Celebrating the sending of the first telegram across the Atlantic from Valentia to Newfoundland.
Events on Valentia Island off the Kerry coast mark 150 years since the first cable message was sent across the Atlantic between Europe and America.
The first ever public telegram was sent via an underwater cable stretching from the island all the way to Newfoundland.
Siobhán Ní Dhonnchu of the Transatlantic Cable 150th Anniversary Committee says that when the event took place on 16 August 1858, there was a four mile parade down Broadway to celebrate an amazing engineering feat. There was a hundred gun salute on Boston Common and newspapers predicted the end of all wars.
The message sent in 1858 was 99 words long and took 16 hours to send through the underground cable which had been laid by two ships around two miles down on the seabed earlier that year. John Power, Engineers Ireland, describes it as, a fantastic feat of engineering.
Marking the anniversary of the great engineering feat, An Post has issued a special commemorative stamp featuring the two ships responsible for laying the cables. Former Kerry footballer Mick O'Connell has fond memories of his time working at the cable station on Valentia.
Today messaging is instantaneous and it all began here on a small little island on the southwest coast of Ireland.
An RTÉ News report broadcast on 17 August 2008. The reporter is Jennie O'Sullivan.
