July 27: The cable in the deep
On July 27, 1866, the first permanent transatlantic telegraph cable was completed. Tonight's film: Sphere (1998).
Picture that morning, July 27, 1866. You are standing on the shore of Heart’s Content, a tiny fishing village in Newfoundland. The fog slowly lifts, and out on the water appears the Great Eastern, at the time the largest steamship in the world. Two weeks earlier, on July 13, she had sailed from Valentia Island in Ireland under Captain James Anderson. Now she is rolling the cable ashore, and the locals just watch. On the ocean floor, thousands of meters down, a copper wire now runs end to end, linking the Old World and the New. A message that took ten days by ship now crosses in minutes.
What people rarely mention is that this was already the fifth try. The two continents had been connected before, in 1858. Queen Victoria cabled President James Buchanan, and New York threw a parade down Broadway. Three weeks later the cable died, because someone pushed too much voltage through it. Ruined investors, lost millions, years of bitter failure. Then, in 1866, on the fifth attempt, it finally held. For good.
For me the real point is the location. The whole thing was built on the ocean floor. In the dark, in the cold, under kilometers of water, where no light reaches and nobody can see a thing. Exactly where tonight’s film begins.
Sphere opens in 1998 on the bottom of the Pacific. An American naval team finds a spacecraft in the deep, which by its entry dates has been lying there for nearly 300 years. They send down a team of experts to an underwater habitat: the psychologist Norman Goodman, played by Dustin Hoffman, the marine biologist Beth Halperin (Sharon Stone), the mathematician Harry Adams (Samuel L. Jackson), and the astrophysicist Ted Fielding (Liev Schreiber). Inside the ship they do not find aliens. They find something else entirely, a perfect sphere that reflects the room around it, except for them.
Barry Levinson directed, from Michael Crichton’s novel. And let us be honest. The critics did not like it. Against a budget of 73 to 80 million dollars it returned 73.4 million worldwide, which for another film would be weak, and for this loan is a straight flop. Rotten Tomatoes was not kind either, mostly blaming the script for putting A-list actors to work with B-grade material.
But I, honestly, love exactly the thing most people call its flaw. The film does not hand you easy answers. The sphere never explains itself. The whole story turns on what each person drags out of their own head, out of their own nightmares, and how it takes shape in the dark, far from the surface. An engineering-perfect spacecraft, and inside it one thing we cannot understand. That tension holds me every single viewing.
And that is where the cable and the sphere meet. Both are about the deep. One is the triumph of human stubbornness and engineering over the unknown: in 1866 somebody forced their will onto the ocean floor. The other is a warning that the deepest dark may not be underwater at all, but inside us. Same setting, two completely different stories.
These are the little parallels I went looking for when I started this whole thing. Something that pulls my attention away from the daily news, and that gives me a reason to sit down tonight. It does not have to be a perfect film every time. It is enough if there is one idea in it that stays in your head after you switch off the TV.
Tonight, press play.
What else could have been tonight
Around July 27, 1921, Frederick Banting and Charles Best were working on the roof of the physiology institute at the University of Toronto, in a makeshift lab, experimenting on dogs. Under J.J.R. Macleod’s supervision, ever since their first experiment on May 17, they had been trying to isolate the pancreas’s internal secretion, the one that regulates blood sugar. Insulin was born shortly after. It sounds ordinary now, but it was a revolution then. I pair it with Re-Animator (1985), Stuart Gordon’s film, based on an H.P. Lovecraft story. Herbert West, played by Jeffrey Combs, uses biochemical fluids to bring the dead back to life. Insulin saves life, the film’s reagent pushes past it, and asks where the line between healing and the living dead actually runs. Blood, black humor, the 1980s, and one question that still hangs in the air.
On the same day in 1953, at 10 in the morning, in a room built specially for the purpose at Panmunjom, the Korean War armistice was signed. Lieutenant General William K. Harrison signed for the United Nations Command, Nam Il for the North Korean side. Three years of fighting, by most estimates three million dead, suddenly went quiet. I pair it with The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008). Klaatu, played by Keanu Reeves, arrives on Earth with a single message: you must choose between peaceful coexistence and annihilation, a threat hanging over a species that is all too willing to fight. The film is a remake of the 1951 classic, and although the reviews were mixed, the core idea lands hard in a world that has just crawled out of a war.
Sources
Main event, the transatlantic cable (1866):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable (the Great Eastern, July 13 departure, July 27 completion, the earlier 1858 attempt and Queen Victoria’s telegram to President Buchanan)
https://ethw.org/Milestones:Landing_of_the_Transatlantic_Cable,_1866 (Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, the durable connection of July 1866)
Main film, Sphere (1998):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) (spacecraft found on the Pacific floor, the sphere in the cargo bay, Levinson directing, Crichton novel)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120184/ (budget $80 million, US gross about $37 million)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sphere (critical reception, A-list cast with B-grade material)
Side events:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666970621000494 (Banting and Best, Toronto, under Macleod’s direction, 1921)
https://fisherdigitus.library.utoronto.ca/exhibits/show/insulin100/summerof1921 (first dog experiment, May 17, 1921)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089885/ (Re-Animator, 1985)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Armistice_Agreement (July 27, 1953, Panmunjom, signed by Harrison and Nam Il)
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2003/summer/korean-war-armistice (10 a.m., special room at Panmunjom)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0970416/ (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2008)