As a hulking battleship, the HMS Agamemnon was more accustomed to carrying cannons rather than telecommunications technology.

However, on July 17 1858, the Royal Navy steamer vessel was laden with more than 1,000 miles of cable and sailed to the middle of the Atlantic.

There she met a sister ship, the USS Niagara, carrying a vast spool of copper. The two wires were then bonded together, with Niagara setting sail west towards Newfoundland, and Agamemnon returning east towards Ireland.

Arriving at Valentia Island, near Kerry, the last of Agamemnon’s cable was unrolled and attached to a nearby cable house.

It was then on Aug 16 that the cable transported its first message 2,000 miles across the Ocean, sent via Morse Code by the Atlantic Telegraph Company.

“Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, good will towards men.”

However, the success was short-lived. Weeks later, after overzealous testing by engineers, the poorly designed cable failed and severed communications for a further eight years.

While those early cables were designed to carry just a few words a minute, undersea technology now enables 99pc of global internet traffic – carrying billions of messages and countless financial transactions.