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

1963 Western Electric Lightweight Cable

The Western Electric lightweight SD Ocean Cable shown here was made at the company's Baltimore Works, and used for the Florida - Kingston, Jamaica - Fort Sherman, Panama cables of 1963.

The lightweight undersea cable design was originated by the British Post Office, and was first used on the 1961 CANTAT 1 undersea telephone cable between Britain and Canada.

Instead of using a central copper conductor and external armouring, as was the standard cable design from 1851 onwards, the lightweight cable had a stranded steel core for mechanical strength, surrounded by a copper conductor layer. The outer cable sheath could then be a plastic jacket instead of the traditional heavy steel armouring wires.

Bill Glover notes that later lightweight cables of the US design, such as the 1972 Florida-Bahamas cable for AT&T, were made by Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd. in England. STC had two factories in Southampton, one for British design lightweight cables, the other for the US design. It would appear that Western Electric licensed the US lightweight cable technology to STC in order to focus its own efforts on repeater design and construction.

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