As early as 1850, Bishop Mullock, of St. John's, N. F., addressed to an American newspaper, called the _Courier_, a letter in which he advocated a telegraph line from Newfoundland to New York, so that the news of mail steamers could be intercepted and wired to that City. In 1852, the "Newfoundland Electric Telegraph Company" was formed for the purpose of carrying out a similar plan. This was to be accomplished by means of a telegraph line from Cape Race, at the eastern extremity of Newfoundland to Cape Ray, on the western, as well as by short cables over to Cape Breton Island, to Prince Edward Island and the mainland, and thence by ordinary telegraph lines to Canada and the United States. But owing to the want of money, nothing was done. The first attempt at laying a cable under the Atlantic was made by the Atlantic Telegraph Company in 1857, after a careful survey of the ocean had revealed the existence of a submarine plain, or extended table-land, on which the cable could rest undisturbed by passing keels, monsters of the deep or angry billows. The result was the first of a series of failures, which caused great perplexity and depression at the time; for, after 330 miles had been paid out from Valentia on the Irish coast, the cable suddenly parted, burying in 2000 fathoms of water an electrical conductor which had cost $150,000 for its manufacture. A second attempt was made in 1858, when the U. S. frigate _Niagara_ and H. M. S. _Agamemnon_, each carrying half of the cable, met in mid-ocean; and, after splicing the two ends together, steamed away in opposite directions, the _Niagara_ toward Newfoundland and the _Agamemnon_ toward Valentia. Fortunately for the enterprise, Prof. Thomson was on board the English ship as chief electrician. No doubt, his mind turned many a time during those anxious days to Fourier's differential equation for the flow of heat along a conductor, and his own application of it to the conduction of the electric current through the copper core of the cable as it came up from the tanks, trailed out behind the ship, dipped silently into the blue water and slowly settled down to its bed of ooze on the ocean floor. After a series of disheartening mishaps, necessitating as many returns of the ships to the rendezvous in mid-ocean, the _Agamemnon_ landed the shore-end safely in Valentia; and the _Niagara_, after rolling and pitching for days and nights in tempestuous seas, landed hers in Trinity Bay on the morning of August 5th, 1858, on which historic date the telegraphic union of the two worlds was finally consummated and the great feat of the century accomplished.