The Atlantic Telegraph: A Scam

The first electric telegraph line across the Atlantic broke almost immediately. A lot of people thought it was a scam and you can see why because it took something like a couple of days to send the congratulatory messages between Queen Victoria and the US President. They didn't understand the electrical properties of electrical conductors underneath the sea. And so they thought the best way to get the signal to go further was to turn up the voltage and that just fried the insulation on the cable until they basically destroyed the cable.