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

CS Restorer
by Bill Glover

CS RESTORER

Built in 1903 by Armstrong Whitworth & Co. Newcastle upon Tyne

Length 358.4 ft Breadth 44.0 ft. Depth 20.8 ft. Gross tonnage 3180

Built for the Eastern Extension, Australasia and China Telegraph Company for cable repair work. 4 tanks were fitted having a total capacity of 31470 cubic feet and a total weight of 1800 tons. Johnson and Phillips supplied the cable machinery consisting of double combined paying out-picking up machine forward and a paying out machine aft. Three bow sheaves and one stern sheave of 4 feet 3inches diameter were fitted. Restorer and her sister ship Patrol left England with full tanks partly for stock in Singapore and the rest to be laid between Balikpapan and Kwandang, a distance of 650 nm, for the Dutch East Indies Government. It was intended that Restorer would be based at Adelaide on cable repair duties but she was sold to the Commercial Pacific Cable Company to replace Scotia which had been lost. Remained in service until 1952 and then scrapped. Chartered on a number of occasions by the United States Army for repair work on the Alaska Communications System.

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