Balloons And "Perfect Horse Wonder"     From the late 1840s through the 1850s,  ballooning was taking off (pardon the pun.) Attempts were being made to make aerial journeys from St. Louis to New York City; San Francisco to New York City and an ambitious plan to make a trans-Atlantic balloon flight. The FAA Would Not Have Approved the "City of New York" (And you thought the Boeing 737 was unsafe!?) And then, there was the absurd.  Imagine somebody attempting the following today Balloon Ascension on Horseback Professor Elliot made a balloon ascension on horseback at St. Louis, Mo., on Monday of last week. The Republican  says: Agreeable to announcement: Professor Elliot made his aerial voyage on horseback. The ground inside the enclosure was thronged with ladies and gentlemen to witness his perilous voyage, while outside the numbers could only be enumerated by  thousands. There were many who thought the horse would not go up but true to the appointed t...

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...