The Transatlantic Cable Lands
Next: July 27, 2027
Weeks became minutes.
The story
Where it comes from
This Story marks 27 July 1866, when the steamship Great Eastern, by far the largest ship afloat, reached Heart's Content in Newfoundland trailing a telegraph cable from Valentia Island in Ireland. She had left on 13 July, and in fourteen days laid more than 1,800 miles of cable on the floor of the Atlantic. It created the first lasting electrical link between Europe and North America. Before it, news crossed the ocean by ship; afterwards, it took minutes. An earlier cable of 1858 had soon failed, and one of 1865 had snapped mid-ocean.
How it's celebrated
There is no organised observance. The cable station at Heart's Content, which worked until 1965, is now a museum, and both it and Valentia Island in Ireland carry IEEE Milestone plaques for the link. The simplest way to mark the day is to send a message to someone on another continent, and to remember that it still travels, as it did in 1866, along a cable on the sea floor.
Did you know
- News of Abraham Lincoln's death in April 1865 took about a week to reach Europe, because it had to cross by ship.
- After landing the new cable, the Great Eastern went back, fished the lost 1865 cable up from the ocean floor and finished it, so by 8 September 1866 there were two working lines.
- Five more cables joined Heart's Content and Valentia by 1894, and today's internet still crosses the oceans on undersea fibre-optic cables.
Coming up next
- World Hepatitis Day · July 28, 2027
- Global Tiger Day · July 29, 2027
- International Day of Friendship · July 30, 2027
- System Administrator Appreciation Day · July 30, 2027
- World Ranger Day · July 31, 2027
- World Breastfeeding Week · August 1, 2027