History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy

	History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications from the first submarine cable of 1850 to the worldwide fiber optic network
CS Basil O. Lenoir by Bill Glover

CS BASIL O. LENOIR
(USAF Col. Basil O. Lenoir)

Identical to CS William A. Glassford. Used to maintain cables of the Alaskan Communication System. Sold to RCA in 1973.

CABLE WORK

1956	(with CS Albert J. Myer) Port Angeles, Washington State - Ketchikan - Skagway, Alaska

Site visitor Jeff Lucas served on the Basil O. Lenoir in the mid to late 1960s, and sends these photographs:

Above: Laying cable ashore in Seymour Canal,
providing phone service to a village

Above and below: Wrangell Narrows outside of Petersburg, Alaska.
We had just laid the first telephone cable into Wrangell.

Click on each placemark to see Jeff's Alaska cable locations

View Alaska Cables in a larger map

Jeff also recalls:

When laying a new cable we would tow an LCM 8 landing craft with a D-8 dozer. While anchored off the lee of the Cape Spencer “rock” that the lighthouse was on, us seamen were sent in to Glacier Bay to find an iceberg, lower the ramp, and ram it to break off chunks of blue glacier ice.

I’m told it was for the officers aboard, who liked it to make martinis with. It was pure and wouldn’t melt as fast as regular ice cubes!

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Last revised: 25 November, 2013

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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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—Bill Burns, publisher and webmaster: Atlantic-Cable.com