All trials to lift up the cable failed so a new attempt was made from the Great Eastern in March 1866. It took five months - then the first message was transmitted across the Atlantic.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN ...

1866 - The first fully functional telephone cable laid across the Atlantic. Queen Victoria and the UK President exchange messages using the cable.

1943 - Alan Turing builds Colossus, the world’s earliest computer used to decipher German messages during the second world war.

1945 - Vannevar Bush first Director of the National Science Foundation introduces the memex. The micro-film based memex enabled the user to link together related pieces of information for rapid retrieval ... the first web concept.

1948 - Mathematician Claude Shannon published A Mathematical Theory of Communication enabling the calculation of the information-carrying capacity of any channel and introducing the word ‘bit’ to describe a piece of binary information, which underpins all information and modern communications (internet) system theories.

1958 - After the launch of Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, creates the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to develop space and military programs which included the creation of a new global computer and
communications system.

1961 - Researcher, Leonard Kleinrock publishes a paper on packet-switching theory, and ARPA scientists consider communication links in terms of passing active packages of information around rather than routing them through fixed circuits.

1962 - Computer scientist, Paul Baran, studying the survivability of communications under nuclear attack, describes a distributed computer network for the first time. This, a network built in a number of nodes, was revolutionary in its use of messages split into blocks, each taking a different path to its destination - in essence a packet-based network as considered by Kleinrock.

1965 - Ted Nelson coins the term ‘hypertext’ - text that can be read in a non-linear fashion - by following a series of links between related sections of material. By far the biggest hypertext application is the world wide web.

1967 - ARPA computer scientist, Roberts designs a fast,
decentralised network built on dial-up telephone lines.                      The Arpanet Age