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

CS Dominia
by Bill Glover

CS DOMINIA

Built in 1926 by Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson Ltd.

Length 488.9 ft Breadth 59 ft Depth 37.4 ft Gross tonnage 9273

Built for the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company specifically to lay the loaded telegraph cable from Bamfield, British Columbia, to Fanning Island for the Pacific Cable Board. Total length carried for this task was 3627 nm of cable weighing 8594 tons.

Fitted with four tanks with a total capacity of just under 180,000 cubic feet. There was a further 118,500 cubic feet of cargo space. Two independent paying out-picking up machines were fitted forward and one paying out machine was fitted on the port side of the aft awning deck. Three bow sheaves and one stern sheave all 3 ft 6 in. in diameter were fitted.

When the cable divisions of Telcon and Siemens Bros merged in 1935 there was only sufficient work for one ship so Dominia was sold to the Russians and renamed Nickolai Ejov. More information on this is available here.

CABLE WORK

1926 Bamfield, British Colombia - Fanning Island
1929 Algericas - Ceuta
1929 Tenerife - Gran Canaria
1929 Vigo, Spain - Carcavelos, Portugal
1930 Willemstad, Curacao - La Guayra, Venezuela
1930 Willemstad, Curacao - Aruba, Dutch West Indies
1930 Aruba - Maracaibo, Venezuela - Barranquilla, Colombia
1930 Belgium - Portugal
1932 Dakar - Conakry shore ends

The middle ship in this painting is Dominia,
then under the name of Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Image courtesy of Martin Bollinger

CS Dominia
Image courtesy of Brian Ellis

Copyright © 2007 FTL Design

Last revised: 18 August, 2008

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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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