One of the pleasures of researching last week’s column, which included a passing mention of the laying of the first transatlantic cable, was learning about Cyrus West Field, the American businessman who was the driving force behind the effort.

The son of a Massachusetts clergyman who’d graduated from Yale, and the grandson of a Revolutionary War officer, Field had certain advantages from the start, but rather than pursue a career in the church, in academia, or in the military, he decided to enter the world of business in 1834, at the tender age of 15.

He started as an errand boy in a dry goods emporium in New York City. After three years of steadily improving his situation in the employ of other men, Field decided to try his own hand at business. He bought a defunct paper mill, and within a few years, built it into a profitable concern.

He’d bought the mill in bankruptcy, but kept careful notes of the creditors who’d been forced to accept pennies on the dollar. When he started to make real money, he shocked his colleagues — and the business world — by going back to those creditors and paying them the full value of their debts, even though he was under no legal obligation to do so.

While some might consider this a terrible business move, in fact it helped cement his reputation as a man of impeccable honor whose values transcended the mere making of money.

Deeply influenced by his father’s Congregationalist philosophy, Field believed that business should be harnessed to the greater good. The runaway success of his paper supply and printing concerns allowed him to retire in his early 30s with a vast fortune.

Of course, a man of such tremendous energy and drive was unlikely to be idle for long. Field, along with a few of his wealthy neighbors in Gramercy Park, where he’d built a mansion for his growing family, decided to enter the exciting new field of telegraphy. Field was a charismatic dreamer, an enthusiast’s enthusiast. He created a “dream team” of mid-century business talent, including Peter Cooper, the man who built the first steam locomotive; Abram Stevens Hewitt, an innovator in the iron industry; Moses Taylor, a director of the City Bank of New York, which would ultimately become Citibank; and Samuel Morse, the inventor of the Morse code.

Their first order of business was to lay telegraph cable between St. John’s, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, so that ships arriving from Europe could send news as soon as they made shore, rather than wait two additional days to arrive on the mainland.

The group succeeded in the venture, and went on to consolidate a number of smaller operators into the American Telegraph Company, whose only rival in terms of size was the Western Union Company.

But this didn’t satisfy Field’s dual ambitions: to make profits and serve mankind. One evening, sitting by a globe in his study, he ran a finger across the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland and asked the fateful question: “Why don’t we just extend the cable from here to here?”

The laying of that first cable in 1858; its brief, brilliant success; and heart-breaking failure is one of the great stories of American entrepreneurship. Broke, but undaunted, Field kept at it, despite the intervening Civil War, the marring of his reputation, and the bewilderment of his family and friends.

Eight years later, with new financing, better engineering, and the backing of Washington and London, Field succeeded in establishing an instantaneous communications link between the New World and the Old that has lasted to this day.

In hindsight, it’s easy to take for granted Field’s perseverance, his drive, his ability to charm and cajole, and his tolerance for risk. All par for the course for a bright-eyed and bewhiskered 19th century titan of industry, right?

But Field’s vision was larger than mere business. He dreamed of an interconnected world where governments could defuse conflicts in real-time; markets could be harmonized; and information could flow more freely.

His colleagues Cooper and Hewitt were cut from similar cloth. They went on to found the Cooper Union, which delivered a top-notch college education in the arts and sciences to qualified applicants — without charging a penny for tuition.

These days, the vogue is to make one’s billions in the “jungle,” the amoral world of business, only to pour it back into the community in the form of philanthropy later in life. Bill Gates, George Soros, and David Koch come to mind.

This is the model of the so-called Robber Barons, the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, men who realized late in the game, after decades of ruthlessly destroying the competition, that there’s more to life than the bottom line — a lesson Cyrus Field seems to have learned at his father’s knee.

It’s a shame that “business ethics,” as it’s currently taught in American business schools, tends to focus on avoiding the worst behaviors, rather than aspiring to the best.

Mr. Field shows us that capitalism and philanthropy — in the same man, at the same time — needn’t be mutually exclusive.