Mr. Field listened attentively to his visitor, but declined to commit himself to more than an expression of sympathy with the enterprise.  After the departure of his guest, he took the globe which stood in his library, and turning it over, began to examine the proposed route of the telegraph line and the distance to be traversed by the steamers.  While engaged in this examination, the idea flashed across his mind that instead of undertaking such a complicated scheme, it would be better to attempt to stretch a telegraph wire entirely across the ocean, from the shores of Newfoundland to the coast of Ireland.  The vastness of this scheme pleased him, and its usefulness to the entire world, if it could be carried out, was clear to his mind from the first.

He at once set to work to ascertain if such an undertaking as an Atlantic telegraph was practicable.  He wrote to Lieutenant Maury, then the Chief of the National Observatory at Washington, and asked if the laying of such a wire was possible; and to Professor Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, to know if such a wire would be available for sending messages if it could be laid.  Lieutenant Maury promptly replied, inclosing a copy of a report he had just made to the Secretary of the Navy on the subject, from which Mr. Field learned that the idea of laying a telegraph across the ocean was not original with himself.  In this report Lieutenant Maury demonstrated the entire practicability of such an enterprise, and sustained his conclusions by a statement of the recent discoveries concerning the bed of the ocean, made by Lieutenant Berryman.  Professor Morse came in person to visit Mr. Field, and assured him of his entire faith in the possibility of sending telegraphic messages across the ocean with rapidity and success.

The two highest authorities in the world thus having assured him of the entire practicability of the undertaking, Mr. Field declared his readiness, if he could procure the assistance of a sufficient number of capitalists in the United States, to undertake the laying of a telegraph across the Atlantic between Europe and America.  Further deliberation only made him better satisfied with the undertaking, and he set to work to find ten capitalists, each of whom he proposed should contribute one hundred thousand dollars, making the capital of the proposed company one million of dollars.  Mr. Field was convinced that the undertaking would be expensive, but he had then but a faint conception of its magnitude, and was very far from supposing that “he might yet be drawn on to stake upon its success the whole fortune he had accumulated; that he was to sacrifice for it all the peace and quiet he had hoped to enjoy, and that for twelve years he was to be almost without a home, crossing and recrossing the sea, urging his enterprise in Europe and America.”