Lightning Beneath the Sea
The Race to Wire the World and the Dawn of the Information Age
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jun 9, 2026
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The thrilling story of the nineteenth century’s Apollo moonshot: an Atlantic-spanning telegraph cable that created the global village and changed the world.
In 1854, the American entrepreneur Cyrus Field set out to lay a 2,000-mile telegraph cable across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Nothing like it had ever been attempted. Field knew nothing about telegraphy, electricity, ships, or oceans, and science itself still lacked a universal theory of electricity. But he believed that wiring the world for near-instantaneous communication would bring about peace on Earth. In 1866, after enduring over a decade of global scorn, catastrophic failures, staggering losses, and brushes with death, he would finally lay his great cable, ushering in the global information age. From acclaimed author James M. Tabor, Lightning Beneath the Sea is an unforgettable tale of radical vision, unwavering determination, and triumph against overwhelming odds that transformed life on Earth forever.
In a propulsive narrative, Tabor tells how Field swiftly assembled an all-star scientific dream team that included telegraph legend Samuel F. B. Morse; a young Lord Kelvin, called the da Vinci of his day; Michael Faraday, the father of electrical engineering; and legendary philanthropist Peter Cooper. Together they battled epic storms, freak accidents, corporate sabotage, the enmity of Abraham Lincoln, and the hubris of the project’s original chief electrician—an eccentric who insisted on being called Wildman—while racing two rival efforts to establish telegraphic communications between continents. When it was finally done, Field’s cable lay up to 2.5 miles deep under the ocean, and the London Daily News announced: “Time and space seem literally annihilated.” The cable’s legacy can be traced today in the hundreds of descendants that still carry 98 percent of the world’s information through a “world undersea web.”
Deeply researched and written with verve, Lightning Beneath the Sea is the gripping account of an epochal achievement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A visionary businessman braves terrible weather and cutthroat opposition to achieve Promethean results in this rousing history. Journalist Tabor (Forever on the Mountain) recaps the efforts of paper manufacturer Cyrus Field to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable in the 1850s and '60s, an initiative that would bring Europe and the Americas into instant communication, yield big profits, and, he believed, foster world peace. The narrative recounts a series of intrepid cable-laying expeditions and maddening setbacks. Field's first expedition ended ignominiously when the cable disappeared irretrievably into the depths. His second weathered a monstrous storm, but still completed a functioning transatlantic cable—which then quit working after a few weeks. His third was plagued by probable sabotage—spikes were discovered driven into the cable. The fourth, successful expedition, in 1866, was a race against Western Union's efforts to link San Francisco with Europe via a cable across the Bering Strait and Russia. Tabor makes Field's quest into an epic maritime adventure, as well as a riveting study of technological progress, as each failure goads new improvements. It's also a vivid portrait of Field, a man of missionary zeal and angst—he assumed he would go to hell if any sailors died—whose dogged resilience rallied investors after each disaster. The result is a captivating saga of Victorians cobbling modernity into existence under the most grueling circumstances.
