“I’ll Put a Girdle Round the Earth in Forty Minutes” (October 1958 | Volume: 9, Issue: 6)

“I’ll Put a Girdle Round the Earth in Forty Minutes”

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Authors: Arthur C. Clarke

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October 1958 | Volume 9, Issue 6

Cyrus West Field was one of the greatest Americans of the nineteenth century, but today there can be few of his countrymen who remember him. I Ic opened up no frontiers, killed no Indians, founded no industrial empires, won no battles; the work he did has been buried deep in the Atlantic ooze for almost one hundred years. Yet he helped to change history, and now that his dream of a telegraph to Europe has been surpassed by a still more wonderful achievement, the transatlantic telephone cable, it is only right that we should pay tribute to the almost superhuman courage which enabled him to triumph over repeated disasters.
 
His face is looking at me now, across the century that lies between us. It is not at all the face of the international financier or the company promoter, though Held was both these things. The thin, sensitive nose, the regular features, the deep-set, brooding eyes—these add up to a poet or musician, not to the stereotyped sad success, indistinguishable from all his ulcer-ridden colleagues we see today in the business section of Time magazine. “Visionary and chivalrous” were the words applied to Field many years later, and no one without vision would have set oil on the long and arduous quest that dominated his life for almost twelve years.

[A New Englander by birth, Field had already made a fortune in the wholesale paper business by the time he was 33, but the clfort had taken a heavy toll on his health, and he had been ordered by his doctors to relax. He took a trip to Europe with his wife, then toured South America with the famous landscape painter Frederick E. Church. To all intents and purposes Field, a millionaire by today’s standards and still a young man, had retired for good.]

He might have remained in retirement for the rest of his days if chance had not brought him into contact with F. N. Gisborne, an English engineer engaged in building a telegraph line across Newfoundland. When the Newfoundland company went bankrupt in 1853 before more than forty miles of line had been erected, Gisborne, who had been left holding the company’s debts, went to New York the next year in an attempt to raise more money lor the scheme. Dy good fortune he met Cyrus Field, who was then relaxing after his South American trip and was not at all keen on becoming involved in any further business undertakings. He listened politely to Gisborne but did not commit himsell to any promise of help. Only the uncompleted line across Newfoundland was discussed, but when the meeting was over and he was alone in his library, Field started to play with the globe and suddenly realized that the Newfoundland telegraph was merely one link in a far more important project. Why wait loi steamers to bring news from Europe? Let the telegraph do the whole job.

From that moment, ticld