Today in 1866, the Atlantic Cable was successfully completed.
The first working transatlantic telegraph cable connecting Europe and America, completed in 1858, failed within a few weeks. Before it did, however, it prompted the biggest parade New York had ever seen and accolades that described the cable, as one newspaper said, as “next only in importance to the ‘Crucifixion.'”
Tom Standage quotes similar reactions in The Victorian Internet: “The completion of the Atlantic Telegraph…has been the cause of the most exultant burst of popular enthusiasm that any even in modern times has ever elicited. The laying of the telegraph cable is regarded, and most justly, as the greatest event in the present century.” And “Since the discovery of Columbus, nothing has been done in any degree comparable to the vast enlargement which has thus been given to the sphere of human activity.”
The successful installation of the cable in 1866, resulted in similar—and so familiar to us today—pronouncements. Standage writes:
The hype soon got going again once it became clear, that this time, the transatlantic link was here to stay… [The cable] was hailed as “the most wonderful achievement of our civilization”… Edward Thornton, the British ambassador, emphasized the peacemaking potential of the telegraph. “What can be more likely to effect [peace] than a constant and complete intercourse between all nations and individuals in the world?” he asked.
Steven Lubar in InfoCulture: “For merchants fresh news meant the difference between profit and loss… Information was the key, and more and fresher information was better. These merchants lived in an Information Age. Their hopes and fears and expectations and beliefs about the new information technology were, in some ways, not too far removed from ours.”