The rail road and the telegraph, two communication technologies poles apart, developed hand in hand for the first 20 years. The first transatlantic cable was laid in the fifties of the nineteenth century. The first message was sent of Queen Victoria in 1858 whch was 98 (long) words long and took several minutes to send. Above all else, the "cable" enabled business transactions and money transfer faster than ever before; so much so that the exchange rate between the Sterling Pound and the American Dollar came to be known as the "Cable Rate" - a term that is used to this day.

Re " two communication technologies poles apart, developed hand in hand for the first 20 years".... The credit for this goes to the English civil engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He was also instrumentsl in building dockyards and bridges. General anxieties with the new telecommunications technology of the telegraph and the new transportation technology preceded the great failures of the new science of engineering, after twenty continuous years of stupendous successes, did occur from 1855 through 1865.