Great Fortunes: Cyrus W. Field Part 10
This second failure greatly disheartened the directors, and it required all Mr. Field’s persuasiveness to induce them to sanction another attempt. Yet he prevailed, and, hastening from London to Queenstown, sailed with the telegraph fleet on the third attempt to lay the cable, leaving Queenstown on the 17th of July. The rendezvous was reached on the 28th, and on the 29th the splice was made; and the “Niagara” and “Agamemnon” parted company. This time the undertaking was successful. The cable was laid across the Atlantic, the “Niagara” reaching Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, on the 5th of August, and the “Agamemnon” arriving at Valentia, Ireland, a few hours later on the same day. Signals were sent across the entire length of the line, from shore to shore, with ease and rapidity, and nothing occurred to mar the success of the mighty undertaking.
The successful laying of the cable was hailed with the liveliest joy on both sides of the Atlantic, and those who had participated in it were regarded as heroes. But great as was the achievement, it was not destined to be a lasting success. After working for four weeks, the electric current suddenly ceased on the 1st of September. It never worked perfectly at any period of its existence, but it did transmit a number of messages with intelligibleness, and thus put an end to all doubt in the minds of the scientific men of the expedition of the feasibility of laying a successful line across the ocean.
The public generally and the directors of the company were greatly disappointed, and many of-the latter and nearly all of the former declared that all such attempts must of necessity fail. Some persons even went so far as to avow their belief that the statements as to the successful transmission of signals over the wire were false; but the proofs that the wire did work properly for awhile are too strong to allow us to accord the slightest weight to this disbelief. But whether signals had passed over the wire or not, there could be no doubt that the cable had ceased to respond to the efforts of the electricians, and was a total failure, and the discouragement of nearly every one connected with it was most profound.
Mr. Field and one or two others were the only persons who retained the slightest confidence in the enterprise, and it was clear to them that any further effort to secure the aid of private capital would be useless just then. An appeal was made to the British Government. It was urged that the work was too great to be undertaken by private capital alone, and that, since it was to be more of a public than a private nature, it was but just that the Government should undertake it. The company asked the Government to guarantee the interest on a certain amount of stock, even if the second attempt should not prove a complete success. The failure of the Red Sea cable, to which the British Government had given an unconditional guarantee, had just occurred, and had caused a considerable loss to the treasury, and the Government was not willing to assume another such risk. Anxious, however, for the success of the Atlantic telegraph, it increased its subsidy from fourteen thousand to twenty thousand pounds, and agreed to guarantee eight per cent, on six hundred thousand pounds of new capital for twenty-five years, upon the single condition that the cable should be made to work successfully.
