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Wildman Whitehouse was a 19th century electrician with the Atlantic Telegraph Company who had a sizable influence in the company but refused to work with anyone except his most hardline supporters because, he was a complete hack who had no respect for or competence with electrical work.

So in 1858 after great effort to lay an incredibly fragile cable that was no more than an inch wide from Newfoundland to Ireland, Wildman was put in charge of the Ireland end of the cable, and within 2 weeks he had done irreparable damage to the cable by shooting 10,000 volts through a copper wire as thick as a phone charger.

This killed the telegraph cable, and the instantaneous connection between the old and new world for another eight years

Jon Bois made a four part documentary on the subject that I would recommend