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

CS Hooper/Silvertown
by Bill Glover

CS HOOPER/SILVERTOWN

Length 338.2 ft. Breadth 55.0 ft. Depth 34.6 ft. Gross tonnage 4,935.

Built 1873 by C. Mitchell and Co., Newcastle.

Single screw. Compound engine of 1800 hp. Speed 10½ knots.

Originally built to carry the whole of the cable to be laid between England and Bermuda for the Great Western Telegraph Company, the ship was going to named Great Western. When this scheme was abandoned the ship was named Hooper. Fitted with 3 cable tanks all 32 ft. deep and diameters of 46 ft. 53 ft. and 51 ft. giving a coiling capacity of 88,900 cubic feet.

Sold to the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works in 1881 and renamed Silvertown. Sold to the Anglo-American Oil Company in 1912 and used as an oil tanker until 1918 when relegated to an oil hulk until 1924 and then a coal hulk, at Algiers, with the name Francunian II. Sold to Dutch shipbreakers in 1936.

CABLE WORK AS HOOPER

CABLE WORK AS SILVERTOWN

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