The Commercial Pacific Cable Company lays the first Pacific telegraph cable, from San Francisco to Honolulu.
San Francisco (; Spanish for "Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th most populous in the United States, with 815,201 residents as of 2021. It covers a land area of 46.9 square miles (121 square kilometers), at the end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city after New York City, and the fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. Among the 331 U.S. cities proper with more than 100,000 residents, San Francisco was ranked first by per capita income (at $133,856) and fifth by aggregate income as of 2019. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include SF, San Fran, The City, Frisco, and Baghdad by the Bay.San Francisco and the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area are a global center of economic activity and the arts and sciences, spurred by leading universities, high-tech, healthcare, FIRE, and professional services sectors. As of 2020, the metropolitan area, with 6.7 million residents, ranked 5th by GDP ($874 billion) and 2nd by GDP per capita ($131,082) across the OECD countries, ahead of global cities like Paris, London, and Singapore. San Francisco anchors the 12th most populous metropolitan statistical area in the United States with 4.7 million residents, and the fourth-largest by economic output, with a GDP of $592 billion in 2019. The wider San JoseSan FranciscoOakland, CA Combined Statistical Area is the fifth most populous, with 9.6 million residents, and the third-largest by economic output, with a GDP of $0.5 trillion in 2020. Of the 105 primary statistical areas in the U.S. with over 500,000 residents, this CSA had the highest GDP per capita in 2019, at $112,910. In the same year, San Francisco proper had a GDP of $200.5 billion, and a GDP per capita of $228,118. San Francisco was ranked seventh in the world and third in the United States on the Global Financial Centres Index as of March 2022.As of June 2022, the Bay Area was home to four of the world's fifteen largest companies by market capitalization, and the city proper is headquarters to companies such as Wells Fargo, Salesforce, Uber, First Republic Bank, Airbnb, Twitter, Block, Levi's, Gap, Dropbox, PG&E, Lyft, and Cruise, although the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has accelerated the exodus of business from downtown San Francisco. The city is home to a number of educational and cultural institutions, such as the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the University of San Francisco (USF), San Francisco State University (SFSU), the de Young Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Ballet, the San Francisco Opera, the SFJAZZ Center, the California Academy of Sciences, the San Francisco Giants, and the Golden State Warriors. A popular tourist destination, San Francisco is known for its steep rolling hills and eclectic mix of architecture across varied neighborhoods, as well as its cool summers, fog, and landmarks, including the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, Alcatraz, and Chinatown and Mission districts.
San Francisco was founded on June 29, 1776, when colonists from Spain established the Presidio of San Francisco at the Golden Gate and Mission San Francisco de Ass a few miles away, both named for Francis of Assisi. The California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, transforming an unimportant hamlet into a busy port making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time; between 1870 and 1900, approximately one quarter of California's population resided in the city proper. In 1856, San Francisco became a consolidated city-county. After three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, it was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, it was a major port of embarkation for naval service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. It then became the birthplace of the United Nations in 1945. After the war, the confluence of returning servicemen, significant immigration, liberalizing attitudes, the rise of the "beatnik" and "hippie" countercultures, the sexual revolution, the peace movement growing from opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, and other factors led to the Summer of Love and the gay rights movement, cementing San Francisco as a center of liberal activism in the United States. More recently, statewide droughts in California have strained the city's water security.
Commercial Pacific Cable Company was founded in 1901, and ceased operations in October 1951. It provided the first direct telegraph route from America to the Philippines, China, and Japan.
The company was established as a joint venture of three companies: the Commercial Cable Company (25%), the Great Northern Telegraph Company (25%), and the Eastern Telegraph Company (50%). Though the Eastern (a British firm) was the majority shareholder, the CPCC was registered in the United States.
The company used cable ships to lay its undersea cable across the Pacific Ocean from America's west coast. The cables extended a length of 6,912 miles (11,124 km) and the project cost about $12 million. Before this, messages had to travel across the Atlantic to the Far East via Cape Town and the Indian Ocean, or via London to Russia, then across the Russian landline to Vladivostok, then by submarine cable to Japan and the Philippines.
The first section of cable was laid in 1902 by the cableship CS Silvertown from Ocean Beach, adjacent to the famous Cliff House in San Francisco to Honolulu. It began operating on January 1, 1903. Later that year, cables were laid from Honolulu to Midway Atoll, thence to Sumay, Guam, and thence to Manila. The cables carried the first message to ever travel around the globe from US President Theodore Roosevelt on July 4, 1903. He wished "a happy Independence Day to the US, its territories and properties..." It took nine minutes for the message to travel worldwide.
In 1906 Siemens AG made and laid the section from Guam to Bonin Islands in the Japanese archipelago. In the same year the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company manufactured and laid a cable between Manila and Shanghai using CS Silvertown and CS Store Nordiske.
In the First World War the trans-Pacific service slowed significantly from repeated faults and the general increase in war-related traffic. Despite repeated requests by United States businesses and the Federal government, the company would not invest in improvements to increase traffic volume or speed. After the war conditions eased, but demand continued to be high and the company made repeated promises to invest in a second cable, but never did so. When the US entered the Second World War, the cable connection from Midway to the Philippines closed quickly after 7 December 1941, and did not reopen until the war was over.
By 1946 the cables were developing serious faults. Over a million dollars was spent on repairs, but the company was unable to maintain a viable service and stopped operating in 1951. It merged with American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T).