Cyrus W. Field: The Atlantic Cable, a Fried Wire and Ruin by Jay Gould

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In late August 1858 Great Barrington, Massachusetts, greeted Cyrus W. Field with brass bands as the man behind the first transatlantic telegraph cable. Born in 1819 in Stockbridge, the eighth of ten children of a clergyman, Field went to New York at 15 as an errand boy for the dry goods firm of A.T. Stewart, earning $50 his first year. Six months after he became a junior partner at E. Root and Company in 1840, the firm collapsed. His new firm with brother-in-law Joseph F. Stone supplied paper to the booming penny press, and by March 1853 he had repaid the old firm's debts with interest though not legally required to. He semi-retired at 34, toured South America with painter Frederic Edwin Church, and in 1854 heard Frederick Newton Gisborne's plan to wire Newfoundland to New York.

Field widened the idea into a cable to Ireland, rallied Peter Cooper and Samuel F. B. Morse, and formed the Atlantic Telegraph Company. In August 1858 Queen Victoria messaged President James Buchanan, but three weeks later the line died after electrician Wildman Whitehouse's high voltage degraded the gutta-percha insulation. The Panic of 1857 nearly ruined Field, and leaked Civil War letters from William Gladstone brought accusations of Confederate sympathy. In 1866 the Great Eastern laid a durable cable, then grappled up and spliced a cable lost the year before. Later, as president of the New York Elevated Railroad Company and a partner of Jay Gould in the Wabash Railroad, Field lost his fortune and died in Stockbridge in 1892.

• His paper fortune of $250,000 equals nearly $9 million today.
• Peter Cooper, his Gramercy Park neighbor, used personal funds to keep him afloat during the panic.
• A dynamometer on the Great Eastern signaled when grappling hooks snagged the lost cable.
• Congress awarded Field a gold medal, and he won the grand prize at the 1867 Paris Exposition.
• Field, British Columbia, Ardsley, New York, and the Cambrian worm Fieldia carry his name.