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 John W. Mackay by Bill Glover

CS JOHN W. MACKAY

Built 1922 by Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson Ltd.

Length 361.8 ft. Breadth 48.1 ft. Depth 25.4 ft. Gross tonnage 4064

Built for the Commercial Cable Company both for repairs and cable laying. Underwent an extensive refit in 1965 to enable the vessel to lay co-axial cables. Laid up in 1977 after 55 years service. In 1990 moved to a dry dock at Hebburn on Tyne for possible preservation but sold in 1994 for scrap to Turkish shipbreakers.

Cable work:

1924	Waterville, Ireland - Weston Super Mare, England
1929	One of seven vessels repairing Atlantic cables after subterranean earthquake.
1939-42	Based at Halifax, Nova Scotia on Atlantic maintenance duties.
1942	Requisitioned by the Admiralty for work in the Persian Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean. First recovered 450 nm of Italian cable off the Cape Verde Islands to enable cable laying to be carried out.
1944	Laying cables in the Pacific for the US Navy.
1950	Newfoundland - Greenland "Hotline"
1959	TAT 2 with HMTS Monarch (4)
1962	SCOTICECAN
1965	PENCAN 1 Cadiz, Spain - Santa Cruz de Tenerife
1966-7	Grand Turk - Bahamas
1969	SAT 1 shore ends Sicily - Libya Germany - Sweden
1970	MAT 1
1971	Gran Canaria - Fuerteventura - Lanzarote Barcelona - Majorca Scotland - Faroes
1972	PENBAL Sesimbra, Portugal - Madeira
1973	St. Thomas - St. Maarten - Curacao
1975	Australia - Papua New Guinea

Last revised: 23 October, 2011

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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.

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