Excerpt from A Trip to Newfoundland: Its Scenery and Fisheries; With an Account of the Laying of the Submarine Telegraph Cable

There are very few who have not heard of that grand achievement of human genius, the electric telegraph, and of the wonderful things that have been accomplished through its agency -how distant lands have been brought into close connection; how people separated by thousands of miles have been enabled through it to communicate their thoughts to each other almost with the same rapidity as they could express them; how it has annihilated time and space, and how in connection with the steam engine, and the printing press it is silently and slowly, but surely performing its part in working out the civilization and progress of mankind. Twenty years ago people when they heard what would now be considered the hum ble claims it made to public notice treated them with ridicule, for they could not conceive it possible for an invisible, impalpable body, more subtle than the air we breathe, to carry messages with the speed of the light ning itself over a distance of a thousand miles. Where now is the skepti cism with which it was received, and where the unbeliever who has not been converted from his infidelity? Not more than eleven years have passed since the first electric telegraph was established between Baltimore and Washington, and now our country is intersected by a perfect net-work of wires extending over a distance of forty-two thousand miles. But this is not all, for if we direct our attention to Europe, we will find that there are more than thirty thousand miles of it in Operation on that continent, making altogether for the Old and the New Worlds a total of over seventy thousand miles.

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