Talk:Cable length

Historical Mistakes
One Cable Length was in the Royal Navy the standard length of an anchor cable of 600 feet or 100 fathom and meant a string of rope which was made in one piece. This was long before about 1850, when anchors started getting chains and ships started getting motor winches for chains. The U.S. Navy used a standard anchor cable of 720 feet for their anchors. A relation to the (virtual) seamile as an arc minute or past 1840 to the meter defined nautical mile (1852.216m) was not established; the foot defined Admiralty mile (6080 feet) was set about 1880.

1⁄10 Admiralty mile is 185.3 meter not 185.2, because one Admiralty mile is 1853.18 meter. But in fact, the cable length was never based on the Admiralty mile because until 1964 when the Admiralty mile was abandoned in UK (USA ten years earlier) the fathom was regular, too.

The modern (re-) definition of cable length as 1⁄10 international nautical mile as 185.2 m is convenient because large anchors don't have standard cable anymore, units based on the imperial system are obsolet and nobody would use cable length to make an exact statemant anyway. Today cable length is used in nautical narrations as an equivalent of about 200 meters over the thumb.

Cable length is also used by military artillerists in different forces and in different departments. It can refer to 200 meters, 200 yards, 1/10 of a statute mile oder nautical mile. According to it's actual definition the unit is claimed to be exact: "Target in 15.3 cable." Cable length is only used as a unit for horizontal distances, never vertically.

CBa--89.0.56.110 (talk) 15:10, 18 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Could you specify a source for that? --LonleyGhost (talk) 18:05, 28 December 2019 (UTC)

Content from Rope
Rope says "In the Middle Ages (from the 13th to the 18th centuries), from the British Isles to Italy, ropes were constructed in ropewalks, very long buildings where strands the full length of the rope were spread out and then laid up or twisted together to form the rope. The cable length was thus set by the length of the available rope walk. This is related to the unit of length termed cable length. This allowed for long ropes of up to 300 yards long or longer to be made. These long ropes were necessary in shipping as short ropes would require splicing to make them long enough to use for sheets and halyards. ..." If it had a source we could use some of that ? - Rod57 (talk) 11:38, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Abbreviation for cable
Is there a Wiki-approved abbreviation for a cable? We have "nmi" or "NM" accepted for miles (see table in MOS:FOOT), but no mention of cables. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 11:15, 14 March 2023 (UTC)