Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Thrilling Race to Wire the World

The in-person program will be followed by a Book-signing and Reception.

Presented in Partnership with The Victorian Society New York

In this program, based on his book, Lightning Beneath the Sea, author James M. Tabor will tell the thrilling story of the nineteenth century’s Apollo moonshot: an Atlantic-spanning telegraph cable that 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. But he believed that wiring the world for near-instantaneous communication would bring about peace on Earth. As Mr. Tabor will describe in enthralling detail, how in 1866, after enduring over a decade of catastrophic failures and staggering losses, Field would finally lay his great cable, ushering in the global information age.