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

CS Amber
by Bill Glover

CS AMBER

Built 1888 by Napier and Sons, Glasgow.

Length 217.5 ft.  Breadth 31.1 ft.  Depth 14.3 ft.  Gross tonnage 1,043.

Single screw. Triple expansion.

Built for the Eastern Telegraph Company for cable repair duties, working on the west coast of Africa for most of the time. Fitted with three cable tanks and a standard set of cable machinery. Laid a number of short cables in the Greek Islands and assisted Colonia and John Pender (2) in laying the Gibraltar - Malta No 5 cable in 1921.

Transferred to Imperial & International Communications Ltd., in 1929 and sold to shipbreakers at Gibraltar in 1930.

CABLE WORK

The message on the back of the postcard is rather uncomplimentary – one wonders if the writer was perhaps a passenger on an Orient Line or P&O liner to India or beyond, and sent the postcard from Gibraltar in passing. The postmark is 23 January 1904.

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