The Great Eastern Returning to a Buoy Marking a Break in the Cable (A painting by Robert Dudley)      Cyrus Field's powers of persuasion must have been enormous. After the spectacular and expensive failure of the 1858 cable he raised funds for another effort in 1865. Though he came from a reasonably prosperous middle class family, Field's rise was really "rags to riches" and his enemies never let him forget it calling him "a junk collector."  Though a wealthy man Field was officially a New York City licensed junk collector.  His paper mills supplemented  wood pulp paper  with cotton rags. He had rag collecting contracts much like a recycling company would have today with a steel mill. To keep warehouses full of rags, Field was officially licensed as a "junk collector."       Field kept up with telegraph technology.  Blame for the failure of the 1858 cable was tossed back and forth among several of the key players.  Th...

HMS Agamemnon laying the Trans Atlantic cable 1858 NASA's program to send a man to the moon required--and yielded-- a variety of scientific and technical breakthroughs.  The moonshot of the 1850s, laying a telegraph cable from the New World to the Old World require--and yielded-- significant technical and scientific discoveries.  It was expected that once ships and cable were ready and in place, it would take only six to eight days to connect the continents.  Instead, it took nearly ten years and six  $1,200,000  major failures. But it wasn't until the cables had been successfully connected and tested that the real trouble began. By 1852 Europe was  already laying lines short distances under water such as  across the Irish Sea and the English Channel. Early experiments in laying telegraph cable underwater demonstrated it took a lot more redesigning than simply putting more gutta percha and tar insulation around the copper wires and plunking it in the w...

  The eight ships of the Far East Squadron in Perry's return to Japan Perry now turned his attention to the small islands between Japan and China.  At the time, several of these were small kingdoms.  At each, Perry exacted a treaty similar to the one he would negotiate with Japan. The treaties provided sailors washed ashore would be well treated; that the king would sell supplies to American ships, in return Americans would buy from nobody else on the islands; and, that the kingdoms would serve as coal storage points for the American navy.  This last part encountered opposition.  The islanders had no wish to be responsible for coal that might be washed/blown away in a typhoon, pilfered by the natives, seized by pirates or other navies, etc., and then suffer the threatened consequences by the US Navy. A Russian fleet had reached Japan only a few weeks after Perry in 1853.  The Russians left hurriedly without a treaty on hearing the Crimean War had started ...

“War With Paraguay and How To Sit In A Hoopskirt--America from 1848 through 1868 as told through the newspapers and magazines of the time” Journalism has been called “history’s first rough draft.” Newspapers and magazines have been the public discourse for most of American history. "The American Squadron en route to Paraguay" Harper's Magazine 1858   The “rough draft” is the only thing most people at a particular time and place have to frame their opinions and reactions.  Historians have the luxury of hindsight.   Combined with access to private journals, formerly secret or undiscovered documents, and statistical facts unknown to the average person of the time allow historians to pontificate on “what was really happening.” While writing a magazine article about my hometown, Raleigh, NC, on the eve of the Civil War, I was astonished at the difference between the “first rough draft” in the local newspapers of the time and what historians present the public with afte...