History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy - HMCS Iris (1) and CS Recorder (2)

	History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications from the first submarine cable of 1850 to the worldwide fiber optic network
HMCS Iris (1) and CS Recorder (2) by Bill Glover

HMCS IRIS (1) & CS RECORDER (2)

Built in 1902 by D. J. Dunlop & Company, Glasgow

Length 295.00 ft Breadth 40.7 ft Depth 15.1 ft Gross tonnage 2253

CS Recorder (2)

Built to maintain the 1902 Trans Pacific Cable and owned by the Pacific Cable Board, which represented the Dominion governments, so she carried the prefix HMCS, (His/Her Majesty's Cable Ship), the first to do so. Fitted with four cable tanks, two forward and two aft, combined paying out-picking up machine forward and a paying out machine aft, triple bow sheaves and single stern sheave.

Transferred to Imperial & International Communications Ltd. in 1929 and renamed Recorder (2). Based at Auckland until the outbreak of war and then transferred to Singapore. After the fall of Singapore moved to Gibraltar and then to Aden. Underwent an extensive refit in 1947 and finally taken out of service in 1952 and sold for scrap.

See also Peter Edwards' page on CS Recorder (2), which details an incident in World War I when Iris (as the ship was then named) captured the crew of a German raider.

CABLE WORK

HMCS IRIS(1)
1912	Diverted Norfolk Island - Doubtless Bay cable into Auckland

RECORDER (2)
1937	Laid Cook Strait, New Zealand telephone cable
1939	While attempting a repair near Batavia Recorder was caught without navigation lights in territorial waters by a Dutch submarine and was requested to accompany the submarine into port. Holland was at this time still neutral. Fortunately everything was sorted out and Recorder was able to carry out the repair.
1941	Undertook the diversion of one of the Bombay-Aden cables into Muscat. This involved the recovery of 560 nm miles of cable at a pick up rate of 1 nm per hour. In all, three trips were involved.

HMCS Iris (1), circa 1930

Sending messages under the sea

"Cable" is the name popularly given to telegraph messages which are sent over wires which lie on the bed of the ocean, Before the introduction of the radio telephone, the cable was the only method of sending messages round the world in a few hours. The cable ships lay new cables and repair any breakdowns.

Inset: By means of a very delicate instrument on board it is possible to tell when the ship is over a cable. Here the chief officer lays a course across a cable.

Raising the cable from the bottom of the ocean.

The grapnel, to haul the cable to the surface, goes down over the bow sheaves. An officer sits on the hawser attached to the grapnel. By the "feel" of it he can tell when the cable is fast on the grapnel. The grapnel is then hauled up, bringing the cable with it.

Inset: The grapnel, with its four large hooks being lowered from the ship to the bottom of the sea.

Last revised: 11 May, 2007

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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