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
Cable Work at Greenwich: Telcon, STC, & Alcatel Ron Fox

Ron Fox
April 2008

Introduction: These pages present personal aspects of cable-making at Greenwich, by some of the craftsmen who worked there.

Ron Fox, now retired, was a marine engineer at Telcon/STC, having started with the company in 1945. He worked on many cable ship projects.

Ron shares these photographs of the Telcon workshop and CS Iris.

--Bill Burns

Click on each photo for a larger view.
Engineering workship at STC, Greenwich: "Hover Hoist". Cable running gear in for testing before installation aboard ship. (Left) Marine and cable gear engineer Gary Waterman (Right) Alan Webb, assistant workshop engineer to Ron Fox and Gary Waterman. The hoist is run on air, the hovercraft principle, because of the heavy equipment. It spreads the weight out and does no damage to the workshop floor surface.
Following photographs all CS Iris

When Jim Jones introduced me to Ron Fox in April 2008, Ron very kindly presented me with this cable sample, which he said he’d been using as a doorstop. As yet unidentified, the 2.25" (5.7 cm) diameter cable has a seven-strand copper conductor with polythene insulation, and is probably a Telcon cable from the 1930s or 40s.

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Last revised: 26 May, 2008

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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