The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph

To relieve all doubts, it is only necessary to give a very brief history of the working of the Atlantic cable. It was landed on both sides of the ocean on the fifth of August. The last recorded message passed over it on the first of September, one day short of four weeks. Within that time there were sent exactly four hundred messages, of which two hundred and seventy-one were from Newfoundland to Ireland, and one hundred and twenty-nine from Ireland to Newfoundland. Of these, the greater part were merely between the operators themselves, respecting the adjustment of instruments, and working the telegraph, which, while they furnished decisive evidence to them, were of no force to the public. Of course an operator, working with a battery on the shore at Valentia, or at Trinity Bay, watching his instrument, and seeing the little tongue of light reflected from the moving mirror of the galvanometer, needed no other evidence of an electric current that had passed through the cable. He saw it, and knew, as if he saw the flash of a gun on the coast of Ireland, that it was a light which had come from beyond the sea. But these private assurances were nothing to the outside world. What they needed was public messages, conveying news from one hemisphere to the other. Of these, there were not a great number, for obvious reasons. The cable, during the four weeks of its existence, never worked perfectly--that is, as a land line works, transmitting messages freely and rapidly, and with perfect accuracy. It was subject to frequent interruptions for reasons which may satisfy any one that the wonder is, not that it did so little, but that it did so much.