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

1957 HAW-1 Cable
(Point Arena, California - Hanauma Bay, Oahu, Hawaii)

Manufactured by Submarine Cables Ltd. (2030 nm) and Simplex Wire & Cable Co. (2380 nm), the 1957 telephone cable from California to Hawaii was commissioned by AT&T and the Hawaiian Telephone Co., and was laid by CS Monarch (4) and CS Ocean Layer.

Monarch commenced laying the cable from Point Arena (San Francisco) on 11 July 1957, and after laying 1900 miles met in mid-ocean with Ocean Layer, which put down the remaining 665 miles of cable into Hanauma Bay on Oahu. The first message through the cable was sent on 3 August 1957, and the ships then laid the eastbound cable, completing the installation in the Autumn of 1957.

The same type of cable had been used the previous year for TAT-1 (the first transatlantic telephone cable), and also for the 1956 USA to Alaska telephone cable. As the repeaters worked in only one direction, two cables were needed for each route. The cable provided the first direct operator dialing between Hawaii and the mainland, and remained in service until 1989.

The portion of the cable supplied by Submarine Cables Ltd. was made at the company's factory on the River Thames in London, England. Jim Jones provided the following photos and information from material published locally at the time.

CALIFORNIA - HAWAII SUBMARINE TELEPHONE CABLE

Nearly half of the first submarine telephone cable link between California and Hawaii was produced by Submarine Cables Limited at its Erith factory for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

The route distance between the two landing points, namely, Point Arena, north of San Francisco, and. the Island of Oahu in the Hawaiian group, is approximately 2,400 nautical miles and there will be two cables, one for each direction of transmission. The final splice was made in the first of these cables on August 2 and the laying of the second cable is scheduled to be completed by the middle of September. Underwater repeaters or speech amplifiers are spliced into the cables at intervals of 38 nautical miles.

The 2,030 nautical miles of cable, costing over £2,500,000, which were produced at Erith, were shipped in May and June last on board the cableship H.M.T.S. Monarch (1,073 nautical miles) and the cableship Ocean Layer (957 nautical miles) belonging to Submarine Cables Limited. The cable was manufactured, underwater repeaters from America spliced in, and the whole shipped on board the two cable-laying vessels within 10 months.

The polythene-insulated coaxial type cable is designed to provide the same number of telephone channels, namely, 36, as the first transatlantic telephone cables, the greater part of which were also produced by Submarine Cables Limited.

See also the page on Brendan Keane's service on Ocean Layer

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