Cyrus West Field

• Born: November 30, 1819
• Birthplace: Stockbridge, Massachusetts
• Died: July 12, 1892
• Place of death: New York, New York

American paper merchant and transatlantic telegraph cable builder

Field built a profitable paper business in New York in the 1840’s and 1850’s. He then gained international renown as the organizer and driving force in the effort to lay an underwater telegraph cable connecting Europe and North America.

Sources of wealth: Trade; telegraph

Bequeathal of wealth: Dissipated

Early Life

Cyrus West Field was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1819. His father was a stern, influential Congregational minister. All of Field’s brothers who survived to middle age achieved notable success in occupations ranging from writing to serving as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and president of the Massachusetts Senate. At age fifteen, Field moved to New York City to begin an apprenticeship in the city’s leading dry goods store, where he quickly rose to become a senior clerk. At age eighteen, he returned to western Massachusetts, working for his brother as bookkeeper, general assistant, and then sales representative at a paper mill.

First Ventures

At age twenty, Field married and became the junior partner in Root & Company, a wholesale paper dealer in New York City. Within six months, Root went bankrupt, but Field settled the debts of his former employer at thirty cents on the dollar and reorganized the firm under his own name. The company purchased supplies for papermakers and marketed their products. Field used his knowledge of the industry, close ties with Massachusetts papermakers (especially Crane & Company), and rising demand for paper to build an immensely successful business. Putting in exceptionally long hours and rarely delegating work, Field became the “uncontested dean” of New York paper merchants, amassing a net worth of almost $250,000 ($7.2 million in 2010 currency) by 1852. At this point, although it was not legally required, he paid off his company’s old debts at their face value plus 7 percent interest, turned business duties over to a junior partner, and took a lengthy trip to South America with noted landscape painter Frederick Church.

Mature Wealth

Semiretirement did not suit the energetic Field. In 1854, Field’s brother Matthew introduced him to Frederick Gisborne, whose Newfoundland Electric Telegraph Company owned rights to run a telegraph line to the easternmost point in North America. Gisborne was a fugitive from fraud charges because his company had run out of funds to pay its workers after making little progress stringing a telegraph line through the rugged Canadian region. Field seized on the idea of buying out the company and using it as a springboard to lay a cable across the Atlantic connecting Europe and North America from Newfoundland to Ireland. He contacted Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, to assess the project’s plausibility and Matthew Fontaine Maury, head of the U.S. Naval Observatory, who explained that the ocean floor in this region of the Atlantic was ideal for a cable. Next, Field turned to wealthy New York City residents for funding, convincing Peter Cooper, Moses Taylor, Marshall Roberts, Chandler White, and others of the plan’s merits.

Field then bought Gisborne’s company, negotiated a new charter with the Newfoundland government, and recommenced construction of the original line. As expenses mounted, he traveled to England to find additional investors. An attempt to lay the Atlantic cable in 1857 failed after the line snapped, sending half a million dollars worth of material to the ocean floor. Success in laying the cable in 1858 brought transatlantic jubilation, and Field was hailed as the Columbus of America. Unfortunately, sending signals through the cable proved difficult and it went completely dead within a month. Skeptics claimed the cable never actually delivered any messages and alleged that Field was engaged in a hoax enabling him to make a substantial profit while preventing the company’s charter from expiring. While these charges were rebutted, some historians maintain that Field’s claims of successfully sending news over the wire were fraudulent.

Although Field was determined to see the project’s successful completion, an official inquiry into the causes of the cable’s failure and the outbreak of the Civil War caused delays. As the war ended, Field obtained use of the Great Eastern, the world’s largest steamship, arranged new funding, and obtained a more advanced cable. Again, in 1865, the cable snapped in mid-ocean. Unbowed, Field arranged a fourth attempt in 1866 that succeeded, as did the recovery of the 1865 cable from the ocean floor. With two cables in operation and a monopoly on transatlantic service, the Anglo-American Telegraph Company began earning substantial profits.

Field remained busy for the next twenty years, investing in a range of businesses, including ownership of substantial telegraph holdings and a New York daily newspaper, the Mail and Express, and management of the Manhattan Railway, an elevated commuter line whose fortunes he turned around. His wealth reached about $6 million ($140 million in 2010 currency). He played a significant role in politics and may have inadvertently helped swing the 1884 presidential election when he arranged a gala dinner at Delmonico’s restaurant for the Republican candidate, James G. Blaine, and many of his wealthy supporters. The opposition press depicted Blaine as a friend of the privileged and Grover Cleveland eked out a win in New York and the electoral college.

Inexplicably, in 1887 Field began speculating in the stock market, touting the Manhattan Railway in his newspaper and borrowing money to buy company shares on a thin margin, as his purchases pushed its price up. When the price began to fall, he was overextended and lost virtually his entire fortune within a few days. The press portrayed the collapse as a vile plot by Field’s friend and associate Jay Gould, but a fairer reading shows that this was not the case. Field sank into illness and depression, abetted by a series of family losses and the collapse of his son’s brokerage firm amid evidence of substantial fraud.

Legacy

As Field’s assets evaporated, his primary legacy is the example of his relentless energy, vision, enthusiasm, and organizational talent in successfully laying the transatlantic cable. His name will forever be linked with that major breakthrough in long-distance communications.

Bibliography

Blondheim, Menahem. News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. This monograph does a superb job of putting the era’s telegraph and commercial news business in context and suggests that news transmissions over the first Atlantic cable were a hoax.

Carter, Samuel, III. Cyrus Field: Man of Two Worlds. New York: Putnam, 1968. This is the most comprehensive work on Field’s life and career. However, the book lacks documentation and the author is uncritical of Field.

Klein, Maury. The Life and Legend of Jay Gould. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. This work is very critical of the traditional account of Field’s demise.