(From the London Times of Wednesday, September 5th.)
“The recovery of the cable of 1865 from the very lowest depths of the Atlantic seems to have taken the world by surprise. It is not, however, too much to say that no class of the community has felt more astonishment than those who are best acquainted with the difficulties of the task—the electricians....
“Night and day for a whole year an electrician has always been on duty watching the tiny ray of light through which signals are given, and twice every day the whole length of wire—1240 miles—has been tested for conductivity and insulation.... Suddenly last Sunday morning at a quarter to six, while the light was being watched by Mr. May, he observed a peculiar indication about the light, which showed at once to his experienced eye that a message was near at hand. In a few minutes afterwards the unsteady flickering was changed to coherency, if we may use such a term, and at once the cable began to speak:
“ ‘Canning to Glass.—I have much pleasure in speaking to you through the 1865 cable. Just going to make splice.’ ”
(From Harper’s Magazine, October, 1866.)
“A great historical event has occurred since our last talk, and it has been received almost as a matter of course. The distance between Europe and America has been practically annihilated; the Atlantic Ocean has been abolished; steam as an agent of communication has been antiquated. We read every morning the previous day’s news from London or Paris, and there is no excitement whatever. Scarcely a bell has rung or a cannon roared. Not even a dinner has been eaten in honor of the great event, except by the gentlemen immediately concerned; and the salvo of speeches which usually resounds upon much inferior occasions from end to end of the country has been omitted.... The steamers bring the cream no longer. That is shot electrically under the sea, and the ships suddenly convey only skim-milk. They are yet young men who remember the arrival of the Sirius and the Liverpool and the Great Western. Their coming was the occasion of a thousandfold greater excitement than the laying of the cable. Yet if some visionary enthusiast had said to his friend as they watched with awe the steaming in or out of those huge ships, ‘Before we are bald or gray we shall look upon these vessels as we now look from the express train upon the slow old stage-coaches,’ he would have been tolerated only as a harmless maniac.... The name which will be always associated with this historical event is that of the man who has so patiently and unweariedly persisted in the project, Cyrus W. Field. With an undaunted cheerfulness, which often seemed exasperating and unreasonable and fanatical, he has steadily and zealously persevered, no more dismayed or baffled by apparent failure than a good ship by a head wind. We remember meeting him one pleasant day during the last spring in the street by the Astor House in New York. He said that he was going out to England by the next steamer.
“ ‘And how many times have you crossed the ocean?’
“ ‘Oh,’ he replied, with the fresh enthusiasm of a boy going home for vacation, ‘this will be the twenty-second voyage I have made upon this business.’ And his eyes twinkled as we merrily said good-bye. We heard of him no more until we saw his name signed to the despatch announcing the triumph of his blithe faith and long labor.”
The number of voyages is understated here. That made on May 30th, he writes, was his thirty-seventh.