CS Telconia was an English cable ship used in the early 20th century to lay and repair submarine communications cables. It was built in 1909 by Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson

Swan Hunter

Swan Hunter, formerly known as "Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson", was one of the best known shipbuilding companies in the world. Based in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear, the company was responsible for some of the greatest ships of the early 20th century — most famously, the RMS Mauretania which...

 for the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company (a subsidiary of the Atlantic Telegraph Company

Atlantic Telegraph Company

The Atlantic Telegraph Company was a company formed in 1856 to undertake and exploit a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic ocean, the first such telecommunications link....

) and remained in service until late 1934..

The 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 Tuchman

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was an American historian and author. She became known for her best-selling book The Guns of August, a history of the prelude to and first month of World War I, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1963....

 incorrectly asserted this based on an interview with a retired Royal Navy

Royal Navy

The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...

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 the 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 the 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.