IMAGINE, if you can, a time when North America was a backwater, when an answer to even the most urgent message across the Atlantic took three or four weeks to arrive. This was the case even as late as 1865, the year Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

News of the president's death travelled by land telegraph from the United States to Newfoundland, and then by fast steamship to Ireland, from where it was telegraphed to London. Even so, 12 days had passed by the time it hit the London papers. Startling as the report was, it felt like old news.

A cable had been laid across the English Channel in 1851. It put Britain in close touch with all the capitals of Europe. News of politics, war, commerce, royal gossip, passed freely. It made the name of Julius Reuter, first to spot the potential of this new medium. It is no surprise that the impetus to lay an Atlantic telegraph came from North America. The Americans saw they were being left behind in this new world of instant information.

The driving force in laying the cable was a New York paper manufacturer called Cyrus Field, who had made a fortune, lost it, and made another, before retiring at the age of 34. Retirement didn't suit him. He was already bored when, in 1854, he stumbled on the stalled Atlantic cable project. 'Impossible' was not a word in Field's vocabulary, and he dedicated the next 12 years to keeping hope alive. He soldiered on through failed attempts in 1857, 1858, and 1865, triumphing at last in 1866. In the middle of this fell the US Civil War, when Field acted as an informal ambassador in London for the northern states, fighting to keep Britain from joining the war on the side of the Confederacy.

Field's motive was more than a desire to make money - although he risked his personal wealth on the Atlantic telegraph, and it was eventually a huge money-spinner, much more than anyone had foreseen. He was driven by a love of England, the country of his ancestors - who had emigrated in the 17th century from Wakefield - and saw the cable as a means of bringing together the Old and New worlds. The telegraph would be an instrument of peace and understanding. And of course, it promised to be a wonderful tool of business and news, and put the United States on the world stage.

When Field started out on his transatlantic dream, a telegraph on such a scale was an idea way ahead of its time. There were many difficulties. The channel cable was 25 miles long, and had been laid by a fishing boat in a few hours. But the shortest route between North America and Europe was 2,000 miles, at depths of up to two miles. In the 1850s, there was no ship in the world able to take the whole length of cable - it weighed a ton a mile. The first cable had to be subcontracted to two manufacturers, as no one had the capacity to make all of it. And much of the sea bed was uncharted territory.

The first cable cost more than £300,000, a colossal amount of money in the 1850s. The later ones were more still. At first, there was little trouble raising the money from enthusiastic investors, even though the engineers involved were not entirely confident that an electrical signal could travel the full distance. It was impossible to test this in a laboratory. The only way to know was to try it out. Much to the engineers' relief, the 1858 cable worked for a month, long enough to verify that signals could indeed pass across the ocean.

After that, as the scientists grew more confident, ironically it became more difficult to raise money to try again. Some of the biggest supporters had been wiped out by the first two failures, small investors were put off by rumours that the whole thing was a gigantic fraud to fleece the public, and governments refused to offer funds. Field became a close friend of WE Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, but still no public cash was forthcoming.

It was only after some manoeuvrings in the world of high finance, involving limited companies - then a very new thing - and deferred payments, that the scheme was revived in 1865. By then, the electricians - as electrical engineers were then called - had improved their skills on long and deep cables in the Mediterranean. And the 1865 expedition enjoyed another boost, for at last there was a steamship which could take the whole cable and withstand the Atlantic storms which had almost brought disaster to the smaller naval vessels on the 1858 voyage.

The ship was Brunel's mighty Great Eastern, which like the Atlantic cable, was ahead of its time. Many believe that the ship killed her creator - he died in 1859, before she was completed. Like much of Brunel's work, the Great Eastern was an economic disaster. But as a cable-layer, she found her vocation.

Even so, the 1865 expedition failed. Six hundred miles from Newfoundland, and only two days' sailing from shallow coastal waters, the cable broke and bad weather stopped efforts to retrieve it. The following year a new line was laid, and the 1865 line was picked up and completed, so that two cables connected the continents.

From then on, there was unbroken communication between Europe and the United States. Whether Field was right in thinking that better communication leads to better understanding is a matter for debate. Certainly it brought the United States to the centre of world events.

At first the telegraph was so expensive to use - a guinea for a few words - that it was the preserve of businessmen, in search of the latest prices from the markets of America and Europe. But Reuter, too, made good use of it, and the newspapers were soon filled with very recent news from across the ocean. This is how the cable had its widest impact, on the newspaper reading public of America, Europe and, of course, the North-East of England. One of the reasons The Northern Echo was established in 1869, just three years after the cable had been laid, was that news was suddenly available from all over the world.

l The Cable: The Wire That Changed The World, by Gillian Cookson, published in hardback by Tempus at £12.99.

* Ottakar's bookshop in Darlington is hosting An Evening of History on November 12 at 7pm. Dr Cookson, author of The Townscape of Darlington, will be talking about The Cable, and local historian George Flynn will be talking about Darlington's history. All welcome. Further details on (01325) 465666.