Miles to Cable Lengths (mi to cb)

1 mile equals 8.689762419 cable lengths (rounded).

1 mile = 8.689762419 cable lengths

How to convert miles to cable lengths

To convert miles to cable lengths, multiply the number of miles by 8.689762419. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply cable lengths by 0.1150779448 (rounded).

cable lengths = miles × 8.689762419

Example: 10 miles = 86.89762419 cable lengths.

About these units

Mile (mi)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

5,280 feet or 1,760 yards, exactly 1,609.344 meters. This is the statute (international) mile used on US and UK roads.

A thousand paces gave the mile its name. It descends from the Latin mille passus, the Roman mile, by way of Old English mil and Middle English myle. For centuries after Rome, miles of many lengths coexisted; a sixteenth-century Mercator map, for example, shows small, medium and large Flemish miles on a single scale bar. The English statute mile was fixed by an Act of Parliament under Elizabeth I in 1593, which declared that a mile contains eight furlongs, or 5,280 feet.

The 1959 international yard and pound agreement made that mile exactly 1,609.344 meters. A slightly longer US survey mile, about 1,609.347 meters, lingered in American land surveys and was slated for retirement from 1 January 2023. Today the mile is the road unit of the United Kingdom, the United States, Liberia and Myanmar, along with several territories such as the Bahamas, Belize, Guam and the US Virgin Islands. In Canada it survives chiefly in rail transport and horse racing.

1 mile = 1,609.344 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Mile; Wikipedia: Foot (unit); 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.