Cable Lengths to Meters (cb to m)

1 cable length equals 185.2 meters exactly.

1 cable length = 185.2 meters

How to convert cable lengths to meters

To convert cable lengths to meters, multiply the number of cable lengths by 185.2. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 0.005399568035 (rounded).

meters = cable lengths × 185.2

Example: 10 cable lengths = 1,852 meters.

About these units

Cable Length (cb)

NauticalTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

One tenth of a nautical mile (185.2 m). A traditional nautical measure for short distances between ships.

Before it became a figure on a chart, a cable was simply the thick rope that held a ship at anchor. Ropemakers worked on long covered ropewalks, and the length of the walk limited the longest rope they could lay. By the mid-sixteenth century the usual anchor cable was about 100 fathoms, or 600 feet, so the word turned into a measure of distance. The ropewalk at Chatham Dockyard is a quarter of a mile long, built to turn out standard coils of 120 fathoms.

Mariners found a cable handy for judging short gaps, such as the space between two ships in formation or the distance to a hazard. Because a nautical mile of 6,080 feet divides neatly by ten, the Admiralty tied the cable to a tenth of a sea mile, about 608 feet. The figure used here follows the international nautical mile of 1,852 m, giving 185.2 m. Other definitions differ: a traditional British cable of 100 fathoms is 182.9 m, while the older US Navy cable of 120 fathoms is about 219.5 m. Sources therefore span roughly 169 to 220 m.

1 cable length = 185.2 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Cable length; Wikipedia: Nautical mile

Meter (m)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI base unit of length. Since 1983 it is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Meter comes from the Greek metron, a measure. In 1791 the French National Assembly defined it as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris, after rejecting the length of a seconds pendulum because that length changes with local gravity. The surveyors Delambre and Méchain measured the meridian arc, and in 1799 a platinum bar known as the Mètre des Archives became the physical standard. NIST notes that this Earth-based meter turned out to be about 0.2 mm shorter than the true pole-to-equator fraction it was meant to represent.

The 1875 Treaty of the Meter created the CGPM and the BIPM to look after common standards, and in 1889 a platinum-iridium prototype bar took over; the original is still kept at the BIPM. In 1960 the meter was tied to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of an orange-red krypton-86 line, and in 1983 to the speed of light, which made length a quantity derived from the time standard. The 2018 revision reworded that definition without changing the meter's size. NIST offers a handy yardstick for scale: a pace, meaning two steps, is roughly a meter or a yard.

The meter is the reference unit for length on this site.

Sources: BIPM: history of the metre; NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition; Wikipedia: Metre

Related conversions

See all length units.