The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph

"Long and hard" indeed had been the way, but in the end what a triumph was gained: an achievement that was one of the most marvellous in all history, as a proof of man's dominion over the forces of nature. When it was first proposed to span the Atlantic, it seemed but a beautiful dream, fascinating indeed to the imagination, but beyond all human power; and men listened to the picture of what might be with delighted amazement and wondering incredulity. In an oration at the opening of the Dudley Observatory at Albany, in 1857, Edward Everett spoke thus of the projected Atlantic Telegraph: "I hold in my hand a portion of the identical electrical cable, given me by my friend Mr. Peabody, which is now in progress of manufacture to connect America with Europe. Does it seem all but incredible to you that intelligence should travel for two thousand miles, along those slender copper wires, far down in the all but fathomless Atlantic, never before penetrated by aught pertaining to humanity, save when some foundering vessel has plunged with her hapless company to the eternal silence and darkness of the abyss? Does it seem, I say, all but a miracle of art, that the thoughts of living men--the thoughts that we think up here on the earth's surface, in the cheerful light of day--about the markets and the exchanges, and the seasons, and the elections, and the treaties, and the wars, and all the fond nothings of daily life, should clothe themselves with elemental sparks, and shoot with fiery speed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere, far down among the uncouth monsters that wallow in the nether seas, along the wreck-paved floor, through the oozy dungeons of the rayless deep; that the latest intelligence of the crops, whose dancing tassels will, in a few months, be coquetting with the west wind on those boundless prairies, should go flashing along the slimy decks of old sunken galleons, which have been rotting for ages; that messages of friendship and love, from warm, living bosoms, should burn over the cold, green bones of men and women, whose hearts, once as warm as ours, burst as the eternal gulfs closed and roared over them centuries ago!"