Outposts of transformation

HEART’S CONTENT, Newfoundland and Labrador — Of all the landmarks of high tech, including the Menlo Park lab where Thomas Edison perfected a marketable incandescent light bulb, the Palo Alto garage where Hewlett-Packard’s audio oscillator was developed, the Harvard dormitory where Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook, none is as unlikely as the ragged shoreline of this remote fishing village, where 150 years ago the Old World and the New were connected by an underwater trans-Atlantic telegraph cable.

Here, in a tiny maritime outpost where women still hook scraps of old fabric into wall hangings,...