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History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications
from the first submarine cable of 1850 to the worldwide fiber optic network

Cable Stories

One of the rewards of running the Atlantic Cable website is the contact it provides with present and former cable industry staff. As a result of answering inquiries about cableships and cable companies, I've been privileged to hear stories and see photographs showing the recent and not-so-recent history of the cable industry. This page presents some of these stories for the first time, together with reprints of historical articles about cable workers.

If you have any cable-related material you'd like to share (photographs, family histories, artifacts or souvenirs of any kind), please feel free to email me.

-- Bill Burns
1850-64 Frederick C. Webb: Old Cable Stories Retold
1858 Thomas Worrall and the Atlantic cable
1858 Richard Williamson and the 1858 Atlantic Cable
1867 Philip Crookes and the 1867 Florida - Cuba Cable
1870-74 James Nicol - Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Company
1873 Benjamin Powell Wilkins - CS Robert Lowe
1875-1897 John Seymour - CS's Hibernia, Kangaroo, Edinburgh, Scotia, Medina, Britannia, Seine (2)
1879-1900 Henry Ash - CS Faraday (1)
1883 George West - cable repairs off the coast of Peru
1886 James Graves - Superintendent, Valentia Cable Station
1889-1911 Alf Newsome - CS Silvertown, Dacia, Mexican, Electra
1890 Charles Henry Baker - Central & South American Telegraph Company, Barranco, Peru
1892 Captain Basil C. Combe - CS Silvertown, CS Omba, CS Dacia
1894 Charles W. Banks - fire on CS Minia
1897 John Brown and CS Contre Amiral Caubet
1900-13 James Joseph Cope - Siemens Brothers and CS Faraday (2)
1902 Captain Christian Christenson - CS Ydun and the 1902 Mexico cable
1912-2? Charles Skilliter - CS Faraday and HTMS Monarch (3)
1914 Walter Claypoole - Far Rockaway and Canso stations of the Commercial Cable Company
1915-16 Alfred Lawrence Spalding and CS Levant II - cable laying during the Gallipoli Campaign
1924 John S. Whaley - All America Cables, Santa Elena Station, Ecuador
1925-85 Wallie Graves & Marshall Killen in An operator’s view of the early days of the Italian trans-Atlantic telegraph cable
by Donard de Cogan
1926-35 James Alan Bambrough - CS Dominia & CS Telconia
1929-31 Leonard Francis Ellis - CS Dominia & CS Faraday (2)
192?-45 Lionel Voss - CS Faraday (2), HMTS Alert (2)
193?-41 Hugh McDonald Campbell - CS Faraday (2)
1936 Captain Frederick Hack - CS All America
1940-49 Ken Smith, Cable Jointer- Life on board cable ships during the war and after
1941 James Dooley's Violin
1942 George S. Watson - Remembrances of a Cable Operator
1944-45 Cal Sheckler - Cable Station RM - Cal's account of diverting the 1926 Azores-Emden German cable into Normandy for use by the Allied Forces after D-Day
1945-51 S.F. (Rudy) Rudolph - Cablehead RM - Rudy arrived at the station just as Cal Sheckler was leaving, and continues the story of the operation immediately after the end of the war
1944-45 Frank Foord - Protecting CS Lord Kelvin - includes details of the French Cable Wharf at Halifax, Nova Scotia
1944-47 Eric Tate and the Admiralty Cable Ships
1948-53 Peter Edwards - CS Recorder (2) and CS Edward Wilshaw
1940s-50s Bernard Perrault & Jean Auger - Western Union cables at Le Havre, France
1950s Ron Woodland Sr. - HMTS Ariel
1950s Mike Bonds - CS Mirror, Cable & Wireless
1950s Jim Coulson - HMTS Iris 2), Alert (2), Monarch, Ocean Layer
1950s P.T. Joergensen - Great Northern Telegraph Company
1952-59 Harry Parker - CS Monarch (4)
1953- Dave Smith - Memoirs of a Cable Engineer
Part 1: Western Union
1954 Barry Waterhouse - CS Recorder (3)
1957 Brendan Keane - CS Ocean Layer
1958-89 Telcon - Jim Jones & Ron Fox - Cable Work at the Telegraph Construction & Maintenance Company (Telcon) and Standard Telephones & Cables (STC)
1959 Ken Guy - CS Ocean Layer
1960s Gustavo Coll - River Plate cable repairs
1962 Jack Jenkins - CS Mercury
1967- David Watson - Memoirs of an STC Project Engineer
Part 1: SAT 1 (1967)
Part 2 - Sicily - Libya (1968)
Part 3 - Germany - Sweden (1969)
Part 4 - CANTAT 2 (1973)
Part 5 - ANZCAN (1982)
1967-73 George Smith - CS Alert (4)
1968 David Howard - Losing a Buoy on CS Retriever
1968- Leo Parrish - CS Long Lines
1978 Jose Manuel Gil - CS Mercury
1981 Karl Howard - drafting the cable route for ANZCAN

Last revised: 17 January, 2012

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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

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