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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.
00:01:20They 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.
00:01:52They changed the world of the media, they changed the world of commerce, they changed
00:01:56how we communicate.
00:01:57So they were revolutionary.
00:01:59When it comes down to people looking at their Netflix or looking at their Facebook or using
00:02:05WhatsApp, we still rely heavily upon these submarine cables.
00:02:09And 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 the 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.
00:03:29Their 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,
00:03:50enabling near instant communications 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 of 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. He'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
00:04:46and gathers a team of experts, including the eminent Belfast-born physicist William Thompson.
00:04:54If one took half Einstein and half the talents of Edison
00:04:58and succeeded in fusing such incompatible gifts into a single person,
00:05:03the result would be rather like William Thompson.
00:05:06Thompson was one of the most brilliant scientists of his generation
00:05:09and the second law of thermodynamics comes from him.
00:05:12He talks about how heat can be transferred between one body to another
00:05:17if those two bodies are at different temperatures.
00:05:20By the time Thompson joins Field in Valencia Island,
00:05:24the future Lord Kelvin has already defined the theoretical concept of absolute zero
00:05:29and identified many fundamental scientific principles that underpin our world today.
00:05:36When you are face to face with a difficulty, you are up against a discovery.
00:05:44I think what's fascinating is there you have this figure who is a preeminent physicist of his time
00:05:49and he wants to spend time working out how you send the most possible messages through 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,
00:06:10it must have been a source of wonder that cutting-edge science was happening on their doorstep.
00:06:16In this part of Ireland, most people were speaking Irish,
00:06:20most people didn't know how to read and write.
00:06:23You have people all along that coast primarily subsisting off potatoes,
00:06:28in many cases in cabins made of mud, struggling to survive on that evil kind of life.
00:06:36The people of Ireland's west are not alone in having their horizons limited by poverty and 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,
00:07:00but with a much vaguer sense of what was outside of it.
00:07:03So your sense of space, you know, of how far something is,
00:07:08you know, the next parish and the parish beyond the next parish was a long way away.
00:07:13Beyond 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,
00:07:28very advanced technological characters from Europe and America,
00:07:32you know, using this crazy new technology.
00:07:36What is this thing, electricity?
00:07:38You know, it's full of mystical, sacrilegious kind of qualities attached to it.
00:07:43As leader of the transatlantic cable expedition,
00:07:46Cyrus Field knows that many have predicted his mission to be impossible and bound for failure.
00:07:53It was looked upon by 99 out of every 100 men as the wild project of a Yankee lunatic.
00:08:00But 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.
00:08:15The goal of achieving high-speed, long-distance communications is as old as civilisation itself.
00:08:24Beacon to beacon sped the courier flame, the moving light sped from the pyre of pine,
00:08:30an urge to be the first in the world.
00:08:34The ship was the first in the world.
00:08:38Beacon to beacon sped the courier flame, the moving light sped from the pyre of pine,
00:08:43an urge its way in golden glory, like some strange new sun.
00:08:50Our ancient ancestors dreamed up ingenious ways to communicate over distance.
00:08:55Some used drums, others smoke and carrier pigeons to send messages to each other.
00:09:02There is something sort of fundamental about the desire for news,
00:09:06to have information to 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, he's sharing letters with other people.
00:09:20The fastest that a human being could travel was on a horse, really, you know, in any practical way.
00:09:31And that hadn't changed for millennia, you know, they would have been the same a thousand years earlier.
00:09:38For centuries, the most reliable system of sharing information had been a letter written by hand and delivered by hand.
00:09:47Darling Ege, your last letter has nourished me for six months. Now I need another from you, 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 companies increases the pace of human connectivity.
00:10:10The coming of steam speeds things up further.
00:10:14Even so, delivering news across long distances continues to depend on a piece of paper being transferred from a writer to a reader.
00:10:24Information from beyond your locality could take weeks, months or years to arrive.
00:10:31Driven by the Industrial Revolution, a rise in education and the relentless pursuit of scientific discovery, the 19th century is a time of phenomenal transformation.
00:10:43Among 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 nation a matter of absolute necessity.
00:11:10When electricity was first harnessed, it was greeted like supernatural power.
00:11:15You know, people 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, intellectuals.
00:11:27And they used to debate a lot, discuss and disagree quite a lot with things.
00:11:32Experiments by scientists like Benjamin Franklin in America, Alessandro Volto in Italy and Michael Faraday in England show that a wire connected to an electrostatic machine or a battery will cause an electrical charge to be felt at the wire's far end.
00:11:48So the public would want to be part of the experiments.
00:11:51They'd be wanting to touch the electricity.
00:11:54They'd want to feel it, they'd want to feel the hairs standing upon end.
00:12:05In the early 1800s, experimenters in Britain, France and the US harnessed electricity to create machines that generate light, power and heat.
00:12:16Crucially, they also discovered that electricity can be used to facilitate long-distance communications.
00:12:26Ever bigger and faster machines and technology are developed.
00:12:30Steam, steel and vast engines power massive factories.
00:12:35And through the heart of it all, electricity pulses.
00:12:40Electricity changed everything in lots of ways.
00:12:42I think this makes people imagine new possibilities for what it is to be human.
00:12:47And it is why you get the advent of science fiction.
00:12:50You know, people like Jules Verne and other science fiction writers that start to emerge, imagining humanity living differently as a result of technology.
00:12:58Early attempts by pioneers to harness electricity to send messages are too complex.
00:13:05But in 1837, Samuel Morse, an American artist, invents a simple code of dots and dashes which can be translated into words using a codebook.
00:13:16Morse's business partner, Alfred Vail, expands the code to include letters and special characters, and in 1844 they successfully send a message by cable from Washington DC to Baltimore.
00:13:31Morse code will come to dominate the world.
00:13:34Cable.
00:13:37The most frequent letters were the ones to which Vail attributed the letters.
00:13:42The most frequent letters were the ones to which Vail attributed the letters.
00:13:46Da-da-da-dit, da-da, da-da-da-dit, da-da-da-dit, dit.
00:13:55Cable.
00:13:57The most frequent letters were the ones to which
00:14:01Vale attributed the shortest number of characters.
00:14:06E, a dot.
00:14:08T, a dash.
00:14:10I, two dots.
00:14:12M, two dashes.
00:14:15And then when you come to letters which are used very seldom,
00:14:19like J, da-da-da-da, that's one dot and three dashes.
00:14:25By the late 1840s,
00:14:27a network of telegraph wires is erected across America's east.
00:14:32New York, Washington and Chicago are connected.
00:14:36Across the Atlantic, telegraph networks are constructed
00:14:40connecting the main cities of Europe.
00:14:44There are engravings where you can hardly see the sky
00:14:49for the festoon of wires.
00:14:53And a bird couldn't fly from ground upwards without hitting a wire.
00:15:01Before the telegraph, it could take days
00:15:04for a speech made by a politician
00:15:06to travel from Chicago to New York.
00:15:09Once a telegraph happens,
00:15:11those speeches can get to New York in a matter of hours.
00:15:24When the first telegraphs come in in England,
00:15:26immediately people start trying to use them
00:15:28to transmit the results of horse races.
00:15:30You can get that news away from the race course
00:15:33after the result has been declared
00:15:35and get it into a betting shop in London.
00:15:38Before the news reaches the betting shop,
00:15:40you can place a surefire bet.
00:15:45A lot of people could see the commercial viability of it,
00:15:48that there were telegraph networks on both sides of the Atlantic.
00:15:53Those networks were becoming busy
00:15:55and the use of them particularly for trade
00:15:57and for transmitting news and for stockbrokers was evident.
00:16:01It's something we still see in modern days.
00:16:04For years, trading firms would have invested tonnes of money
00:16:07in getting the fastest cables to be a microsecond faster
00:16:11in getting data and information on stocks
00:16:14and other commercial activities,
00:16:16because speed is of great importance.
00:16:19These land-based telegraphic systems,
00:16:22pulsing with stock market prices and political news,
00:16:26are the beacons of our modern information age.
00:16:38SIRIS FIELD
00:16:44Having made his fortune in the paper business,
00:16:47Siris Field understands that the world is shrinking
00:16:50and hungry for fast news.
00:16:53Now a chance encounter with British telegraph pioneer
00:16:56Frederick Gisborne in 1853
00:16:59gives Field an opportunity to enter the cable business.
00:17:03Frederick Gisborne is a very interesting character.
00:17:08He's very well educated.
00:17:11He takes all of his worldly goods on a sled
00:17:14and walking through the wilderness
00:17:17to survey different parts of the land.
00:17:21Gisborne had noticed that lots of ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean
00:17:25pass by Newfoundland.
00:17:27Gisborne has figured that if he can erect a line
00:17:30connecting Newfoundland's coast
00:17:32to the existing telegraph network in North America,
00:17:35he could cut up to five days off the time it takes
00:17:38to send a message between Europe and America.
00:17:41It was quite a mad idea because Newfoundland was quite remote
00:17:44from the rest of North America and it was very inhospitable.
00:17:49Backed by private equity, Gisborne sets out full of hope.
00:17:53But bad weather and even worse luck brings failure.
00:17:57A team member dies, others abandon him.
00:18:01He did it at a horrible time of the year
00:18:04and you're in the interior of Newfoundland, it's undeveloped.
00:18:13Undaunted, Gisborne asks Cyrus Field for funding for a second attempt.
00:18:20It was quite a mad idea but the legend has it
00:18:23that after Gisborne left, Cyrus Field had an even madder idea.
00:18:26He looked at his globe and he realised that
00:18:28if you could lay a cable all the way from New York to St. John's in Newfoundland,
00:18:32would it not be just easier to lay a cable
00:18:35the whole way across the Atlantic to Europe?
00:18:45But laying a 3,200 kilometres long cable
00:18:49beneath the vast Atlantic Ocean
00:18:52was thought impossible by some of the foremost men of science.
00:18:57It was a mathematical impossibility
00:19:00to submerge the cable successfully at so great a depth
00:19:04and if it were possible, no signals could be transmitted through so great a length.
00:19:11Even Samuel Morris, now vastly wealthy from his telegraph investments,
00:19:16fears 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.
00:19:30Third, can a cable of such length be paid out to such a depth as required?
00:19:37But driven by ambition and profit, Field pursues his plans with zeal.
00:19:43It appears difficult to overestimate the commercial returns
00:19:47that will accrue from this undertaking.
00:19:50Sometimes you do need an outsider to come into a field and say,
00:19:53well, hang on a minute, why don't we try this?
00:19:55And the people who know all about it will say, well, that can't be done.
00:20:10To undertake his mission to connect the world by cable,
00:20:14in 1856 Field gathers his team of experts.
00:20:18Among them are the telegraph pioneer Samuel Morris
00:20:21and the groundbreaking physicist William Thomson.
00:20:26It's striking at the time it was all men that were involved in laying the cable.
00:20:30Women weren't involved in the engineering or designing or any of the operations.
00:20:36Which is not unusual given how difficult it was for women to enter certain professions.
00:20:43There were still notions of a separate sphere,
00:20:45women belonging rather to the household than out in schools.
00:20:50And that is something that we see throughout the 19th century.
00:21:02There is one unexpected addition to Field's team,
00:21:05the British art dealer John Brett.
00:21:08So John Brett's really interesting.
00:21:10He goes to the U.S. and in the U.S. he brings with him lots of old masters,
00:21:15you know, paintings from the Renaissance.
00:21:17He makes a fortune selling these and comes back to London as a fairly wealthy character.
00:21:23In the late 1840s, John Brett with his brother Jacob
00:21:27had hatched a plan to lay a submarine cable connecting Britain and France.
00:21:32If this succeeded, it would be the first undersea cable to connect two countries
00:21:37in the world.
00:21:38The British and French governments grant the Bretts permission to proceed with their plans.
00:21:44Of course the British ruling elite is interested in it.
00:21:46They see it as a means to control territory, to control their colonies.
00:21:53The French also want to connect with their colonies in Africa.
00:22:00Among the many challenges the Bretts must overcome
00:22:03is that water and electricity can't mix.
00:22:08When you're stringing up telegraph wires on land,
00:22:11you can just put the wire up and you can have your telegraph poles and it's all quite straightforward.
00:22:15You can't do that underwater because water is an electrical conductor.
00:22:20So if you put a bare copper cable into water,
00:22:24basically the current will just dissipate into the water.
00:22:34But after some research, the Bretts find a solution.
00:22:42Gutter percha, which was made from the sap of the gutter tree,
00:22:46which was native to what was then called Malaya, now Malaysia in Southeast Asia,
00:22:50bore up well to being soaked in water.
00:22:54Irish chemical entrepreneur Henry Bewley
00:22:57then steps in with his novel design for a new machine
00:23:00which he calls the Thermoplastic Insulator.
00:23:04Bewley's machine allows gutter percha to be stretched into a thin layer,
00:23:08allowing the latex to be finely wrapped around the cable wire.
00:23:13Now, with their copper cable safely insulated from the water,
00:23:17the Bretts were set to go.
00:23:23So here we have Jacob Brett's personal album
00:23:25on the origin and progress of sap.
00:23:27This is his 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.
00:23:41But it's also got some lovely illustrations, including this one,
00:23:46showing the start of laying down telegraph cable between England and France.
00:23:50We have the boats here.
00:23:52We've got the cliffs of Dover here.
00:23:55And here you can see people actually laying out the cable
00:23:59from the start through to the ship.
00:24:03So they've literally got a whole load of wire,
00:24:05stuck it on the back of a fishing boat
00:24:08and went across the channel spooling the wire out of the back.
00:24:11And it didn't go terribly well because the wire floated on the water
00:24:15so they had to attach weights to it to get it to sink.
00:24:17But finally they get to France
00:24:19and they were then able to send messages between Britain and France.
00:24:23The Bretts' success is acclaimed around the world.
00:24:28We stand on the threshold of an improvement
00:24:31that may hasten the progress of our race more rapidly than any other.
00:24:36Emboldened by success,
00:24:39John Brett attempts to lay a cable connecting France to Africa,
00:24:43where the Mediterranean Sea is far deeper and uneven,
00:24:47and the project fails.
00:24:52Brett does, however, succeed in connecting Britain to Ireland
00:24:56and continues the line to Dublin and the south.
00:25:01Brett foresees that someone will succeed in laying a cable under the Atlantic
00:25:06and when it comes, he will be ready to connect to it.
00:25:14Along with John Brett,
00:25:16Field's team also includes the physicist William Thomson,
00:25:19who has become fascinated by the theory of undersea telegraphy.
00:25:23Thomson relishes the challenge of designing a submarine cable
00:25:27that many in the world of science believe to be impossible.
00:25:30We may be sure that the American telegraph will succeed.
00:25:34The corresponding solution of the equation
00:25:37by which the effect of imperfect insulation may be taken into account is
00:25:41the change of electrical potential V in the cable due to imperfect insulation
00:25:47With his deep understanding of physics,
00:25:50Thomson was the ideal candidate for the position of chief engineer
00:25:54of Field's Atlantic Telegraph Company.
00:25:57But ignorant of the scientific challenges that face them,
00:26:00Cyrus Field appoints Thomson as an advisor
00:26:04and instead an amateur experimenter, Wildman Whitehouse,
00:26:07is given the most senior scientific position in the company.
00:26:11Wildman Whitehouse appropriately named, yes.
00:26:14He was a surgeon by training.
00:26:16He had no background in electricity or engineering,
00:26:19but not many people involved in the enterprise did.
00:26:25He was a sort of self-taught telegraph engineer.
00:26:28He had his own theories, he'd done lots of research,
00:26:31but he used his own special terminology
00:26:34and he used his own equipment to measure the properties of wires.
00:26:37So they go into this with a chief engineer
00:26:41who doesn't really know what's going on.
00:26:43I mean, to be fair, hardly anyone does.
00:26:48With his team in place, now Field must choose the route.
00:26:52Initially, a direct line running from New York to Britain or France
00:26:57is considered until deep-sea soundings by the US Navy
00:27:01reveal something unexpected and providential.
00:27:06From Newfoundland to Ireland,
00:27:08the bottom of the sea between the two places is a plateau.
00:27:12Which seems to have been placed there
00:27:14especially for the purpose of holding the wires of a submarine telegraph
00:27:18and of keeping them out of harm's way.
00:27:22At some level, this felt miraculous.
00:27:27This must be there for a reason.
00:27:30God must have put this plateau across the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
00:27:35so that we could lay the cable.
00:27:37That this was part of human destiny.
00:27:39You're talking about a time when people really saw God's hand in things
00:27:44and he was doing it so that humanity could live a better life.
00:27:52The Atlantic Plateau decides the matter.
00:27:55Ireland will be the landing point in Europe.
00:27:58But where in Ireland?
00:28:00The answer comes from an encounter between Field and Peter Fitzgerald,
00:28:0519th Knight of Kerry.
00:28:09Knight of Kerry was a Member of Parliament in London
00:28:13and when Cyrus Field was raising funds,
00:28:15he befriended Peter Fitzgerald
00:28:18and Peter of course knew everybody that was important in London
00:28:22and he opened the doors for the raising of finance for Cyrus Field.
00:28:33The Knight of Kerry, he was actually very innovative and progressive.
00:28:37He lived on the island and very different to other British landlords,
00:28:42he 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,
00:28:55a devastating famine, triggered by the failure of the potato crop,
00:28:59had 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,
00:29:09the inhabitants of Valencia Island escaped the worst.
00:29:13Sir Peter Fitzgerald was conscious of ensuring that Valencia had economic viability,
00:29:19so he had invested in the growing and weaving of flax for export,
00:29:25he invested in the development of the slate factory.
00:29:29Through 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.
00:29:54But the biggest challenge remains ahead.
00:29:57A cable strong and flexible enough to survive the pressures
00:30:01of the vast Atlantic Ocean must be produced.
00:30:04The Atlantic Telegraph is now in the process of manufacture.
00:30:082,500 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,
00:30:26and as you can see, there's copper in the middle,
00:30:29with gutta percha and hemp surrounding it,
00:30:32and then iron, too, that was twisted around it.
00:30:37To make a cable strong enough to survive the forces involved,
00:30:4129,000 kilometres of copper wire must be wound
00:30:45in 526,000 kilometres of protective iron wire.
00:30:51That's an iron wire long enough to reach the moon.
00:30:57The contract to manufacture the cable
00:30:59goes to two rope and cable manufacturers in England.
00:31:07The cable required lots of copper.
00:31:09This copper would have come from Cornwall.
00:31:11It could have come also from Chile.
00:31:13And 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
00:31:22that came from Cornwall, that came from Chile, that came from Indonesia.
00:31:25Workers around the world, thousands of them,
00:31:27had to come together to make this happen.
00:31:29It was a massive international effort.
00:31:32This is the moment where we can start to see
00:31:34what we now would think of as globalisation.
00:31:36This is where globalisation starts.
00:31:39The cables are extremely long.
00:31:41They 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
00:31:58and the Transatlantic Telegraph Company
00:32:00are inevitably substantial.
00:32:02Field invests much of his own fortune.
00:32:05For the rest, he turns to the private market.
00:32:09He goes and raises money from investors.
00:32:11And a bit like with a modern tech start-up,
00:32:13you have a roadshow, you have a PowerPoint deck,
00:32:15but he's saying, this is going to be great,
00:32:17we're all going to make lots of money,
00:32:18it's going to change the world, world peace.
00:32:21I don't think the idea that this will make humanity better is just spin.
00:32:25I think people actually believe it.
00:32:27I think there's a sense that in some way
00:32:29the world has changed on its axis here.
00:32:31Something different has happened.
00:32:33Maybe this is humanity entering a better phase.
00:32:37There's still that belief that technology could make us better.
00:32:41Make us better people.
00:32:43And to learn to love one another.
00:32:51August 4th, 1857.
00:32:54With international press and large crowds
00:32:57watching on Valencia Island,
00:32:59the Atlantic Telegraph Company prepares to transform the world.
00:33:04On loan from the British and U.S. governments,
00:33:07the HMS Agamemnon and the USS Niagara
00:33:10carry half the cable each on board.
00:33:14The idea is that Niagara will spool out its half
00:33:17and then when they get halfway,
00:33:18they'll stick on the Agamemnon's half
00:33:20and do the second half of the cable.
00:33:25Cable boats today are advanced,
00:33:27they're purpose-built ships made for this purpose.
00:33:30They work 365 days a year laying cable or fixing faults.
00:33:38The original guys took Navy ships
00:33:41that were not built for purpose,
00:33:43they modified them to take the cables that they needed.
00:33:45They were learning as they went,
00:33:47they were finding problems and fixing them on the go.
00:33:52But how they took those ships loaded with that weight of cable
00:33:55to start distributing across the Atlantic is mind-blowing.
00:34:02Before the ships depart,
00:34:04Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, George Howard,
00:34:07delivers a rousing speech.
00:34:09We are about to establish a new material link
00:34:12between the old world and the new.
00:34:15Our new link, instead of superseding and supplanting the old ones,
00:34:19is to give a life and intensity which they never had before.
00:34:25There was bands there,
00:34:27there was artists depicting what was going on,
00:34:30and there was huge excitement over this transatlantic cable.
00:34:35With so many visitors on the island,
00:34:37it was a wonder where they got accommodation.
00:34:40To celebrate the laying of the cable,
00:34:42the Knight of Kerry had a banquet and a dance,
00:34:45and these were held in John O'Driscoll's store in the Slate Yard.
00:34:49On the eve of this great ocean voyage,
00:34:52nerves among the sailors and pioneers are on edge.
00:34:56The whole adventure of the big ship leaving the harbour
00:35:00with the additional bit of cable,
00:35:02of the big ship leaving the harbour
00:35:04with the additional bit of laying this cable out behind it,
00:35:07fit into a whole set of stories of ocean adventures,
00:35:11I suppose, you know, going back to Homer, really,
00:35:14of setting out into the ocean,
00:35:16and the ocean being, in lots of ways, one of the last frontiers.
00:35:23Cyrus Field feels the weight of history.
00:35:28I have no words to express the feelings which fill my heart tonight.
00:35:32It beats with love and affection for every man, woman and child who hears me.
00:35:45The following morning, the ship set sail.
00:35:49In a portent of what may lie ahead,
00:35:51only hours after leaving port, the cable snaps.
00:35:55The ships must return to Valencia for repairs.
00:35:59The next day, they sail out once more,
00:36:02this 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,
00:36:14the cable was running out, it was very heavy,
00:36:17and it was running out too fast,
00:36:19and their braking system wasn't good enough,
00:36:21and they couldn't control the braking system.
00:36:26The cable dropped really quickly.
00:36:29The guys on the ship went, oh my God, you know, help, help.
00:36:32They pulled the brake, and they snapped the cable.
00:36:36That first cable was really inadequate.
00:36:38It was really just too thin and too weak to withstand the Atlantic.
00:36:43New boats today can measure the tension on the cable.
00:36:46You know, there could be a couple of tons' weight tension on the cable
00:36:49as it goes to the ground.
00:36:51You know, there could be a couple of tons' weight tension on the cable
00:36:54as it goes to the greater depths,
00:36:56and they can vary and release those to manage that so it doesn't get stressed.
00:37:00But back in the day, the tensions on the cable was causing the snap.
00:37:05The loss of 480 kilometers of cable is a catastrophe.
00:37:10Not only has the 1857 mission failed,
00:37:13it has devoured most of the money Field had raised.
00:37:22The Atlantic Telegraph Company is an embarrassment to the world.
00:37:27Field, though, remains determined.
00:37:30Over winter, the braking system that controls the speed and tension
00:37:34at which the cable is paid out is improved.
00:37:37A fresh fundraising round is initiated
00:37:40with shares of £20 sold to private investors in the US and the UK.
00:37:45Then a year later, the team is set to go again.
00:37:52June 10th, 1858
00:37:59June 10th, 1858
00:38:02The two refitted ships depart for the second time from Plymouth in the UK.
00:38:07The plan has changed.
00:38:09The 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,
00:38:26the vessels will start in opposite directions,
00:38:29one 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,
00:38:44cod primarily, hunting seals in the winter.
00:38:50So it's basically a kind of hunter-gatherer subsistence life.
00:38:55And if the fish don't come in, or if the seals are offshore,
00:38:58the ice is offshore, there's real hunger.
00:39:00People actually starve to death in Newfoundland.
00:39:04The Agamemnon and the Niagara successfully rendezvous
00:39:08halfway between Europe and Newfoundland and set off.
00:39:13But within hours, catastrophe hits again.
00:39:20The Agamemnon rose heavily and then went down quickly into the deep trough of the sea,
00:39:26falling over as she did, so almost to capsize completely.
00:39:31Everything 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.
00:39:45Cabins are flooded. The cable is damaged.
00:39:50It was evident that the ship itself would soon strain into pieces if the weather continued so.
00:40:03It takes ten days for the storm to blow out.
00:40:06Beaten and battered, the ships rendezvous and make repairs,
00:40:10and field then orders the cable laying to continue.
00:40:14Again, however, the mission is blighted.
00:40:17Twice more the cable snaps.
00:40:19Long sections are lost several kilometers down to the ocean floor.
00:40:25After a month of toil, the ships run perilously low on coal and food,
00:40:30and finally they realize they must give up and return to Ireland.
00:40:35Cyrus Field faces ruin.
00:40:39The strain on the man was more than the strain on the cable.
00:40:43We were in fear that both would break together.
00:40:46Shocked 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.
00:40:58But against all odds, Field persuades the company board to allow him one last attempt.
00:41:05Quickly, he has the ships reprovisioned, and just four weeks later, they sail again.
00:41:12The mission seems doomed.
00:41:15Three 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,
00:41:46the man whose drive and vision has sustained this epic journey,
00:41:50at last enters Newfoundland's Trinity Bay.
00:42:00Hours later, on the far side of the ocean,
00:42:03the HMS Agamemnon arrives at Valencia Harbor to the sound of a massive gun salute.
00:42:12Five years of toil, persistence and ingenuity has paid off.
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.
00:42:39Arrived here yesterday all well.
00:42:42The Atlantic telegraph cable successfully laid.
00:42:45Please 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
00:43:07in promoting perpetual peace and friendship between kings and nations.
00:43:12I have not yet received the Queen's dispatch.
00:43:23The world is completely besotted by this and completely excited.
00:43:28In some places all business was suspended.
00:43:32Men rushed into the streets and flocked to the offices where the news was received.
00:43:37There were tremendous celebrations here in Valencia.
00:43:41There was barrels of water poured out by the night carry.
00:43:47There were celebrations in Dublin and London, all over the world really.
00:43:53There are massive celebrations in the streets of New York.
00:43:58There's a fireworks display so big that it sets the roof of the City Hall on fire.
00:44:03There's a half-day holiday declared.
00:44:07There's a piece of the cable that's paraded down Fifth Avenue.
00:44:12There are telegraph balls.
00:44:16There's telegraph merchandise.
00:44:18You could buy a walking stick, a gentleman's walking stick,
00:44:22that had a piece of the actual cable built into the shaft, designed by Tiffany's.
00:44:27You know, I want one of these.
00:44:29Here in New York, the triumphant pyrotechnics celebrated this final and complete subjugation
00:44:36by man of all the powers of nature, space and time included.
00:44:41The phrase is used that this annihilates time and space.
00:44:46It's hard to think of a bigger claim to make about anything.
00:44:49If you could send a message more or less instantly across it, time was gone, space was gone.
00:45:02August 16th, President Buchanan receives a message from the British monarch, Queen Victoria.
00:45:09The Queen is convinced that the President will join her in fervently hoping that the electric cable
00:45:15will prove an additional link between the nations,
00:45:19whose friendship is founded upon their common interest and reciprocal esteem.
00:45:27Glory to God in the highest, and to earth, peace and goodwill to all men,
00:45:32was the first message sent on the cable.
00:45:35It's talked about in terms of uniting humanity.
00:45:38Cyrus Field appears to have been fully aware of the future implications of his great endeavor.
00:45:44The whole earth will be belted with electric current, palpitating with human thoughts and emotions.
00:46:00Repeat, please. Repeat, please.
00:46:04Repeat, please. Repeat, please.
00:46:08Please send slower for the present.
00:46:11Repeat, please. How? How do you receive?
00:46:15But as the world celebrates, the cable is failing.
00:46:25The cable had been unreliable from the start, from the very first day.
00:46:29It was quite difficult for the operators to understand the message being transmitted.
00:46:32Repeat, repeat, please. Repeat, please. Repeat, please.
00:46:36Please, just please say...
00:46:39So when you put a cable under the sea, and you make it very long,
00:46:43what you have is something called retardation.
00:46:49It would sort of lengthen these pulses,
00:46:52and that meant that the next incoming pulse overlapped with the previous pulse.
00:46:57There was no space between the signals.
00:47:02And that meant the signals at the other end of the cable were all distorted,
00:47:06so the telegraph operators just heard noise.
00:47:09Repeat, please. Repeat, please. Please send these and these.
00:47:13These and these. Please send these and these.
00:47:16The first message to be sent over was from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan in the US,
00:47:21and it was 90 words long, and it took 16 and a half hours to transmit because of these problems.
00:47:27In a converted slate house on Valencia Island,
00:47:29Wildman Whitehouse seeks desperately for a solution.
00:47:33Whitehouse's answer is to turn up the voltage.
00:47:36He thinks, well, surely this is the way to make signals travel more effectively over very long distances.
00:47:41He then increases the voltage to around 2,000 volts through this narrow cable.
00:47:48So he thought, OK, well, I'm going to give it a big amount of voltage on this side of the cable
00:47:52to the point where it gets to the other end of the very long cable.
00:47:55It's still going to have some voltage.
00:47:56He didn't realize that that's just not how the science works,
00:48:01and what happened was he burnt out the cable, so the cable was destroyed.
00:48:06After two weeks of ever more garbled messages, the company board has enough.
00:48:12Whitehouse is fired and William Thompson is promoted.
00:48:16Thompson immediately rectifies the issue by reducing the power sent through the cable.
00:48:22But the cable is too damaged to survive.
00:48:26Within a week, the line is permanently dead.
00:48:40When news of this gets into the media,
00:48:43some of the media reports say that the whole thing was made up and it was all a complete fake.
00:48:49There's a big scandal because this cable has been hailed as a great breakthrough for mankind
00:48:57and that everyone's written it up in the papers.
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.
00:49:07Reliable and unimpeachable evidence is wanting.
00:49:11That one solitary intelligible sentence ever passed upon the cable from either continent to the other
00:49:17Have the cable managers humbugged the public?
00:49:21The same obviously happened with the moon landings.
00:49:24There are still people who say, oh yes, it was all a trick.
00:49:27They got Stanley Kubrick to do it and it was all faked by NASA on sound stages and this sort of thing.
00:49:32So these amazing leaps forward are sometimes so amazing that people can't believe that they really happened.
00:49:40After the failure in 1858, there was a public inquiry in London.
00:49:44The first of its kind, and they brought all the scientists together.
00:49:49William Thompson and Samuel Marson, Michael Faraday, all those people were brought together to 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.
00:50:12Following the inquiry, Cyrus Field now turns to the one man whose scientific knowledge he hopes can save the cable.
00:50:28William Thompson.
00:50:30Cyrus Field and the other directors turn to Thompson and say, we should have listened to you, tell us what we were doing wrong, help us sort it out.
00:50:38Among Thompson's first recommendations is 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, the 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. Otherwise, I do not.
00:51:20Thompson's super-sensitive galvanometer revolutionises undersea telegraphy.
00:51:25The galvanometer allows signals to be sent over vast distances using low amounts of electrical current.
00:51:33A tiny mirror mounted on a light coil of copper wire twists back and forth in a magnetic field generated by the electric current.
00:51:41A beam of light reflecting off the mirror swings one direction for a Morse code dot, the other for a dash.
00:51:55When the inquiry ends, the irrepressible Cyrus Field prepares for a third attempt.
00:52:02Events in the US, however, bring plans to a halt.
00:52:15An estimated 750,000 people lose their lives in the American Civil War.
00:52:26The war reveals the strategic value of high-speed communications.
00:52:32In this brutal long war, both Confederate and Union sides use telegraphs to command armies.
00:52:40Meanwhile, the British government's commitment to telegraphy also grows.
00:52:46In the short window during which the Atlantic cable had worked,
00:52:49British military command sent messages on it commanding their troops stationed in Canada
00:52:55to disregard a previous order calling on them to sail to India.
00:53:00As the Indian mutiny had since been suppressed, the soldiers were no longer required.
00:53:06This saved the British government £50,000 at a stroke, more than repaying its own investment in the cable.
00:53:14British prime ministers often talked about the telegraph as a kind of a trigger, like a trigger on a gun.
00:53:19You know, you could put an army in place and you could keep that army in the barracks,
00:53:24send the telegraph, send the army out, and it can, you know, go to work or go to war.
00:53:37After so much failure, raising finance for a new attempt proves a mammoth undertaking.
00:53:44Investors have lost fortunes in previous attempts and 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 and even to the peace of the world.
00:54:05Then, in a bold move, for his third attempt at the mission, Field leases an extraordinary asset.
00:54:13Designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the Great Eastern is the largest ship in the world.
00:54:21There's this enormous ship, the Great Eastern. It's never really made any sense.
00:54:26Turns 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 of the Great Eastern,
00:54:43and there's a normal-sized frigate beside her, and then a smaller supply ship beside that.
00:54:49And you can see just as a painter what he's done. He's put them there for scale.
00:54:53That you look at the Great Eastern, you think, oh, a ship.
00:54:56Then you realize, no, that's a normal-sized ship beside it. That is a beast.
00:55:00And it's about scale. It's about, look at what we can build.
00:55:03Bigger, better, but also the kind of conquest of the Atlantic.
00:55:07We can conquer not just the surface, but the deeps. We can conquer the bottom of the ocean.
00:55:20On July 23, 1865, the world's press descend once again on Valencia Island
00:55:27to witness the third attempt to connect Europe to America by cable.
00:55:31Rich and powerful mingle with less well-off locals.
00:55:37It was a strange crowd to look at. Half the men were barefoot, and none of them were decently clad.
00:55:43The chances are that three or four could have seen the point of a joke and given a smart answer themselves.
00:55:53So we're on the most westerly point of Valencia Island now.
00:55:56Next stop from here is North America.
00:55:57And see those islands there? They're the Skelligs.
00:56:00And in 1865, just beyond them is where the Great Eastern had to anchor
00:56:04because it was too large to come into this harbour.
00:56:07So a boat had to come out and collect the shoreline cable
00:56:11and bring it back and connect it to this purpose-built cable station right here.
00:56:16With a cable plugged in, Cyrus Field sets out on the Great Eastern, destination Newfoundland.
00:56:23The Great Eastern proves far more reliable than the old navy ships.
00:56:28Progress is easily made.
00:56:31The Great Eastern, from her size and constant steadiness
00:56:35and from the control over her afforded by the joint use of paddles and screw,
00:56:40renders it safe to lay an Atlantic cable in any weather.
00:56:44Everything went quite well until there were 600 miles off of Newfoundland.
00:56:48A damaged cable went out and I had to haul it back in.
00:56:52But when the crew tries to haul the cable up from the depths, it breaks.
00:56:58It flew through the stoppers and with one bound leaped over the intervening space and flashed into the sea.
00:57:04The cable gone forever, down into that fearful depth.
00:57:09The cable snaps and it's lost at the bottom of the sea.
00:57:13But this time, unlike in 1857, they decide to mark the spot and to come back and recover it.
00:57:29Though disappointed, the team is optimistic.
00:57:33For before the cable broke, operators were sending clear messages to the ship
00:57:39For before the cable broke, operators were sending clear messages to the ship
00:57:49Now certain that the cable can function perfectly, Field raises a new round of finance.
00:57:55Now certain that the cable can function perfectly, Field raises a new round of finance.
00:58:06July 13th, 1866. The Great Eastern Ways anchor and departs Valencia Island for the fourth attempt.
00:58:16It was so calm that the masts of our convoy were reflected in the ocean.
00:58:20A large shoal of porpoises gambled about us for about half an hour.
00:58:25A glorious sunset and later, a crescent moon.
00:58:30This time, there are no significant problems.
00:58:35After 14 days at sea, the massive ship reaches Newfoundland,
00:58:40where a new cable station has been built in the village of Heart's Content.
00:58:49And then, all of a sudden, they look out, they see six huge masts coming around the point.
00:58:56All of a sudden, they look out, they see six huge masts coming around the point.
00:59:00They see six huge masts coming around the point of an almost 700-foot ship
00:59:06coming into the mouth of the harbor to change the face of the town forever.
00:59:14The ladies would have wore their Sunday best, the men would have been in top hats and tails.
00:59:20They would have had huge celebrations.
00:59:24Cyrus Field walks off the Great Eastern and he comes ashore,
00:59:29and he's literally hoisted above the heads of the people.
00:59:34And then they send a message and actually say,
00:59:38we have now connected the two continents.
00:59:42It is a glory to our age and nation,
00:59:46and the men who have achieved it deserve to be honored among the benefactors of their race.
00:59:50Since the discovery of Columbus,
00:59:54nothing has been done in any degree comparable to the vast enlargement
00:59:58that has thus been given to the sphere of human activity.
01:00:03The world is stunned and thrilled.
01:00:07Cyrus Field has achieved his dream.
01:00:11He telegraphs a note to his friend and supporter, the Knight of Kerry in Valencia.
01:00:20This was put together by the Knight of Kerry.
01:00:24And there is this message from Cyrus Field, sent from Hearts Content in Newfoundland,
01:00:29so they've got to the other side, and it says,
01:00:32Ireland and America are united by telegraph.
01:00:35Please remember me very kindly to all your family. Sent at 12.30.
01:00:39With the transatlantic cable successfully relaying messages between Europe and North America,
01:00:44Field heads out into the ocean to see if he can find the cable that had sunk the year before.
01:00:50After three weeks grappling, the 1865 cable is recovered from a depth of two kilometers down.
01:00:58In a characteristic act of showmanship, Cyrus Field uses the 1865 cable
01:01:04to send a message from the Great Eastern to the Cable Hut in Valencia Island,
01:01:08and from there his message is relayed via the new 1866 cable back to Newfoundland.
01:01:15And they say he wept as he sent that message.
01:01:19As I sat in the electrician's room, a flash of light came up from the deep,
01:01:25which having crossed to Ireland, came back to me in mid-ocean,
01:01:29telling that those so dear to me were well and following us with their wishes and their prayers.
01:01:34This was like a whisper of God from the sea.
01:01:36Bidding me keep heart and hope.
01:01:50The significance of that moment is when you realize that the world that we knew had changed forever,
01:01:58and the way that you communicated had changed forever.
01:02:00A lot of inspiration that we can take from them is about perseverance, about being hardworking,
01:02:06about understanding each other's skill set and putting the right people in the right place.
01:02:12The thing that gets me is that they tried and failed and tried and failed,
01:02:17and it's like just keep trying until you achieve it.
01:02:22I admire the perseverance and resilience that Cyrus Field and all of the men and women
01:02:28back then had, that they weren't giving up on this challenge.
01:02:32They were going to succeed and connect the two continents.
01:02:36That vision and that hope or dream, that's what I take from the story.
01:02:48The success of the Transatlantic Cable transformed the world.
01:02:52It also transforms life on Valencia Island.
01:02:56Skilled 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, Valencia's economy thrives.
01:03:11So Valencia Island becomes a global center of communications.
01:03:15The local impact is that a lot of well-paid staff arrive to work on the island.
01:03:20A lot of well-paid staff arrive to work in the cable station.
01:03:25The British gentlemen and their families lived in the cable station houses.
01:03:30In the heights in Valencia, when the cable station was in full operation,
01:03:35there was up to 200 employees, about 23 English families living there
01:03:41and maybe 28 single rooms for British gentlemen.
01:03:45They set up tennis courts. There's pictures of them playing croquet.
01:03:50There's pictures of them taking photographs in the lawns which they built
01:03:54in front of the telegraph buildings.
01:03:57Now their wages were supposed to be equivalent to a bank manager at the time.
01:04:02So you can imagine 200 bank managers here in an island off the coast.
01:04:07That had a massive influence on the local economy here.
01:04:10So they lived in the lap of luxury.
01:04:14In the first years, all the cable operators are outsiders.
01:04:18But in time, many Kerry locals will be trained into the plum jobs.
01:04:23They bring new wealth and status to the island.
01:04:34On the opposite side of the Atlantic, the people of Harrods,
01:04:37also find their lives enriched.
01:04:41The families of the employees here would have enjoyed many different things
01:04:48compared to the people who were in Harrods Content prior to the cable.
01:04:53Things like curling, billiards, art classes,
01:04:58all sorts of more European leisure activities.
01:05:02These people had cash money.
01:05:05So they were able to order from catalogs,
01:05:09and these fashions were available to them.
01:05:25The success of the transatlantic cable sparks a community of interest.
01:05:29The success of the transatlantic cable sparks a communications gold rush.
01:05:36Cables are laid under every ocean and sea until the entire planet is connected.
01:05:43For cable pioneers like Cyrus Field, Samuel Morse, and Wildman Whitehouse,
01:05:49who redeems his reputation, telegraphy generates great wealth.
01:05:54Yesterday, we had 50 messages, paying 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, which is an enormous amount of money.
01:06:13It's more than the annual budget of a worker at the time working in one of the mills.
01:06:20It was so completely out of reach for 99% of the world population.
01:06:28One of the reasons that the Atlantic Telegraph is so profitable right away
01:06:32is that traders and financial types can send messages, can synchronise markets much more efficiently.
01:06:38And so we see immediately an increase in the pace of business information travelling around the world.
01:06:44Suddenly, you start to see complaints from stockbrokers saying, you know,
01:06:49we used to have an easy life and now we're expected to jump as soon as we receive news about a price changing.
01:06:54So it was a cause of a lot of stress.
01:07:00With humanity sharing information at speeds hitherto thought impossible,
01:07:05the world seems to shrink. Life seems to move at a faster pace.
01:07:10Today people complain that there's a sort of information overload, it's too much to deal with.
01:07:17But imagine how much more traumatic it must have been for people living in the second half of the 19th century
01:07:24because they went from really not having international communication,
01:07:28not having telecommunication at all, to having it in a very short period of time.
01:07:33Year by year, the technology improves. Data moves faster.
01:07:37Photographs can be sent. News crisscrosses continents in an instant.
01:07:45Suddenly, you can get news from around the world very, very quickly.
01:07:49And they really, I think, went through a very, very dramatic acceleration in the pace of life.
01:07:56Newspapers are heavy consumers of it.
01:07:59So newspapers are now carrying stories from around the world maybe a day after they happen, which is revolutionary.
01:08:04In time, the price of sending a message by cable falls.
01:08:09But it will take years before sending messages becomes affordable to ordinary people.
01:08:14For decades, into the first part of the 20th century,
01:08:18the only telegram worth the price is one sending news of a birth or a death.
01:08:24Meanwhile, the overwhelming impact of the cable continues to make itself felt as a means of communication.
01:08:31The impact of the cable continues to make itself felt as the world grows ever smaller.
01:08:51The big tipping point is the First World War.
01:08:54They're sending back reports of casualties.
01:08:57They're sending back the horror of that war in a way that would run directly counter to the narrative of heroism
01:09:05that the same government that paid for the wires would want to put out.
01:09:13And suddenly, people in England are getting reports of what's happening on the battlefield as it happens.
01:09:24People realize, well, no, this is horrific.
01:09:27So it changes our sense of empathy, it changes our sense of value, it changes our sense of purpose
01:09:33of not just what it is to be a people or a nation, but how that impacts globally.
01:09:39There's a moment where we glimpse our world coming into being.
01:09:54The First World War also acutely reveals the strategic importance of undersea cables.
01:10:01One of Britain's first moves in August 1914 is to cut Germany's transatlantic cable,
01:10:08giving the Allies an immediate advantage in the war.
01:10:24The battle for control of the global information superhighway had begun.
01:10:38The years that follow the First World War bring change to Ireland.
01:10:43Irish nationalists rise to end centuries of British rule in Ireland
01:10:47and achieve independence for most of the island in 1922.
01:10:52Worried for the safety of their communications,
01:10:55Britain reroutes its Atlantic Telegraph connection from Valencia Island to Cornwall.
01:11:03In the carrier system department, trained technicians maintain equipment
01:11:08that transmits hundreds of messages over a single pair of wires.
01:11:12In the decades that follow, the technology is becoming increasingly expensive.
01:11:17Technology leaps forward.
01:11:19Radio telegraphy, the telephone, faster data transfer languages
01:11:24and satellites come to displace Morse code telegraphy.
01:11:28Cable stations become increasingly irrelevant.
01:11:32And in 1966, the Valencia Island cable station shuts its doors for good.
01:11:39But undersea cables remain the mainstay of our global communication systems to this day.
01:11:4899% of international traffic goes via subsea cables with only 1% via satellites.
01:11:57Everything from your searches on the internet to your AI learning to your digitized voice.
01:12:04We take all those ones and zeros, create an optical signal and send it across the subsea link.
01:12:11I think the physics of that alone is phenomenal.
01:12:15Today, there are approximately 500 optical fibre subsea cables in the world.
01:12:22If you put all those cables together,
01:12:26it represents about 1.4 million kilometres of cables
01:12:30that are today placed in the seabed, all across the globe.
01:12:34When Samuel Morse sent his first telegraph in 1844, it read,
01:12:40What hath God wrought?
01:12:43In the two centuries since, the overwhelming scale of what he intended has become clear.
01:12:51Technology amplifies human nature.
01:12:55So it amplifies our ability to communicate.
01:12:59Technology amplifies human nature.
01:13:03So it amplifies the good things and it amplifies the bad things.
01:13:06So yes, they allow us to do wonderful things,
01:13:09to get more information, share information with our friends,
01:13:12share pictures, to stay in touch with people, to communicate, to work from anywhere.
01:13:16This is all immensely positive and makes our lives much easier, much more flexible.
01:13:21But the pace of life increases and this is both exhilarating and, for some people, quite worrying.
01:13:29The reality is, of course, that it didn't bring on world peace.
01:13:34It soon could become an instrument of war.
01:13:37So the virtuous, utopian idea that the telegraph was going to lead on to world peace was just a myth.
01:13:48The internet changed our worlds beyond imagination.
01:13:52And yes, there are some negatives, but the positives easily, easily outweigh the negatives.
01:14:00Even just think about something like the pandemic.
01:14:03We were still able to educate people because of the internet.
01:14:09Just think about health and health information and medical technology.
01:14:14You can now operate on somebody on a different continent with robotic hands somewhere else because of the internet.
01:14:44And at the same time, there will be strong inequalities between people
01:14:48on their ability to distinguish what is true information and what is false information.
01:14:54So it's a real issue, while we are being invaded by this big data,
01:14:58this very important flow of information, to share things and find out what this important information is.
01:15:03And how can this information be strategically manipulated?
01:15:09I think there's something we take for granted today and that is
01:15:12that through a phone, we can be connected to things that are happening all around the world instantly.
01:15:20Before the telegraph, no human being had ever experienced that.
01:15:26The more we can communicate, the better we can communicate with distant people,
01:15:31the more understanding there is, the more empathy there can be, and the better we can be as human beings.
01:15:38I think that's worth salvaging.
01:15:43SIRIS
01:15:48Siris Fields' vision and courage changed the world.
01:15:52Though bad investments caused him later to lose much of his fortune,
01:15:57he was ever conscious of the seismic transformation he had set in motion.
01:16:03What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.
01:16:09Peter Fitzgerald, the Knight of Kerry, fulfilled his dreams of seeing Valencia becoming a key nodal point of the global communications network.
01:16:20For his contributions to science, William Thompson was ennobled as Lord Kelvin.
01:16:26He is buried in Westminster Abbey, surrounded by a floor of Valencia slate.
01:16:31Those who periled in the original Atlantic Telegraph were impelled by a sense of the grandeur of their enterprise,
01:16:38and of the worldwide benefits which must flow from its success.
01:16:43Science, even in its most lofty speculations, can promote the social and material welfare of man.
01:16:52These are unsung heroes in the world.
01:16:55They were the pioneers to lay these communications down.
01:16:58They were the pioneers to lay these communications systems, this cable, across the Atlantic.
01:17:04They were the first to take this adventure and do it, and show that, yes, you can transmit messages and data across continents.
01:17:12So it was far more than just physics.
01:17:15They had an attitude to serve the society with the solution that they had in mind, and that's amazing.
01:17:28And for more fascinating but true documentaries, don't forget to check out the Real Irish Stories section on the front page of RTE Player.
01:17:36Meanwhile, after the break, is Faith blinding Pyre to the truth?
01:17:40Under the Banner of Heaven continues, next here on One.
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