Two Samples of Telegraph Cable for Floating Mines and a Break

...; transferred from the Ministerie van Marine (Department of the Navy), The Hague, to the museum, 1883

ObjectNumber: NG-MC-1191

Two samples of telegraph cables for floating mines, each with brass rings at the ends. Both are shroud-laid steel cables with a core of seven copper wires in a thick insulating coating of black synthetic material. The steel outer coating of the thicker cable consists of cable-laid strands of seven yarns each. The so-called ‘break’ consists of a tube between two pear-shaped brass plates, one of which has a hole for a key.

According to the original inventory these samples are related to the ‘torpedo’, as mines were called in those days, and designed by a certain ‘Mory’.¹¹J.M. Obreen et al., handwritten inventory list for items 944 to 1431, 1884, manuscript in HNA 476 RMA, inv. no. 1089, no. 1191. This is almost certainly the American Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806-1873), who had close relations with the Dutch naval officer Marin Henri Jansen (1817-1893). Between 1863 and 1865 Jansen conducted several experiments with torpedoes for the Dutch Navy, including Maury’s torpedoes. The cables were for electric detonation of the mine.

Torpedo-commissie & Commissie tot de beproeving van watermijnen, Verslagen van de commissies van de beproeving van watermijnen en electro schokmijnen te Brielle, s.l. (1866), 6 manuscripts in NIMH Losse stukken 965; J.A. Vandevelde and W. Sluyterman van Loo, Rapport van een cursus over watermijnen en electro schokmijnen, gegeven door M.F. Maury te Londen in 1866, manuscript in NIMH Losse stukken 966; J.M. Obreen et al., handwritten inventory list for items 944 to 1431, 1884, manuscript in HNA 476 RMA, inv. no. 1089, no. 1191; S.P. l’Honoré Naber (ed.), Het leven van een vloothouder. Gedenkschriften van M.H. Jansen, Utrecht 1925, pp. 361-69; F.L. Williams, Matthew Fontaine Maury: Scientist of the Sea, s.l. 1963, pp. 442-43, note 6

J. van der Vliet, 2016, 'possibly Matthew Fontaine Maury, Two Samples of Telegraph Cable for Floating Mines and a Break, United Kingdom, c. 1866', in J. van der Vliet and A. Lemmers (eds.), Navy Models in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.245004