In September 1858, New York celebrated the first transatlantic telegraph cable with a parade and fireworks so intense they set the roof of City Hall on fire. At that very moment, on the other side of the ocean, a self-taught electrician was pumping high-voltage current into the fragile line and destroying it. This episode tells the story of Cyrus West Field, a retired paper manufacturer with no engineering background who crossed the Atlantic 56 times to connect the continents.

It follows Matthew Maury's mapping of the Telegraph Plateau with sounding lines, the Newfoundland link that cost over a million dollars, cable halves armored in opposite twists, the 1857 break, the 1858 storm, and the brief success that died after only 732 messages. It covers the clash between William Thomson's delicate mirror galvanometer and Wildman Whitehouse's bru ...