The New York, Newfoundland & London Telegraph Company was a company in a series of conglomerations of several companies that eventually laid the first Trans-Atlantic cable.
In 1854 British engineer Charles Bright met an American, Cyrus Field, who had a dream of completing a submarine cable connection between North America and Europe. The New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company was founded in 1852 and in 1854 Charles Bright and John Watkins Brett became additional signatories along with Cyrus Field. This was to make sure that Britain had a representative on the company's board and so enable support for a trans-Atlantic cable from the British. In 1855 Charles Bright finished a survey of the Irish coast and came to the conclusion that Valentia Island, on the west coast of Ireland, was best possible location and was also the closest point to North America. Armed with this location and the information that Cyrus Field gathered from a US Navy oceanographic seabed survey, that had taken place the year before, the project got underway.
A transatlantic telecommunications cable is a submarine communications cable connecting one side of the Atlantic Ocean to the other. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, each cable was a single wire. After mid-century, coaxial cable came into use, with amplifiers. Late in the 20th century, all cables installed used optical fiber as well as optical amplifiers, because distances range thousands of kilometers.
A submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the seabed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean and sea. The first submarine communications cables laid beginning in the 1850s carried telegraphy traffic, establishing the first instant telecommunications links between continents, such as the first transatlantic telegraph cable which became operational on 16 August 1858.
Cyrus West Field was an American businessman and financier who, along with other entrepreneurs, created the Atlantic Telegraph Company and laid the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean in 1858.
British North America comprised the colonial territories of the British Empire in North America from 1783 onwards. English colonisation of North America began in the 16th century in Newfoundland, then further south at Roanoke and Jamestown, Virginia, and more substantially with the founding of the Thirteen Colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America.
Transatlantic telegraph cables were undersea cables running under the Atlantic Ocean for telegraph communications. Telegraphy is now an obsolete form of communication, and the cables have long since been decommissioned, but telephone and data are still carried on other transatlantic telecommunications cables. The first cable was laid in the 1850s from Valentia Island off the west coast of Ireland to Bay of Bulls, Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. The first communications occurred on August 16th 1858, but the line speed was poor, and efforts to improve it caused the cable to fail after three weeks.
Valentia Island is one of Ireland's most westerly points. It lies off the Iveragh Peninsula in the southwest of County Kerry. It is linked to the mainland by the Maurice O'Neill Memorial Bridge at Portmagee. A car ferry also departs from Reenard Point to Knightstown, the island's main settlement, from April to October. Another, smaller village named Chapeltown sits at roughly the midpoint of the island, three kilometres from the bridge. Valentia Island's permanent population is 658. It is about 11 kilometres long by almost three kilometres wide, making it the fifth-biggest island off the Irish coast.
The Electric Telegraph Company (ETC) was a British telegraph company founded in 1846 by William Fothergill Cooke and John Ricardo. It was the world's first public telegraph company. The equipment used was the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, an electrical telegraph developed a few years earlier in collaboration with Charles Wheatstone. The system had been taken up by several railway companies for signalling purposes, but in forming the company Cooke intended to open up the technology to the public at large.
Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse was an English surgeon by profession and an electrical experimenter by avocation. He was recruited by entrepreneur Cyrus West Field as Chief Electrician to work on the pioneering endeavour to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable for the Atlantic Telegraph Company between western Ireland to eastern Newfoundland. This pioneering project of the Victorian era began in 1854 and was completed in 1858; however the cable functioned for only three weeks. While Whitehouse sent the first telegraph communications on 16 August 1858 to the United States of America, he was ultimately held responsible for the undersea cable failure after he applied higher voltages in an effort to boost declining signals.
Heart's Content is an incorporated town in Trinity Bay on the Bay de Verde Peninsula of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.
Sir Charles Tilston Bright was a British electrical engineer who oversaw the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858, for which work he was knighted.
The Atlantic Telegraph Company was a company formed on 6 November 1856 to undertake and exploit a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic ocean, the first such telecommunications link.
Sir John Pender KCMG GCMG FSA FRSE was a Scottish submarine communications cable pioneer and politician.
Robert Charles Halpin, Master Mariner, 16 February 1836 – 20 January 1894 at Tinakilly, Wicklow. He captained the Brunel-designed steamship SS Great Eastern which laid transoceanic telegraph cables. A successful pioneer of this work, he earned the nickname "Mr Cable".
The Russian–American Telegraph, also known as the Western Union Telegraph Expedition and the Collins Overland Telegraph, was an attempt by the Western Union Telegraph Company from 1865 to 1867 to lay a telegraph line from San Francisco, California, to Moscow, Russia.
Frederic Newton Gisborne was a British inventor and electrician.
The Hooper's Telegraph Works Ltd was established by William Hooper in 1870 to manufacture and lay submarine communications cable using his patented vulcanized rubber core. Before the company was formed to produce finished submarine cable Hooper had furnished core for other companies, particularly that of William Thomas Henley, to armor and sheathe. The original core works were located at Mitcham, London with the later complete cable, core with external sheathing, production located and later consolidated at Millwall and the company renamed Hooper's Telegraph Works.
British America comprised the colonial territories of the English Empire, and the successor British Empire, in the Americas from 1607 to 1783. These colonies were formally known as British America and the British West Indies immediately prior to thirteen of the colonies seceding in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and forming the United States of America.
William Thomas Henley (1814–1882) was a pioneer in the manufacture of telegraph cables. He was working as a porter in Cheapside in 1830, leaving after disputes with his employer, and working at the St Katherine Docks for six years. During those years he was determined to learn a trade and used money from an aunt to purchase a lathe, vice and lumber with which he made a work bench. With those tools he taught himself to turn wood and brass and began to experiment, including with electricity.
Newfoundland is a large island situated off the eastern coast of the North American mainland and the most populous part of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. The island contains 29 percent of the province's land area. The island is separated from the Labrador Peninsula by the Strait of Belle Isle and from Cape Breton Island by the Cabot Strait. It blocks the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River, creating the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the world's largest estuary. Newfoundland's nearest neighbour is the French overseas collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon.
The British and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company was founded by John Brett in 1850. The Magnetic was the principal competitor to the largest telegraph company in the United Kingdom, the Electric Telegraph Company. The Magnetic was the leading company in Ireland, while the Electric was the leading company in mainland Britain. Between them, they dominated the market until the telegraph was nationalised in 1870.
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