Some sites about Valentia Island

Lindberg - "Spirit of St Louis"

Charles Lindberg flew over Valentia Island on the first solo non-stop transatlantic flight in 1927, New York to Paris.

Lindbergh took off in the Spirit from Roosevelt Airfield, Garden City (Long Island), New York and landed 33 hours, 30 minutes later at Le Bourget Aerodrome in Paris, France.

The Telegraph Field on Valenia Island - Documentary

Powerhouse Museum's objects from the Transatlantic Cable

Vikram Pandit on Citi funding the Transatlantic Cable

On the left is the Land Registry Map of the Atlantic Cable Station, marked as the Anglo American Cable House.

Click on the map to see a larger version which shows:

• The Cable House
• Cromwell Fort
• Foilhummerum Bay

Cyrus Field's Atlantic Cable

One day in 1854, Canadian engineer Frederick Gisborne sat in Cyrus Field's parlor in New York City and talked about a telegraph line that would link North America with Europe . The idea appealed to the wealthy paper whole­saler from Massachusetts , and he lis­tened to Gisborne with rising interest. At 34, already the owner of a success­ful business that practically ran itself, Field was restless and looking for a challenge.

His mind raced ahead. Why not lay a cable on the bottom of the ocean it­self, Field wondered. Samuel F,B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, had already expressed some interest in a transatlantic cable. Field approached Morse and Matthew Maury, head of The U.S. Naval Observatory, and talked them into helping him get the project started. Their plan was to lay the cable between Valentia , Ireland , and Trinity Bay , Newfoundland . The cable itself was manufactured in Eng­land , and it consisted of a core of seven interwoven copper wires sheathed in a rubber like substance called gutta-percha. The outer shell was made of eight woven strands of iron. Over 2,000 miles (3,200 km.) of cable were coiled onto two ships, the American Niagara and the British Agamemnon , which left Ireland together, and without fanfare, on August 8, 1857. The Niagara was to lay out the first half of the cable, and the Agamemnon would take over in mid-ocean.

Shortly after the operation began, the cable snapped, and half a million dollars' worth of material slithered to the bottom of the ocean. Field tried again in July, 1858, and this time man­aged to lay the cable between its two terminals in Newfoundland and Ire­land . As the first messages commenced between Europe and North America, the people of New York City went wild. There was a parade, a torchlight procession, and fireworks. Cyrus Field was the man of the hour. But after three weeks and several hundred cable­grams, the cable stopped dead, and in the public mind Field became a charla­tan and a swindler.

Eventually, after 12 long years of still more failures, an improved cable weighing 5,000 tons (4.400 metric tons) was successfully laid on the ocean floor from the huge, 693-foot (205-m.) iron ship, the Great Eastern . When the 3,000-mile (4,800-km.) cable was brought ashore at Heart's Content, Newfoundland, the workmen danced with the dangling end before anchoring it, this time for good, on July 27, 1866.