CS ''Telconia'' was a British

cable ship A cable layer or cable ship is a deep-sea vessel designed and used to lay underwater cables for telecommunications, electric power transmission, military, or other purposes. Cable ships are distinguished by large cable sheaves for guiding cabl ...

used in the early 20th century to lay and repair

submarine communications cables A submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the sea bed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean and sea. The first submarine communications cables laid beginning in the 1850s carried tel ...

. She was built in 1909 by Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson for the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company (a subsidiary of the

Atlantic Telegraph Company The Atlantic Telegraph Company was a company formed on 6 November 1856 to undertake and exploit a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic ocean, the first such telecommunications link. History Cyrus Field, American businessman and finan ...

) and remained in service until late 1934. ''Telconia'' is often incorrectly credited with playing a role in cutting German cables in August 1914. In her book ''The Zimmermann Telegram'', American historian

Barbara Tuchman Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (; January 30, 1912 – February 6, 1989) was an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for ''The Guns of August'' (1962), a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World ...

incorrectly asserted this based on an interview with a retired

Royal Navy The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against ...

officer decades later. Scholars have since determined that in fact it was the British General Post Office ship CS ''Alert'' that carried out these attacks. The job of ''Alert'' was to locate and cut the five German cables heading into the Atlantic. A similar operation cut the German cables that connected Great Britain to the German coast. Successive missions by ''Telconia'' and other ships later in the war eliminated the remainder of Germany's cable network and, in some instances, pulled the cables up with their grapples and relaid them into British and French ports for use by the Allied powers instead.

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Telconia Cable ships of the United Kingdom World War I auxiliary ships of the United Kingdom 1909 ships Ships built by Swan Hunter Ships built on the River Tyne