After a failed 1858 attempt that worked only briefly, the Atlantic Telegraph Company successfully laid a durable submarine telegraph cable across the North Atlantic in 1866, using the steamship Great Eastern. The cable allowed messages between London and New York to be sent in minutes instead of the one to two weeks required by steamship mail. Banks, merchants, and news services quickly adopted the line for price quotations and market news, and a second cable laid the same year gave the system redundancy and lowered transmission costs.
Relevance to Trade History
The 1866 cable created the first reliable near-real-time communication link between European and North American financial and commodity markets, compressing information lag from weeks to minutes.
Read the full story in our article The Telegraph and Faster Commercial Communication.
Source: Institution of Engineering and Technology archive. See our Sources & Methodology page for how we select and verify references.