Piece of the Trans-Atlantic Cable
Brick Store Museum Collection, 1936.0875. Gift of the William Barry Estate.

With the explosion of cell phone technology and the internet, it's difficult to imagine a time when we couldn't instantly communicate with someone halfway around the world. Yet, in the mid 1800s, messages from the United States to Europe took more than a week to arrive by ship.  In a multi-year endeavor spanning the 1850s and entailing five separate attempts, telegraph cable was successfully laid 2,200 miles across the Atlantic Ocean between Ireland and Newfoundland.  On August 16, 1858, the first public message was sent over that cable in a 98-word congratulatory communique from Queen Victoria to U. S. President James Buchanan.  Though it took nearly 17 hours to transmit, this was a remarkable milestone in that it represented the first time that someone could send a message overseas and receive a reply within a 48-hour period.

This is one of two pieces of the trans-Atlantic cable in the Museum's collections.

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