August 5 in Victorian History
What the Victorians were up to on this date, year by remarkable year.
1858
The first transatlantic telegraph cable
After two failed attempts, the cable-laying ships join their wire mid-Atlantic: for the first time, Europe and North America are linked by telegraph. Queen Victoria's 98-word message to President Buchanan takes sixteen hours to transmit. The cable fails within weeks, but the proof is made — a permanent cable follows in 1866, and the world is never out of touch again.