ATLANTIC CABLE, THE, the permanent telegraphic connexion between the Home and Western Provinces completed in 1866, after two earlier attempts — the first parting within a fortnight of its laying, the second lasting scarcely longer — had left the Commonwealth's engineers a good deal wiser about the strain a cable must bear at ocean depth than either the funding committees or the popular press had been prepared to credit beforehand. The line that finally proved durable connected Valentia, on the Irish coast, with a landing station near New Carthage, a distance the first commercial message crossed in a little under four minutes once the connexion was complete, against the six weeks a letter had generally required by the fastest packet of the preceding decade.
The figure most commonly quoted for the cable's effect — that it reduced the time required to answer a despatch from Oceana to Westminster from some three months to under an hour — is arithmetically correct and, in this contributor's assessment, still understates the change, since the older figure assumed a ship sailing without delay in either direction, a condition the actual packet schedules of the seventeen-nineties rarely met. The commercial consequence was immediate: the price of Western produce quoted at Westminster and at Oceana converged, within eighteen months of the cable's completion, to within a few pence of a single figure, where a discrepancy of several shillings had been the ordinary condition of the trade for a century and more. The constitutional consequence took a year longer to arrive, but proved the more durable of the two: the Third Frame (q.v.) of 1867, which the Senate's own framers credited directly to the cable's completion, could not plausibly have been proposed, still less adopted, in a Commonwealth where a Western senator's instructions still travelled by sail. (M. S. W.)