The 19th Century Industrialist Who Linked Europe and America

Cyrus West Field ran thousands of miles of undersea telegraph cable and changed the world forever.

The Battle of New Orleans took place on January 8th, 1815, between the United States and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the last days of the War of 1812. In fact, this battle was fought a full fifteen days after the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, which officially ended the War of 1812 on December 24th, 1814. The combined casualty numbers were over 2,200. This battle was a direct result of how slowly information traveled in the pre-telegraph age.

In the early parts of the 19th century, news from Europe took roughly ten days to cross the Atlantic and make its way to the United States. That number could be far higher, depending on where the information was coming from. In order for General Andrew Jackson to be informed that the war had been concluded, a ship would have taken a copy of the treaty across the Atlantic Ocean to a port, most likely New York City, where it would be disseminated, copied again and then taken overland via horse to the relevant parties. In this case, it took the information weeks to reach the Americans and British forces in Louisiana, leading to a battle that did not need to be fought.

As the Industrial Revolution began to pick up steam across large swaths of Europe and the United States, the problem of slow communication was becoming more and more…