Feet to Cable Lengths (ft to cb)

1 foot equals 0.001645788337 cable lengths (rounded).

1 foot = 0.001645788337 cable lengths

How to convert feet to cable lengths

To convert feet to cable lengths, multiply the number of feet by 0.001645788337. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply cable lengths by 607.6115486 (rounded).

cable lengths = feet × 0.001645788337

Example: 10 feet = 0.01645788337 cable lengths.

About these units

Foot (ft)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

12 inches. Defined as exactly 0.3048 meters. Still the standard unit for height, altitude in aviation and room dimensions in the US and UK.

Human anatomy supplied the idea: an adult foot is roughly 15 percent of body height. Ancient cultures turned that into standards, but not the same one. The Greek pous was about 302 mm, the standard Roman pes about 295.7 mm, and a Harappan foot of about 335 mm has been reported from the Indus Valley. Historically, a foot fell somewhere between about 250 and 335 mm. Charlemagne tried to standardize units around 790 with little lasting success, and in 1593 English law fixed the statute mile at 5,280 feet.

The modern foot dates from the 1959 International Yard and Pound Agreement, which defined the yard as exactly 0.9144 meter and so the foot as exactly 0.3048 meter; the UK adopted it on 1 January 1964. The US survey foot, defined in 1893 as 1200/3937 meter, was deprecated on 31 December 2022. Feet remain in everyday use for height and rooms in the US, and ISO shipping containers are defined in them. Aviation altitudes use them too: flight level 330 means 33,000 feet.

1 foot = 0.3048 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Foot (unit); Wikipedia: Mile; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

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

Related conversions

See all length units.