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 Mercury by Bill Glover

CS MERCURY

CS Mercury repairing cable

Built 1962 by Cammell Laird & Company, Birkenhead

Length 473.0 ft Breadth 58.7 ft Depth 24.6 ft Gross tonnage 8962

Built for Cable & Wireless specifically to lay the COMPAC and SEACOM cables with HMTS Monarch (4). This was the first cable laying vessel owned by Cable & Wireless or its predecessors. Flagship of the fleet and main cable layer until replaced by Cable Venture. From then on based in the UK for the maintenance of Atlantic cables. Fitted with three tanks with a capacity of 100000 cubic feet or 1100 nm of lightweight cable. Three 10 foot diameter "V" bow sheaves were fitted initially, later replaced with two flat sheaves, and a stern chute was fitted to allow laying of repeaters. Seriously damaged after a fire in the engine room in 1996 while moored at Bristol. Scrapped in 1997.

CS Mercury taking on cable at the SCL premises
at Enderby's Wharf, Greenwich, London [1960s]

Above image courtesy of Cyril Malyon; scan by Jim Jones

CABLE WORK

1962	COMPAC
1964	SEACOM
1966	British Virgin Islands - Bermuda
1969	SAT 1 Portugal - Ascension - Cape Town See David Watson's story of cable repairs on SAT 1
1971	CANBER Nova Scotia - Bermuda Jamaica - Cayman Islands
1972	Italy - Algeria PENCAN 2 Spain - Gran Canaria
1973	CANTAT 2 Canada - UK BRACAN 1 Brazil - Gran Canaria See David Watson's story of cable loading and laying on CANTAT
1974	BARO Spain - Italy
1975	TASMAN Australia - New Zealand UK - Spain. See film of this cable lay below.
1976	Italy - Turkey
1977	OLUHO Luzon - Hong Kong ASEAN Singapore - Luzon
1978	COLUMBUS Venezuela - Spain Barcelona - Majorca
1982	ANZCAN Norfolk Island - New Zealand
1983	ANZCAN
1988	PTAT 1
1989-95	Various optical fibre cables worldwide
1992	TAT 11
1995	ECFS East Caribbean Fibre Optic System.

Model of CS Mercury at the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum
Photograph copyright © 2005 by David Howard

Mercury loading cable at Southampton Docks

8mm film shot by Marshall Waugh, 4th Engineer on CS Mercury, during the Auckland to Sydney lay of the 1975 TASMAN cable.

The film shows the shore end being laid in Auckland, with footage of the cable & repeaters being fed through the centrecastle & leaving the stern, and also the Bondi Beach shore end going in.

Last revised: 10 March, 2009

Return to Atlantic Cable main page

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

—Bill Burns, publisher and webmaster: Atlantic-Cable.com