Atlantic Telegraph Company
American communications company
The Atlantic Telegraph Company was a company formed on 6 November 1856 to undertake and exploit a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean, the first such telecommunications link.
History
Cyrus Field, American businessman and financier, set his sights on laying the first transatlantic underwater telegraph cable after having been contacted by Frederic Newton Gisborne who attempted to connect St. John's, Newfoundland to New York City, but failed due to lack of funding. After inquiring about the feasibility of a transatlantic underwater cable to Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury of the U.S. Navy, Field formed an agreement with the Englishmen John Watkins Brett and Charles Tilston Bright to create the Atlantic Telegraph Company. It was incorporated in December, 1856 with £350,000 capital, raised principally in London, Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow. The board of directors was composed of eighteen members from the United Kingdom, nine from the United States, and three from Canada. The original three projectors were joined by E.O.W. Whitehouse, who oversaw the manufacturing of the cables as chief electrician. Curtis M. Lampson served as vice-chairman for over a decade.
The board recruited the physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), who had publicly disputed some of Whitehouse's claims. The two had a tense relationship before Whitehouse was dismissed when the first cable failed in 1858.
“Atlantic Telegraph Company” enters the record as american communications company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Atlantic, Telegraph and Company can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2040990. VIAF identifies the subject as 150189080. The Library of Congress control number is n87147188. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1856 and 1858.
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This entry incorporates text from “Atlantic Telegraph Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.