How the Transatlantic Cable Built the First

In 1746, according to a story Primal Space retells in its new video, the French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet wired 200 monks together with iron wire, connected the line to a Leiden jar, and shocked all of them at the same instant. The point was demonstration, not cruelty: electricity appeared to travel instantaneously over distance. Everything that followed, from semaphore towers to submarine cable, flowed from that observation.

The video, The Cable That Changed The World, runs just under eleven minutes and takes on a big stretch of history: Claude Chappe's optical telegraph, Alessandro Volta's battery, Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail's code, the rival Cooke and Wheatstone needle system, and the 1858 transatlantic cable. It draws on Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet, which remains the best one-volume case that the electric telegraph deserves to be remembered as the internet's ancestor. Ewan Cunningham wrote the script; Beau Stucki narrates.

Before Electricity, Semaphores

The segment on Chappe is the piece of the story most listeners will not know, and Primal Space gives it proper attention. In 1792, Chappe built a chain of towers across France, each topped with mechanical arms whose rotations produced 92 distinct signals. An operator read the previous tower through a telescope, copied the signal, and passed it down the line. Two signals per word, one naming a page in a code book, one naming the word on that page.

The system worked. The video notes the towers alerted the revolutionary government to invasions in minutes rather than days, and Chappe's invention gave the word "telegraph" to the world. But the limits were structural. Every tower needed staff. The system went blind at night and in fog. It served governments sending short messages, at considerable expense, and nobody else.

For a radio person, this is the oldest lesson in the file: the medium shapes the message, and a network that requires human relays every few miles will stay elite, slow to change, and fragile. Chappe's towers were a broadcasting system before broadcasting, and they had broadcasting's early economics.

The Bottleneck Sequence

The video's strongest analytical move is its insistence that the electric telegraph required several separate problems to fall in order. Static electricity from Leiden jars would not carry past a few miles. Volta's 1800 chemical battery solved the power problem with a steady current capable of traveling hundreds of miles. Then came the encoding problem: an early design used 26 wires, one per letter, which priced itself out of existence at scale.

The solution the video reaches for is a lovely piece of pre-industrial evidence. Church bells across medieval Europe already encoded information in ring patterns: on the hour, once per hour; on a death, three slow tolls for a man and two for a woman, then short rings for the age of the deceased. "If all of this information could be conveyed by simple patterns of bell rings," the narration asks, "perhaps the same could be done with electric pulses traveling down a wire."

Samuel Morse, a painter by trade, thought so. With the engineer Alfred Vail, he assigned each letter a combination of short and long pulses, pressed a key to close the circuit, and recorded the result at the receiving end with a pen on moving paper. The video's framing is fair here in a way popular history often is not: Morse had a transatlantic rival. William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone's five-needle system, used on English railways, required multiple wires but no code book at all. Letters were visibly indicated; anyone could operate it. Morse's single-wire system was cheaper to scale; Cooke and Wheatstone's was easier to use. The market, eventually, went to the cheaper wire and the trained operator, a trade-off the video lets stand without belaboring.

A Murder Sells the Network

Craft aside, the video understands that infrastructure adoption runs on stories. On 1 January 1845, John Tawell murdered his mistress and boarded a train for London, assuming the rails would outrun the news. A police officer sent his description ahead on the Cooke and Wheatstone line, and London police arrested him on arrival. The public grasped the telegraph's power, the video notes, and installations spread across Britain within the year. Morse, meanwhile, demonstrated a 40-mile line from Washington to Baltimore.

Within a few years, thousands of miles of wire connected the largest cities on both sides of the Atlantic. The remaining step was the ocean.

The Cable, and What the Video Leaves Out

With the American businessman Cyrus West Field, the Atlantic Telegraph Company aimed to run roughly 2,000 miles of cable from Newfoundland to Valentia Island off Ireland. The engineering is described well: a core of seven copper strands, three layers of rubber insulation, tarred hemp, and a protective wrap of iron wire. No ship could carry the whole cable, so it was split between two warships, spliced mid-Atlantic on 29 July 1858, and paid out in opposite directions. Days later, both ends made landfall. North America had a direct link to Europe for the first time; news that took weeks by steamer crossed in minutes.

Here is where listeners should consult other shelves. The video presents the 1858 cable as the triumph and moves on. As our own earlier coverage of Cyrus Field's cable explains, and as the archival record compiled at atlantic-cable.com documents at length, the 1858 line failed within weeks of opening, done in partly by the decision to drive the signal at voltages the cable's insulation could not sustain. A durable transatlantic link had to wait until 1866. The video does not mention this, which is a real gap for anyone drawing modern parallels: the first attempt at planetary connectivity did not work, and the people who paid for it anyway were the reason the second one did.

There is also the failure mode Standage's book dwells on and the video touches only in passing: bandwidth. The 1858 cable carried a message per hour at best, and Queen Victoria's congratulatory telegram to President Buchanan took hours to transmit. Instant communication, in 1858, meant something slower than a dial-up modem.

The Old Network, Recognizably Ours

The video's framing, that the telegraph era was "a worldwide web of cables crossing oceans and connecting countries," where people "did business, fell in love, and got scammed, just like today," is a compression of Standage's argument, and it holds up. Fraud arrived over the wire almost as fast as commerce. News organizations reorganized themselves around the new speed. The volume of traffic demanded compression habits that look familiar to anyone who has watched a language mutate under character limits.

The key points Primal Space draws from all this are sound: breakthroughs arrive in sequence, not all at once; encoding beats hardware; infrastructure decides whether an invention matters; and speed guarantees nothing about accuracy. That last one the video gestures at through its news-verification sponsor segment, which is a soft pitch, but the underlying point is older than the telegraph. Chappe's operators could misread an arm position. A cable operator could mistap a letter. Every gain in speed has been matched by a new surface for error.

What the video does not ask, and what I keep returning to, is why we resist the lineage. Every few years a technology writer rediscovers that Victorian readers complained of information overload, and presents it as a revelation. The material has been sitting in Standage's book since 1998, and in the cable logs, and in the semaphore operators' logbooks before that. Primal Space has done the useful work of packing the whole arc, monk to cable, into eleven minutes. The open question it leaves the listener is a good one: when the next instant-communication technology arrives, will anyone remember, in time, that we have been here before?

Harry Goodman covers spoken word and audio storytelling for Buzzrag.