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By Root 1553 0

companies were consolidating into a few large regional companies. The mergers came in response to several pressures. Local, independent control had meant inefficient service, cutthroat competition, and reduced profits. The thriving Associated Press sought a smooth-working, national system for gathering news. And despite continued celebration of a free market, the nation was tending in many other branches of its economic life to interstate corporations with centralized managements. A particularly ambitious company was formed in 1851 by a group of Rochester businessmen. They aimed at acquiring and consolidating all telegraphic interests west of Buffalo, using House’s system. Organized as the New York & Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company, they reorganized and reincorporated in 1857 as the Western Union Telegraph Company, and set out to dominate the industry.

At the same time, Morse’s user-friendly telegraphs were spreading outside the United States. Prussia installed them, sometimes with modifications, on important lines from Berlin to Aachen, Frankfurt am Main, and Hamburg; the Prussian government awarded him its gold medal for scientific merit, presented in a gold snuffbox. In 1853 a Morse line went up between Stockholm and Uppsala, the first telegraph in Sweden. Next year, a short line of Morse telegraph was strung between Melbourne and Williamstown, Australia, with plans for a thousand-mile line from Sydney to Melbourne to Adelaide. By 1855, a 5000-kilometer Morse network in India linked Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. Morse telegraphs began clicking in the Russian empire. And there was discussion of the daunting problem of how to transmit Chinese ideograms.

The simultaneous movement of consolidation and expansion came together in the most complex technological feat ever attempted, and one of the great farsighted adventures in human history—the laying and operation of a submarine telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean, electrically connecting the Old World with the New and opening the present era of global communication.

Early in 1854, while in Washington enjoying his success in the Supreme Court case, Morse received a letter from a New Yorker named Cyrus W. Field (1819–1892). The son of a New England Congregationalist minister and a mother memorably named Submit, Field was slight, nervous, boyish. Yet he epitomized the go-ahead spirit of the American marketplace. Starting out as a teenaged dry-goods clerk he had worked his way into the business of merchandising paper, an important commodity with the growth of the American press. By the age of thirty-five he ranked among the wealthiest men in New York. Grossing a million dollars a year, he dwelt in a Gramercy Park town house crammed with Persian rugs and Greek statuary. At the time he wrote to Morse he had just returned from a six-month trip to the rubber forests of the Amazon jungle, partly for relaxation and partly to explore commercial possibilities. He arrived in New York with a flock of screeching parrots and a jaguar on a leash.

Field’s letter to Morse concerned the possibility of submarine telegraphy. A beginning had been made in 1852, when a British company successfully opened electrical communication between London and Paris, by a cable laid across the English Channel. Field wanted Morse’s opinion about whether a cable could be laid across the Atlantic Ocean. His idea was to span the two closest points between Europe and North America—Ireland and Newfoundland, a distance of about 1700 miles. From Newfoundland, the line could be run down through Maine to New York City.

Before replying, Morse visited the National Observatory in the capital to speak with its head, a short, stout naval lieutenant and oceanographer named Matthew Fontaine Maury. Maury had conducted a program of transatlantic soundings, and Morse inquired about the depth and contour of the ocean floor between Ireland and Newfoundland. He learned that the floor was deep enough to keep a cable beyond the reach of anchors or icebergs. And miraculously, perhaps providentially, the floor