Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Race to Wire the World and the Dawn of the Information Age

The thrilling story of the nineteenth century’s Apollo moonshot: an Atlantic-spanning telegraph cable that created the global village and changed the world.

In 1854, the American entrepreneur Cyrus Field set out to lay a 2,000-mile telegraph cable across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing like it had ever been attempted. Field knew nothing about telegraphy, electricity, ships, or oceans, and science itself still lacked a universal theory of electricity. But he believed that wiring the...