of
00:47:24these problems.
00:47:25In a converted slate house on Valencia Island, Wildman Whitehouse seeks desperately for a
00:47:31solution.
00:47:32Whitehouse's answer is to turn up the voltage.
00:47:34He thinks, well, surely this is the way to make signals travel more effectively over
00:47:39very long distances.
00:47:40He then increases the voltage to around 2,000 volts through this narrow cable.
00:47:46So he thought, OK, well, I'm going to give it a big amount of voltage on this side of
00:47:50the cable to the point where it gets to the other end of the very long cable.
00:47:53It's still going to have some voltage.
00:47:55He didn't realize that that's just not how the science works.
00:47:59And what happened was he burnt out the cable.
00:48:02So the cable was destroyed.
00:48:03After two weeks of ever more garbled messages, the company board has enough.
00:48:09Whitehouse is fired and William Thompson is promoted.
00:48:13Thompson immediately rectifies the issue by reducing the power sent through the cable.
00:48:20But the cable is too damaged to survive.
00:48:24Within a week, the line is permanently dead.
00:48:34When news of this gets into the media, some of the media reports say that the whole thing
00:48:39was was made up and it was all a complete fake.
00:48:43There's a big scandal because this cable has been hailed as a great breakthrough for
00:48:49mankind and that everyone's written it up in the papers.
00:48:52So a lot of people say, well, did it ever work?
00:48:54This whole thing could have been a hoax.
00:48:56It could have been a way of making people think that it was a hoax.
00:48:59So a lot of people say, well, did it ever work?
00:49:01This whole thing could have been a hoax.
00:49:03It could have been a way of trying to get money out of investors.
00:49:08Reliable and unimpeachable evidence is wanting that one solitary intelligible
00:49:13sentence ever passed upon the cable from either continent to the other.
00:49:17Have the cable managers humbugged the public?
00:49:22The same obviously happened with the moon landings.
00:49:23There are still people who say, oh, yes, it was all a trick.
00:49:27They got Stanley Kubrick to do it.
00:49:28And it was all faked by NASA on sound stages and this sort of thing.
00:49:31So these amazing leaps forward are sometimes
00:49:35so amazing that people can't believe that they really happened.
00:49:40After the failure in 1858, there was a public inquiry in London,
00:49:45the first of its kind, and they brought all the scientists together.
00:49:50William Thompson and Samuel Marson, Michael Faraday, all those people were brought together.
00:49:56To see why the 1858 cable failed.
00:50:00The inquiry's conclusions, published in 1861 in a 500-page book, are damning.
00:50:07Amateurism, lack of proper scientific rigor, money wasted.
00:50:20Following the inquiry, Cyrus Field now turns to the one man
00:50:24whose scientific knowledge he hopes can save the cable, William Thompson.
00:50:30Cyrus Field and the other directors turn to Thompson and say,
00:50:33we should have listened to you.
00:50:34Tell us what we were doing wrong.
00:50:36Help us sort it out.
00:50:38Among Thompson's first recommendations
00:50:41is that future cables must use only copper wire of the very highest purity.
00:50:47Thompson also stipulates that future cables must be both stronger and more flexible,
00:50:53though this will increase costs.
00:50:55The company agrees.
00:50:57He then invents something called a mirrored galvanometer.
00:51:01Very sensitive instrument for measuring the current through a very long cable.
00:51:08I am never content until I have constructed a mechanical model of the subject I am studying.
00:51:14If I succeed in making one, I understand.
00:51:17Otherwise, I do not.
00:51:19Thompson's super-sensitive galvanometer revolutionizes undersea telegraphy.
00:51:23The galvanometer allows signals to be sent over vast distances
00:51:28using low amounts of electrical current.
00:51:31A tiny mirror mounted on a light coil of copper wire
00:51:34twists back and forth in a magnetic field generated by the electric current.
00:51:39A beam of light reflecting off the mirror swings one direction for a Morse code dot,
00:51:44the other for a dash.
00:51:47When the inquiry ends, the irrepressible Cyrus Field prepares for a third attempt.
00:51:53Events in the US, however, bring plans to a halt.
00:52:06An estimated 1.5 million people will be killed in the event of an earthquake.
00:52:12An estimated 750,000 people lose their lives in the American Civil War.
00:52:24The war reveals the strategic value of high-speed communications.
00:52:29In this brutal long war, both Confederate and Union sides use telegraphs to command armies.
00:52:36Meanwhile, the British government's commitment to telegraphy also grows.
00:52:41In the short window during which the Atlantic Cable had worked,
00:52:45British military command sent messages on it commanding their troops stationed in Canada
00:52:50to disregard a previous order calling on them to sail to India.
00:52:55As the Indian mutiny had since been suppressed, the soldiers were no longer required.
00:53:00This saved the British government £50,000 at a stroke,
00:53:03more than repaying its own investment in the cable.
00:53:08British prime ministers often talked about the telegraph as a kind of a trigger,
00:53:11like a trigger on a gun.
00:53:12You know, you could put an army in place and you could keep that army in the barracks,
00:53:17send the telegraph, send the army out, and it can, you know, go to work or go to war.
00:53:22After so much failure, raising finance for a new attempt proves a mammoth undertaking.
00:53:29Investors have lost fortunes in previous attempts
00:53:32and have little interest in being burned again, but feel the pressure.
00:53:38The British government's commitment to telegraphy is a sign of a new era.
00:53:42It's a sign of a new era.
00:53:43It's a sign of a new era.
00:53:45It's a sign of a new era.
00:53:46It's a sign of a new era.
00:53:48and have little interest in being burned again, but Field remains adamant.
00:53:53A transatlantic cable will be achieved.
00:53:56The Atlantic telegraph's value can hardly be estimated to the commerce
00:54:00and even to the peace of the world.
00:54:05Then, in a bold move, for his third attempt at the mission,
00:54:10Field leases an extraordinary asset.
00:54:13Designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel,
00:54:16the Great Eastern is the largest ship in the world.
00:54:20There's this enormous ship, the Great Eastern.
00:54:23It's never really made any sense.
00:54:25Turns out it's absolutely brilliant for cable, though.
00:54:29The Great Eastern is refitted to carry a whopping 10,000 tons of cable and a crew of 200.
00:54:37There's a wonderful painting by the official painter Robert Dudley
00:54:42of the Great Eastern, and there's a normal-sized frigate beside her,
00:54:46and then a smaller supply ship beside that.
00:54:49And you can see, just as a painter, what he's done.
00:54:51He's put them there for scale.
00:54:53That you look at the Great Eastern, you think, oh, a ship.
00:54:55Then you realize, no, that's a normal-sized ship beside it.
00:54:58That is a beast.
00:55:00And it's about scale.
00:55:01It's about, look at what we can build.
00:55:04Bigger, better, but also the kind of conquest of the Atlantic.
00:55:09We can conquer not just the surface, but the deeps.
00:55:13We can conquer the bottom of the ocean.
00:55:21On July 23, 1865, the world's press descend once again on Valencia Island
00:55:28to witness the third attempt to connect Europe to America by cable.
00:55:33Rich and powerful mingle with less well-off locals.
00:55:39It was a strange crowd to look at.
00:55:41Half the men were barefoot, and none of them were decently clad.
00:55:45The chances are that three or four could have seen the point of a joke
00:55:49and given a smart answer themselves.
00:55:55So we're on the most westerly point of Valencia Island now.
00:55:58Next stop from here is North America.
00:56:00And see those islands there?
00:56:01They're the Skellig's.
00:56:02And in 1865, just beyond them is where the Great Eastern had to anchor
00:56:07because it was too large to come into this harbour.
00:56:10So a boat had to come out and collect the shoreline cable
00:56:13and bring it back and connect it to this purpose-built cable station right here.
00:56:19With a cable plugged in, Cyrus Field sets out on the Great Eastern.
00:56:24Destination, Newfoundland.
00:56:27The Great Eastern proves far more reliable than the old navy ships.
00:56:32Progress is easily made.
00:56:34The Great Eastern, from her size and constant steadiness,
00:56:38and from the control over her afforded by the joint use of paddles and screw,
00:56:43renders it safe to lay an Atlantic cable in any weather.
00:56:47Everything went quite well until there were 600 miles off of Newfoundland.
00:56:52A damaged cable went out and I had to haul it back in.
00:56:57But when the crew tries to haul the cable up from the depths, it breaks.
00:57:02It flew through the stoppers and with one bound,
00:57:04leaped over the intervening space and flashed into the sea.
00:57:08The cable gone forever, down into that fearful depth.
00:57:14The cable snaps and it's lost at the bottom of the sea.
00:57:17But this time, unlike in 1857,
00:57:20they decide to mark the spot and to come back and recover it.
00:57:32Though disappointed, the team is optimistic.
00:57:37For before the cable broke,
00:57:38operators were sending clear messages between the Great Eastern
00:57:42and Valencia Island, County Kerry.
00:57:47Now certain that the cable can function perfectly,
00:57:50Field raises a new round of finance.
00:58:01July 13th, 1866, the Great Eastern waves anchor
00:58:06and departs Valencia Island for the fourth attempt.
00:58:11It was so calm that the masts of our convoy were reflected in the ocean.
00:58:16A large shoal of porpoises gambled about us for about half an hour.
00:58:20A glorious sunset and later, a crescent moon.
00:58:26This was the first time the Great Eastern had ever been so calm.
00:58:31This time, there are no significant problems.
00:58:43After 14 days at sea, the massive ship reaches Newfoundland,
00:58:48where a new cable station has been built in the village of Hearts Content.
00:58:53And then, all of a sudden, they look out,
00:58:56they see six huge masts coming around the point
00:58:59of an almost 700-foot ship coming into the mouth of the harbour
00:59:05to change the face of the town forever.
00:59:10The ladies would have wore their Sunday best,
00:59:13the men would have been in top hats and tails.
00:59:16They would have had huge celebrations.
00:59:20Sires Field walks off the Great Eastern and he comes ashore
00:59:23and he's literally hoisted above the heads of the people.
00:59:28And then they send a message and actually say,
00:59:32we have now connected the two continents.
00:59:35It is a glory to our age and nation,
00:59:39and the men who have achieved it deserve to be honoured
00:59:42by the people of the Great Eastern.
00:59:44It is a glory to our age and nation,
00:59:47and the men who have achieved it deserve to be honoured
00:59:50among the benefactors of their race.
00:59:53Since the discovery of Columbus,
00:59:55nothing has been done in any degree comparable to the vast enlargement
00:59:59that has thus been given to the sphere of human activity.
01:00:05The world is stunned and thrilled.
01:00:08Sires Field has achieved his dream.
01:00:11He telegraphs a note to his friend and supporter,
01:00:14the Knight of Kerry in Valencia.
01:00:21This was put together by the Knight of Kerry.
01:00:24And there is this message from Sires Field,
01:00:27sent from Hearts Content in Newfoundland,
01:00:29so they've got to the other side,
01:00:30and it says, Ireland and America are united by telegraph.
01:00:34Please remember me very kindly to all your family.
01:00:37Sent at 12.30.
01:00:39With the transatlantic cable successfully relaying messages
01:00:42between Europe and North America,
01:00:44Field heads out into the ocean to see if he can find the cable
01:00:48that had sunk the year before.
01:00:50After three weeks grappling,
01:00:52the 1865 cable is recovered from a depth of two kilometres down.
01:00:58In a characteristic act of showmanship,
01:01:01Sires Field uses the 1865 cable
01:01:04to send a message from the Great Eastern
01:01:06to the Cable Hut in Valencia, Ireland,
01:01:09and from there his message is relayed
01:01:11via the new 1866 cable back to Newfoundland.
01:01:16And they say he wept as he sent that message.
01:01:20As I sat in the electrician's room,
01:01:23a flash of light came up from the deep,
01:01:25which having crossed to Ireland,
01:01:27came back to me in mid-ocean,
01:01:29telling that those so dear to me were well
01:01:31and following us with their wishes and their prayers.
01:01:34This was like a whisper of God from the sea,
01:01:38bidding me keep heart and hope.
01:01:51The significance of that moment
01:01:53is when you realise that the world that we knew
01:01:57had changed forever,
01:01:58and the way that you communicated had changed forever.
01:02:01A lot of inspiration that we can take from them
01:02:04is about perseverance, about being hard-working,
01:02:07about understanding each other's skill set
01:02:09and putting the right people in the right place.
01:02:13The thing that gets me is that they tried and failed
01:02:17and tried and failed,
01:02:18and it's like, just keep trying until you achieve it.
01:02:23I admire the perseverance and resilience
01:02:26that Sires Field and all of the men back then had.
01:02:29That they weren't giving up on this challenge.
01:02:32They were going to succeed and connect the two continents.
01:02:37That vision and that hope or dream,
01:02:40that's what I take from the story.
01:02:48The success of the transatlantic cable
01:02:51transformed the world.
01:02:53It also transforms life on Valencia Island.
01:02:57Skilled cable operators come from far and wide.
01:03:00Housing, offices and a new cable station are built.
01:03:04And just as the Knight of Kerry had anticipated,
01:03:07Valencia's economy thrives.
01:03:11So Valencia Island becomes a global centre of communications.
01:03:14The local impact is that a lot of well-paid staff
01:03:18arrive to work in the cable station.
01:03:22The British gentlemen and their families
01:03:24The British gentlemen and their families
01:03:26lived in the cable station houses.
01:03:30In the heights in Valencia,
01:03:32when the cable station was in full operation,
01:03:34there was up to 200 employees.
01:03:37About 23 English families living there
01:03:40and maybe 28 single rooms for British gentlemen.
01:03:47They set up tennis courts.
01:03:49There's pictures of them playing croquet.
01:03:51There's pictures of them taking photographs
01:03:54in the lawns which they built
01:03:55in front of the telegraph buildings.
01:03:58Now their wages were supposed to be equivalent
01:04:01to a bank manager at the time.
01:04:03So you can imagine 200 bank managers here
01:04:05in an island off the coast.
01:04:08That had a massive influence on the local economy here.
01:04:12So they lived in the lap of luxury.
01:04:17In the first years,
01:04:18all the cable operators are outsiders.
01:04:21But in time,
01:04:22many Kerry locals will be trained into the plum jobs.
01:04:25They bring new wealth and status to the island.
01:04:37On the opposite side of the Atlantic,
01:04:39the people of heart's content
01:04:41also find their lives enriched.
01:04:45The families of the employees here
01:04:48would have enjoyed many different things
01:04:51compared to the people who were in heart's content
01:04:54prior to the cable.
01:04:56Things like curling, billiards, art classes,
01:05:01all sorts of more European leisure activities.
01:05:07These people had cash money.
01:05:10So they were able to order from catalogs
01:05:13and these fashions were available to them.
01:05:22The success of the transatlantic cable
01:05:25sparks a communications gold rush.
01:05:30Cables are laid under every ocean and sea
01:05:33until the entire planet is connected.
01:05:37For cable pioneers like Cyrus Field,
01:05:39Samuel Morse, and Wildman Whitehouse,
01:05:42who redeems his reputation,
01:05:44telegraphy, telecommunications,
01:05:46and telecommunications
01:05:48who redeems his reputation,
01:05:50telegraphy generates great wealth.
01:05:54Yesterday, we had 50 messages
01:05:56paying us, I suppose, not less than £12,000.
01:06:02Sending a telegram was really, really expensive.
01:06:07For 20 words, you're paying £20 in 1866,
01:06:11which is an enormous amount of money.
01:06:13It's more than the annual budget of a worker at the time
01:06:17working in one of the mills.
01:06:21It was so completely out of reach
01:06:23for 99% of the world population.
01:06:28One of the reasons that the Atlantic Telegraph
01:06:30is so profitable right away
01:06:31is that traders and financial types
01:06:34can send messages, can synchronise markets
01:06:36much more efficiently.
01:06:38And so we see immediately an increase
01:06:40in the pace of business information
01:06:42travelling around the world.
01:06:45Suddenly, you start to see complaints
01:06:47from stockbrokers saying,
01:06:48you know, we used to have an easy life
01:06:50and now we're expected to jump
01:06:51as soon as we receive news about a price changing.
01:06:54So it was a cause of a lot of stress.
01:07:01With humanity sharing information at speeds
01:07:03hitherto thought impossible,
01:07:05the world seems to shrink.
01:07:07Life seems to move at a faster pace.
01:07:11Today, people complain that
01:07:13there's a sort of information overload
01:07:14that's too much to deal with.
01:07:18But imagine how much more traumatic
01:07:21it must have been for people living
01:07:23in the second half of the 19th century,
01:07:25because they went from really
01:07:27not having international communication,
01:07:28not having telecommunication at all,
01:07:31to having it in a very short period of time.
01:07:34Year by year, the technology improves.
01:07:37Data moves faster.
01:07:39Photographs can be sent.
01:07:40News crisscrosses continents in an instant.
01:07:43Suddenly, you can get news
01:07:45from around the world very, very quickly.
01:07:47And they really, I think, went through
01:07:49a very, very dramatic acceleration
01:07:51in the pace of life.
01:07:54Newspapers are heavy consumers of it.
01:07:57So newspapers are now carrying stories
01:07:59from around the world,
01:08:00maybe a day after they happen,
01:08:01which is revolutionary.
01:08:05In time, the price of sending a message
01:08:08by cable falls,
01:08:09but it will take a long time to recover.
01:08:13It will take years before sending messages
01:08:15becomes affordable to ordinary people.
01:08:18For decades into the first part
01:08:20of the 20th century,
01:08:22the only telegram worth the price
01:08:24is one sending news of a birth or a death.
01:08:28Meanwhile, the overwhelming impact
01:08:31of the cable continues to make itself felt
01:08:34as the world grows ever smaller.
01:08:43The big tipping point is the First World War.
01:08:49They're sending back reports of casualties.
01:08:51They're sending back the horror of that war
01:08:55in a way that would run directly counter
01:08:57to the narrative of heroism
01:09:00that the same government that paid for the wires
01:09:03would want to put out.
01:09:08The world is changing.
01:09:09The world is changing.
01:09:11And suddenly, people in England
01:09:13are getting reports of what's happening
01:09:15on the battlefield as it happens.
01:09:23People realized, well, no, this is horrific.
01:09:26So it changes our sense of empathy.
01:09:29It changes our sense of value.
01:09:30It changes our sense of purpose
01:09:32of not just what it is to be a people or a nation,
01:09:35but how that impacts global change.
01:09:38There's a moment where we glimpse
01:09:39our world coming into being.
01:09:54The First World War also acutely reveals
01:09:57the strategic importance of undersea cables.
01:10:01One of Britain's first moves in August
01:10:03was to build a cable network
01:10:06One of Britain's first moves in August 1914
01:10:09is to cut Germany's transatlantic cable,
01:10:11giving the Allies an immediate advantage in the war.
01:10:27The battle for control of the global information
01:10:30superhighway had begun.
01:10:36The years that follow the First World War
01:10:38bring change to Ireland.
01:10:41Irish nationalists rise to end
01:10:43centuries of British rule in Ireland
01:10:46and achieve independence for most of the island in 1922.
01:10:51Worried for the safety of their communications,
01:10:54Britain reroutes its Atlantic telegraph connection
01:10:57from Valencia Island to Cornwall.
01:11:05In the carrier system department,
01:11:07trained technicians maintain equipment
01:11:10that transmits hundreds of messages
01:11:12over a single pair of wires.
01:11:14In the decades that follow,
01:11:16the technology leaps forward.
01:11:18Radio telegraphy, the telephone,
01:11:21faster data transfer languages,
01:11:23and satellites come to displace Morse code telegraphy.
01:11:28Cable stations become increasingly irrelevant.
01:11:31And in 1966, the Valencia Island cable station
01:11:36shuts its doors for good.
01:11:39But undersea cables remain the mainstay
01:11:42of our global communication systems to this day.
01:11:4899% of international traffic goes via subsea cables,
01:11:52with only 1% via satellites.
01:11:58Everything from your searches on the internet,
01:12:00to your AI learning, to your digitized voice,
01:12:04we take all those ones and zeros,
01:12:05create an optical signal,
01:12:07and send it across the subsea link.
01:12:11I think the physics of that alone is phenomenal.
01:12:30When Samuel Morse sent his first telegraph in 1844,
01:12:35it read,
01:12:36What hath God wrought?
01:12:39In the two centuries since,
01:12:41the overwhelming scale of what he intended
01:12:44has become clear.
01:12:48Technology is a tool of the past.
01:12:50It's a tool of the future.
01:12:52It's a tool of the past.
01:12:53It's a tool of the future.
01:12:54It's a tool of the future.
01:12:56It's a tool of the future.
01:12:57It's a tool of the future.
01:12:59Technology amplifies human nature.
01:13:02So it amplifies the good things,
01:13:03and it amplifies the bad things.
01:13:06So yes, they allow us to do wonderful things,
01:13:09to get more information,
01:13:10share information with our friends,
01:13:11share pictures,
01:13:12to stay in touch with people,
01:13:14to communicate,
01:13:14to work from anywhere.
01:13:15This is all immensely positive,
01:13:17and makes our lives much easier,
01:13:19much more flexible.
01:13:21But the pace of life increases,
01:13:23and this is both exhilarating,
01:13:25and for some people, quite worrying.
01:13:29The reality is, of course,
01:13:30that it didn't bring on world peace.
01:13:34It soon could become an instrument of war.
01:13:38So the virtuous, utopian idea
01:13:40that the telegraph was going to
01:13:42lead on to world peace
01:13:44was just a myth.
01:13:48The internet changed our worlds
01:13:51beyond imagination.
01:13:53And yes, there are some negatives,
01:13:54but the positives
01:13:56easily, easily outweigh the negatives.
01:14:01Even just think about something
01:14:02like the pandemic.
01:14:04We were still able to educate people
01:14:06because of the internet.
01:14:10Just think about health,
01:14:11and health information,
01:14:13and medical technology.
01:14:15You can now operate on somebody
01:14:19on a different continent
01:14:21with robotic hands somewhere else
01:14:24because of the internet.
01:14:54I think there's something we take for granted today,
01:15:11and that is that through a phone,
01:15:15we can be connected to things
01:15:17that are happening
01:15:18all around the world instantly.
01:15:20Before the telegraph,
01:15:21no human being had ever experienced that.
01:15:24The more we can communicate,
01:15:28the better we can communicate
01:15:30with distant people,
01:15:31the more understanding there is,
01:15:33the more empathy there can be,
01:15:34and the better we can be as human beings.
01:15:37I think that's worth salvaging.
01:15:48Cyrus Fields' vision and courage
01:15:50changed the world.
01:15:52Though bad investments
01:15:53caused him later
01:15:54to lose much of his fortune,
01:15:56he was ever conscious
01:15:57of the seismic transformation
01:15:59he had set in motion.
01:16:03What God has joined together,
01:16:06let no man put asunder.
01:16:11Peter Fitzgerald,
01:16:12the Knight of Kerry,
01:16:13fulfilled his dreams
01:16:14of seeing Valencia becoming
01:16:16a key nodal point
01:16:17of the global communications network.
01:16:21For his contributions to science,
01:16:23William Thomson was ennobled
01:16:25as Lord Kelvin.
01:16:26He is buried in Westminster Abbey,
01:16:28surrounded by a floor
01:16:30of Valencia slate.
01:16:33Those who periled
01:16:34in the original Atlantic telegraph
01:16:36were impelled by a sense
01:16:38of the grandeur of their enterprise,
01:16:40and of the worldwide benefits
01:16:42which must flow from its success.
01:16:45Science,
01:16:46even in its most lofty speculations,
01:16:49can promote the social
01:16:50and material welfare of man.
01:16:54These are unsung heroes in the world.
01:16:57They were the pioneers
01:16:58to lay these communication systems,
01:17:00this cable across the Atlantic.
01:17:03They were the first
01:17:04to take this adventure and do it,
01:17:06and show that, yes,
01:17:07you can transmit messages
01:17:08and data across continents.
01:17:11So it was far more than just physics.
01:17:14They had an attitude
01:17:16to serve the society.
01:17:17With the solution
01:17:18that they had in mind.
01:17:19And that's amazing.
01:17:33And for more fascinating
01:17:34but true documentaries,
01:17:36don't forget to check out
01:17:37the Real Irish Stories section
01:17:39on the front page of RETE Player.
01:17:41Meanwhile, after the break,
01:17:42is faith blinding prior to the truth?
01:17:45Under the banner of faith,
01:17:46Under the Banner of Heaven
01:17:47continues next year on ONE.