History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy

	History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications from the first submarine cable of 1850 to the worldwide fiber optic network
CS Cable Enterprise (2) by Bill Glover

CS CABLE ENTERPRISE (2)

Built in 1964 by Cammell Laird & Company, Birkenhead

Length 371 ft 4 in Breadth 49 ft 2in Depth 19 ft 1 in Gross tonnage 4058

Built for Cable & Wireless for cable maintenance. Based at Manila, Philippines for the maintenance of cables in the Indian Ocean and South East Asian waters. Fitted with diesel electric propulsion supplied by English Electric. Also fitted with a Voith-Schneider transverse propulsion unit and a bow rudder to improve manoeuvrability, as well as three cable tanks with a coiling capacity of 30,000 cubic feet.

Johnson & Phillips supplied all the cable machinery, which consisted of a forward paying out-picking up machine which could be used to pay out astern if required. Three 7.0 ft diameter bow sheaves and a stern chute were fitted. The ship could stay at sea for up to six weeks and had a range of 6000 miles. Transferred to Global Marine Systems Ltd in 1999. Withdrawn from service and scrapped in 2002.

CABLE WORK

1964	SEACOM shore ends Singapore - Hong Kong section
1982	ANZCAN route survey on Hawaii - Fiji section
1982	ANZCAN laid shore ends at Port Alberni, Fiji and Hawaii
1999	JIH Cleared over 1800 km of old cable over a period of 160 days prior to the laying of the Japan Information Highway network of cables.

CS Cable Enterprise (2) moored astern of Subsea Viking
in the Port of Victoria, BC, Canada

Last revised: 21 September, 2007

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Research Material Needed

The Atlantic Cable website is non-commercial, and its mission is to make available on line as much information as possible.

You can help - if you have cable material, old or new, please contact me. Cable samples, instruments, documents, brochures, souvenir books, photographs, family stories, all are valuable to researchers and historians.

If you have any cable-related items that you could photograph, copy, scan, loan, or sell, please email me: billb@ftldesign.com