The book tells the overall story of how the telegraph got its start via a landline across the country with its expansion in the 1850s across the Atlantic Ocean from New England northwest to Nova Scotia, to Newfoundland and eventually west to Ireland and finally to Europe and beyond. We explain how the cable is made and operates and gets laid underwater by enormous cable laying ships and eventually to cable stations around the world all conceived by a dreamer by the name of Cyrus W. Field resulting in messages to travel in seconds by electric cable which once took weeks across the ocean by ship.