Earth's space environment often offers surprises upon the introduction of new technologies. The history of some space weather impacts on communications demonstrates this vividly. Such history was on my mind during a recent trip to Newfoundland, Canada. Nestled in an eastern inlet, the small fishing village of Heart's Content marks the landing site of the first transatlantic telegraph cable, in 1866, laid by the famous ship Great Eastern with the financial backing of Cyrus Field. The building and laying of this cable is an engineering saga in its own right; subsequent Europe-to-North America telegraph cables in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also had Newfoundland coastal ports as their termini. Geomagnetic storm–produced ground currents that flowed through this and other telegraph cables seriously affected transmission and reception of signals.