有恒心才能走向成功 The Reward of Persistence
奧裏森·馬登/Orison Marden
Cyrus W. Field had retired from business with a large fortune when he became possessed with the idea that by means of a cable laid upon the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, telegraphic communication could be established between Europe and America. He plunged into the undertaking with all the force of his being. The preliminary work included the construction of a telegraph line one thousand miles long, from New York to St. John's, Newfoundland. Through four hundred miles of almost unbroken forest they had to build a road as well as a telegraph line across Newfoundland. Another stretch of one hundred and forty miles across the island of Cape Breton involved a great deal of labor, as did the laying of a cable across the St. Lawrence.
By hard work he secured aid for his company from the British government, but in Congress he encountered such bitter opposition from a powerful lobby that his measure only had a majority of one in the Senate.
On the second trial, when two hundred miles at sea, the electric current was suddenly lost, and men paced the decks nervously and sadly, as if in the presence of death. Just as Mr. Field was about to give the order to cut the cable, the current returned as quickly and mysteriously as it had disappeared.
The following night, when the ship was moving but four miles an hour and the cable running out at the rate of six miles, the brakes were applied too suddenly just as the steamer gave a heavy lurch, breaking the cable.
Field was not the man to give up. Seven hundred miles more of cables were ordered, and a man of great skill was set to work to devise a better machine for paying out the long line. Before the vessels were three miles apart, the cable, parted. Again it was spliced, but when the ships were eighty miles apart, the current was lost. A third time the cable was spliced and about two hundred miles paid out, when it parted some twenty feet from the Agamemnon, and the vessels returned to the coast of Ireland.