Reddit reviews A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable

The article is Mother Earth Mother Board, unfortunately the Wired online archive version linked here is missing the pictures. I highly recommend it though, definitely worth a read, and you can tell some of his ideas in Cryptonomicon (published 3 years later) were already in his head. Here's my favorite quote from that article, one I think of surprisingly often:

>Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects (I recommend Arthur C. Clarke’s book How the World Was One). The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting.

(I recommend A Thread Across the Ocean since IIRC there was not actually all that much in How The World Was One about the transatlantic cable.)

Each of these three ventures actually included several attempts apiece. There's a pretty decent book called A Thread Across the Ocean that does a good job of contextualizing and explaining the project in a reasonably succinct manner.

This book tells the story of the first undersea cable. It is a pretty good book.

There is a great book on the subject of the first transatlantic cable called A Thread Across the Ocean.

Oh man! Thanks for posting this!

I read A Thread Across The Ocean years ago about this. Good stuff.
That and The Victorian Internet.