The Atlantic Cable Album (1858)
In mid-August 1858, Queen Victoria sent President Buchanan a message transmitted by Morse code through a submarine cable across the Atlantic Ocean - thus inaugurating the use of the Atlantic Cable. Initially hailed as an engineering feat that would forever change transcontinental communication, the cable went dead within a month. Not until 1866 would the project achieve the goal that was celebrated prematurely in 1858.
Quick to see an opportunity to capitalize on the excitement, Tiffany and Company purchased the unused remainder of the Atlantic cable in August 1858, and sold short lengths of it as souvenirs. Similarly, an enterprising New Yorker named Eugene Ely published friendship albums entitled Atlantic Cable Album, each of which had one-eighth inch pieces of the cable imbedded in the cover. Unfortunately for Tiffany and Ely, when the Atlantic cable ceased functioning, the press scorned it as a financial debacle for its investors, and the souvenirs of a momentous success suddenly became relics of a failure.
The Library Company recently acquired a copy of Ely's Atlantic Cable Album with funds from the Program in Early American Economy and Society. It is interesting to see an actual piece of the cable that failed in 1858. It is surprisingly small - less than an inch across. The core has seven strands of copper wire surrounded by layers of gutta-percha (one of the wonder materials of the 19th century), hemp, more wire, and tar. The 1866 cable was larger, had much purer copper, another layer of gutta-percha for insulation, and no exterior tar - and facilitated the creation of a global economy, as its promoters anticipated.
The Library Company has many examples of friendship albums. Typically, young women acquired such items during their teen years. Similar to autograph albums of a more recent vintage, friendship albums were attractively bound blank books in which the owners' friends, teachers, and other acquaintances inscribed passages of prose and poetry to indicate the emotional bonds between them and the albums' owners. The Atlantic Cable Album is the first friendship album in the collection which also commemorates an historic event. It combines elements of the historic souvenir and the personal souvenir -- from an era when remembrance and sentiment were especially important. In fact, the piece of cable in the cover suggests the Atlantic cable as a metaphor for the sentimental bonds between individuals.
Our copy of the Atlantic Cable Album was owned by a young woman named Mary J. Bull, a student at North Granville Ladies' Seminary in North Granville, N.Y. The earliest inscriptions in the album date from 1862; many are accompanied by photographs. Amazingly, the only other copy of the album we know to exist also was owned by a student at North Granville Ladies' Seminary in the 1860s. How these two albums came to be used in the same school over two hundred miles north of New York City, where they originated, is an intriguing mystery.
1. John Steele Gordon. A Thread across the Atlantic: The Heroic Story of the Atlantic Cable (2002), p. 137; Robert Dalton Harris and Diane DeBlois. An Atlantic Telegraph: The Transcendental Cable (1994), p. 40.
Image Above Left: Atlantic Cable Album (New York: Eugene Ely, 1858)
Image Above Right: "North Granville Female [sic] Seminary," frontispiece in Fourth Annual Catalogue … of North Granville Ladies' Seminary (1859)