#cable ship

Recent Acquisition - Photograph Collection

Cable Enterprise Visit mid 70s

The Cable Enterprise was docked in Sydney for a few days for some reason and many of the Paddington staff paid the ship a visit. It did not have any cable in the tanks to lay, although I believe it carried some repair cable and that was about all. The ship had a lot of control and thrusters. The deck was covered in cable feeding rollers and a lot of things that only the experienced crew would…

G. R. M. Garratt   One Hundred Years of Submarine Cables London, 1950; 8, 60 pp.; plates. Published by the Science Museum of London

Genius of Electricity, popularly known as Golden Boy; (detail from the cover)

OSLIN, George P. The Story of Telecommunications Macon, 1992, Mercer University Press

In October 1916 when both Western Union and AT&T were in Western Union's 1875 building at 195 Broadway, a large gold-colored statue of a person with outstretched wings and an arm held high was erected on top of the building.  It was named Genius of Electricity.  Later AT&T renamed it the Spirit of Communications.

After spending almost a hundred years in Manhattan and New Jersey, in 2009 Golden Boy was moved to AT&T's new headquarters in Dallas.

RUSSEL, Florence Kimball A Woman's Journey through the Philippines:     -On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen en Route Boston, 1907, L.C. Page & Company. 270 pp. Folding map, 40 plates.