In 1866, William Howard Russell (1820 1907) published this work, the official account of the July 1865 expedition on board the Great Eastern to lay a cable along the Atlantic Ocean floor between Valentia, Ireland, and Foilhummerum Bay in Newfoundland. It is illustrated with 26 lithographs of watercolours by Robert Dudley, who also travelled with the expedition. The cable, constructed by the Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Company, was designed to create a communications bridge between North America and Europe, enabling telegrams to be sent and received within minutes, when previously...

William Howard Russell (1820 1907) was a nineteenth-century war correspondent for The Times. In 1861 2 he visited America to report on the secession crisis that had followed Abraham Lincoln's campaign to abolish slavery, in which eleven southern states had withdrawn from the United States to form their own confederacy, resulting in the American Civil War. First published in 1863, this two-volume work recounts Russell's experiences there. Based on his interviews with Lincoln, other pivotal figures, and ordinary citizens, together with his diaries and his letters to The Times, it documents his...

The journalist William Howard Russell (1820 1907) is sometimes regarded as being the first war correspondent, and his reports from the conflict in the Crimea are also credited with being a cause of reforms in the British military system. This account of his time there, first published in 1858 and expanded in this 1895 edition, explains how Russell was sent by The Times of London in 1854 to join British troops stationed in Malta. He spent the next two years witnessing some of the key moments of the war, including the battle of Balaclava and the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade. His...