- [Narrator] You know that frustrating feeling when
a message takes more than a few seconds to send?
Well, it's hard to imagine today,
but before the mid-19th century,
sending news across the ocean
could take weeks to arrive.
Then, thanks to an incredible,
yet mostly forgotten technological achievement,
that gap was shrunk from weeks to seconds.
A feat that kicked off the global age
of instant communication that we take for granted today.
For most of human history,
the only way to send a message across a long distance
was to have it delivered in person.
Which was limited by how fast someone could travel.
The invention of the electric telegraph
in the 1830s sparked a revolution.
It allowed messages to be sent across
wires as electrical pulses which could
be translated into letters and words.
Within a decade of its invention,
thousands of miles of telegraph cables were installed
between major cities worldwide linking governments,
businesses, individuals, and the press.
But there was still an enormous, daunting gap.
How to send a signal thousands of miles
across the vast Atlantic Ocean
linking Europe and the Americas?
In 1854, an ambitious, wealthy young American
entrepreneur named Cyrus West Field
was presented with a business opportunity,
to connect a telegraph cable from New York City
to Newfoundland which would shorten the arrival
of news by ship from abroad by a day or two.
Field pushed the idea even further.
What if the line could be extended
all the way to Ireland,
and then unto London which at the time
was the hub of the global economy?
Sensing that his project could change the course of history,
Field was undaunted by the immense challenge.
He raised money from a wide network of investors,
including the British and American governments,
which also provided the necessary ships
for laying the cable in exchange for
top priority communication rights
on the future telegraph line.
Field also recruited some of the top
engineers and scientists of his time
to develop a cable durable enough
to carry a signal thousands of miles across the ocean floor.
Laying out the actual cable by steamer ship
in the rough waters of the North Atlantic
was no easy feat either, and in fact,
the first two attempts failed when
the cable snapped and sunk in the journey
wasting investor money, dashing hopes,
and causing widespread public mockery of the project.
Some of the criticisms were philosophical
and eerily relevant today.
Would instant access to information really
makes us any happier or better off?
Nevertheless, in August 1858,
after over a year of disappointments,
the two massive cable-laying ships
successfully reached their destinations
in Newfoundland and Ireland.
Completing the connection that Field
and others had prophesied.
Once the line had been tested,
an official message of goodwill
was exchanged between Queen Victoria
and U.S. President James Buchanan.
Public celebrations erupted in sieges
throughout the U.S. and Europe marking the dawn
of a new era of unification between
the Old World and the new.
It's hard to overstate how influential
the so-called Electric Union was to
the rapidly globalizing world of the 19th century.
It meant that everything from stock
and commodity prices, to a declaration of war or peace
could now be shared immediately.
It's no surprise that Field's accomplishment
was widely heralded at the time as the greatest
human achievement in history,
and Field himself became an international hero.
Although the first cable only functioned
for a few months before going dead,
it proved that a link was indeed possible.
Within a decade,
more reliable and sophisticated
undersea cables were laid by Field and many others.
Throughout the 20th century, cable networks expanded,
and technology continued to evolve
as telephones eventually replaced telegraphs,
and the digital data eventually replaced analog signals.
While the original Transatlantic cable could
only transmit a few words per minute at best,
today's fiber optic cables deliver hundreds
of terabytes of data in just seconds,
and there are a lot of them,
stretching close to 750,000 miles in total,
and more cable was laid in 2018 than any year
in almost two decades.
Instead of brave entrepreneurs,
now most new cables are being laid by the tech giants,
such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft,
which collectively own or lease more than
half of the undersea bandwidth.
And although it seems that we live
in a mostly wireless world,
undersea cable still carry 99% of data
traffic that crosses the oceans.
So the next time you chat with someone
on the other side of the world,
keep in mind that it all started over 150 years ago
by a visionary entrepreneur and his team,
pulling off what was once called the greatest work
that the genius of man ever contemplated.