The First Wire to the New World

The summer of 1858 saw the laying of the first electric telegraph cable between Europe and America. The spectacular underwater link was intended to overcome space and time, a project deemed worthy of the greatest of technical efforts and considerable financial commitment, marking the birth of virtual communication.

However, in this first history of the transatlantic cable, Christian Holtorf shows that it began as something of a failure. The cable link was in use for barely four weeks before it broke down. Holtorf’s research in British, Canadian and US American archives shows that the technical development was governed by misunderstandings, mistakes and inappropriate behaviour: the visionaries were mistaken, the engineers ruined the technology and the investors lost their money.


The desired success was not achieved until later, once certain cultural adjustments in society and new scientific disciplines such as oceanography and electrophysics had been established. Thus the significance of the cable had far less to do with globalisation and the acceleration of communication than with the observation and explanation of natural phenomena that had remained undiscovered up until that point. Although space and time acquired a new form, it was not (yet) possible to overcome them.

The first transatlantic cable – a short-term triumph over space and time.


The Author
Christian Holtorf, born in 1968, is a professor of science studies at the Hochschule Coburg. The historian and cultural scientist previously worked at the German Bundestag and as a head of department at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden.
Fellow of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. in 2010.