The transatlantic cable connects two continents
At the beginning of the 1870s, there were three cable connections between the Old and New Worlds – and all these transatlantic cables were owned by the Anglo American Telegraph Company. Its main shareholder, the Briton John Pender, defended that monopoly unyieldingly. In order to break that hold, American businessmen and prominent figures in particular decided to install a further communication link. The only ones trusted to accomplish such a task were the Siemens brothers. And they took up the challenge.
America prepares the way – failures and lessons learned
After the major successes of the intercontinental land and sea telegraph lines, it was soon clear that laying a telegraph cable between the American continent and Europe promised to be a lucrative business. In 1854 the entrepreneur Cyrus Field founded the “Atlantic Telegraph Co. of New York, Newfoundland and London.” The route chosen by Field and his employees ran between Ireland and Newfoundland, since the ocean maps showed a raised plateau on the seabed and so the submarine conditions there looked ideal. Field began in 1854 by constructing a link from New York to Newfoundland, before he ventured on the actual task of laying a line beneath the Atlantic, three years after the company was founded.
After a failed attempt in the summer of 1857, Field succeeded in establishing the first connection between the European and American telegraph network on August 5, 1858. However, due to the lack of experience in laying cables over such distances, the cable was made too thin and so was thus too vulnerable to environmental influences. It broke down after around 400 dispatches and 23 days in operation. It took Field seven years to collect enough money again to fund a further attempt. However, this cable also broke while being laid for the first time and so it was only on the second attempt on July 27, 1866, that a permanent telegraph link was established between America and Europe. Since the broken cable has been recovered in the meantime, two functioning lines were then available. Field was saved financially and was able to pay back all his debts by 1867. He was celebrated as a hero in both New York and London.
Good business prospects and a fiercely contested market – the Siemens brothers enter the arena
The profitable business with the transatlantic link soon became a fiercely contested market.
After the British cotton manufacturer John Pender succeeded in gaining control of the existing cables, he formed a monopoly which he defended resolutely against emerging competitors.
As a result of this dominance, investors approached the Siemens brothers in the early 1870s, asking whether they could lay their own “direct” cable between Germany or the UK and the U.S.
Werner von Siemens first wrote about the matter in 1871 in a letter to his brother Carl:
At the general meeting of the Deutsche Bank yesterday […] the Third Director asked me […] whether we would be interested in participating in a direct German-American cable, for which there was a great deal of support and a lot of money in America.
Werner von Siemens, in a letter from 1871
Direct US Cable Company Ltd, prospectus, 1873
It would however be over a year before this idea took concrete shape, not least because of the hesitation of Werner von Siemens, who was still very much aware of the financial losses from a number of earlier cable-laying projects.
But not William and Carl, who were much more inclined toward the project. Throughout 1872, Carl in particular looked for investors in the English-speaking world – and was successful. In spite of all the reservations on the part of
Werner von Siemens, by the end of 1872/beginning of 1873 it was more and more obvious that the Siemens brothers were going to lay a cable through the Atlantic – either for an American company or at their own cost.
Finally, in March 1873 the “Direct United States Cable Company” (DUSC) was founded, the purpose of which was “to produce a direct and independent telegraph link between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the United States of North America.” Werner’s brother William was appointed “Consulting Director.”
Despite the company’s name, it was evident right at the beginning of the project that there was no way a direct link was going tobe created between Ireland and the United States. Instead, the main cable – as with the previous cables – was going to run from Ireland to Nova Scotia and from there a further cable connecting the American mainland would be laid.
According to an Internet source, the main reason for this was that the cable technology of the time was not sufficiently advanced to permit a direct link of this kind. The signals would have become so weak over such a great distance that it would not have been possible to receive them. There is no mention of this in the sources preserved in the Corporate Archives.
