We don’t often think about the way the internet works. We may have some vague idea that satellites handle it, or that somewhere there are lots of tiny cables involved, but how exactly information gets from London to New York can be a bit of a mystery.

The fact that the approximately 750,000 miles of cable currently lying on the ocean floor are somewhat ubiquitous is, in itself, an accomplishment. But ubiquity wasn’t always the name of the game when it came to stretching miles of wires across the high seas. (WATCH: The Spectacle Ep. 133: Thinking of the Roman Empire: Is the US Following In Its Footsteps?)

Within a decade of Samuel Morse’s famous message, “What hath God wrought?” the United States was crisscrossed with telegraph lines. The system worked great when you could stretch your miles of telegraph line in the open air where you could see and mend it. But what if you were an Irish immigrant who wanted to send a message to family members back home in Ireland? Or what if President James Buchanan needed to communicate with Queen Victoria?

That message was written, paid for, and sent via ship. It was a journey that took 10 days if the ship made it to the other side of the Atlantic in good time. That irritated an American merchant named Cyrus West Field, so he got to work.

It took four tries to lay the first cable. Field decided that the best way was to have British ships meet American ships in the middle, and then both of them could lay cable going in opposite directions. (READ MORE: College Kids Without Civics and History)

That was great until the British ships ran into storms en route and were blown off course, or until the cable snapped.

It took Field a year, but by Aug. 5, 1858, he had done the seemingly impossible, and Buchanan and Queen Victoria were chatting about how wonderful the new transatlantic cable was while using it.

It was a short-lived success.

Less than a month later (and some 732 messages later), the cable broke down. The process of laying it had been rough on the materials, and it hadn’t been clear from the outset that one didn’t need 2,000 volts of electricity to send a transatlantic message (more electricity doesn’t equal further transmission). It wasn’t until 1866, after the American Civil War, that Field’s vision of a world connected by telegraph was finally accomplished. (READ MORE by Aubrey Gulick: A New Kind of Revolution)

Today, we’re connected by a network of cables that make it possible for us to communicate, not in dots and dashes, but in 0s and 1s that traverse the ocean at a mind-blowing speed. It took Field’s tenacity to turn underwater transmissions into a ubiquitous form of communication.

This article originally appeared on Aubrey’s Substack, Pilgrim’s Way on Aug. 5, 2024.