Foilhummerum Bay, near Valentia, Ireland, 1866.

Lithograph after Robert Dudley from 'The Atlantic Telegraph', a book by W H Rusell with 26 illustrations by Dudley, published in 1866. It was from this coastal site that the first attempts to lay a transatlantic telegraph cable were made, first with the 'Agamemnon' in 1858 and later with Brunel's 'Great Eastern' in 1865 and 1866. Cables were laid from Valentia to Trinity Bay in Newfoundland, Canada. The third attempt, in 1866, succesfully established the first permanent telegraph cable acros the Atlantic. The use of undersea cables to relay telegraph mesages reduced communication times from the length of a sea voyage to a few seconds.