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After repeated failures and a fortune lost on the floor of the ocean, Cyrus Field pulled off the impossible, laying a working telegraph cable across the Atlantic. Suddenly, Queen Victoria and President Buchanan could trade greetings in mere minutes instead of prolonged weeks of no news. Naturally, Field became an instant national hero… but three weeks later, the cable went cold.
The backlash was brutal. The same newspapers that had cheered him began trading in ideas that Field’s entire operation had been a swindle from the start… a scheme to pump a worthless stock and dump it on a gullible public.
A few even insisted the messages had been faked. So, what am I getting at here? It’s simple: Field had run headlong into what I call “the reality wall.”
SpaceX’s Reality Wall
