View of Heart’s Content, Newfoundland - Philatelic Photographs on Waymarking.com

It takes a lovely place to make a lovely stamp and with a name like Heart’s Content what could better fit the bill? But there are lots of small picturesque fishing villages in Newfoundland, so what makes Heart’s Content special? The answer lies in the small print on the stamp: It was the site where the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable was landed in 1866.

In 1958 the United States issued a stamp commemorating the centenary of the first successful transatlantic cable in 1858. Wait a minute! That’s eight years earlier than the date on the Newfoundland stamp. Which one is correct? Well, I guess that depends on the meaning of the word “successful.”

In 1858, after several failed attempts, a cable was successfully laid between Valentia Island in Ireland and Trinity Bay in Newfoundland. (Trinity Bay was chosen because it practically aims at Ireland and its relatively soft muddy beaches allowed the cable to be landed without the risk of damage caused by rocks.) On August 16, 1858, Queen Victoria of England and President James Buchanan of the United States exchanged pleasantries over the new cable to great fanfare. I suppose you could call this successful but the messages took over 17 hours to be transmitted. This was partially due to President Buchanan’s verbosity but mainly due to poor cable construction and inefficient technology. This was still a big improvement over mailing a letter by ship, but within a month this cable went dead and was abandoned.

By 1866, improvements in cable manufacturing techniques and advancements in telegraphic technology led to another attempt at laying a transatlantic cable. This one proved to be 80 times faster than the 1858 cable and functioned properly until superseded by even better ones.

The 1866 cable was landed in the town of Heart’s Content, hence the image on the stamp. The 1858 cable was landed much further west in Bull Arm near the present-day village of Sunnyside. Overland telegraph cables were harder to maintain than submerged ones due to exposure to the elements. By landing the cable there, the overland portion only needed to be about five miles long in order to connect it to the existing telegraph network. By 1866, this was not as big a concern and the sheltered harbor of Heart’s Content offered a more attractive alternative.

Several additional transatlantic cables were to follow the successful 1866 one which made Heart’s Content a hub of international telecommunications for the remainder of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Eventually, trans-ocean telephone networks and satellite communications rendered telegraphy obsolete and the operation at Heart’s Content was shut down in 1965. Today, the building that once housed the cable station has been converted into a museum that interprets its role through almost a century of telecommunication history.

Stamp Issuing Country: Newfoundland Date of Issue: 3-Jan-1928 Denomination: 8 cents Color: light red brown Stamp Type: Single Stamp Relevant Web Site: Not listed

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Date Logged Log User Rating   06/09/2018 Treknschmidt visited it