Today in 1866, the Atlantic Cable was successfully completed. The first working cable, completed in 1858, failed within a few weeks. Before it did, however, it prompted the biggest parade New York had ever seen and accolades that described the cable, as one newspaper said, as “next only in importance to the ‘Crucifixion.'”  Steven Lubar in InfoCulture: “For merchants fresh news meant the difference between profit and loss… Information was the key, and more and fresher information was better. These merchants lived in an Information Age. Their hopes and fears and expectations and beliefs about the new information technology were, in some ways, not too far removed from ours.”