The wires of the Magnetic Telegraph Company had already been carried to various points on the west and south coast of Ireland; and, in 1852, Mr. F. N. Gisborne, a very able English engineer, obtained an exclusive concession for connecting St. Johns, Newfoundland, with Cape Ray, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, by an overhead telegraph-line. The idea was to "tap" steamers coming from London to Cape Race at St. Johns, and pass messages between that point and Cape Breton, on the other side of the Gulf, by carrier-pigeons. A few miles of cables were made in England, and laid between Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Mr. Gisborne then surveyed the route for the land-line across Newfoundland, and had erected some forty miles of it, when the work was stopped for want of funds. When in New York in 1854, Gisborne was introduced to Mr. Cyrus West Field, a retired merchant, who became enthusiastic on the subject, and formed a small, but strong, syndicate for the practical realization of Gisborne's scheme. A cable eighty-five miles in length was made in England, to be laid between Cape Breton and Newfoundland; but after forty miles had been paid out, rough weather ensued, and the undertaking had to be abandoned. A fresh instalment was, however, sent out in 1856, and successfully laid across the Gulf, thus connecting St. Johns with Canada and the American lines. The conductor of this line instead of being a single solid wire was, for the first time, composed of several small wires laid up together in strand form--with a view to avoiding a flaw in any single wire stopping the conductivity, besides affording increased mechanical pliability. [Illustration: FIG. 1.--Newfoundland Telegraph Station, 1855.] The feasibility of uniting the two vast systems of telegraphy had engaged the consideration of some of those most prominently associated with electric telegraphy on both sides of the Atlantic. It had been already shown that cables could be successfully laid and maintained in comparatively moderate depths in the Mediterranean, Black Sea, etc., but the nearest points between the British Isles and Newfoundland are nearly 2,000 miles apart. The greatest length of submarine line which had hitherto been effectively submerged--110 miles--formed but an insignificant portion of such an enormous distance; and that, too, involving a depth of nearly three miles for a large proportion of the way, instead of about 300 fathoms. Apart from the engineering difficulties entailed by this vast distance and depth, the question was then undetermined as to the possibility of conveying electric currents through such a length in an unbroken circuit, and at a speed that would enable messages to be passed rapidly enough in succession to prove remunerative. Various researches had been made--by Faraday among others--with a view to determining the law in relation to the velocity of electricity through a conducting-wire.