438 POPULAR LECTURES AND ADDRESSES. 



being strong enough for this very unexpected 

 work. On no occasion was the electric cable 

 broken. 1 With strong enough tackle, and a 

 hauling machine, both strong enough, and under 

 perfect control, the lifting of a submarine cable, as 

 good in mechanical quality as the Atlantic cable 

 of 1865, by a grapnel or grapnels, from the bottom 

 at a depth of two miles, is certainly practicable. If 

 one attempt fails, another will succeed ; and there 

 is every reason, from dynamics as well as from the 

 1865 experience, to believe that in any moderate 

 weather the feat is to be accomplished with little 

 delay, and with very few if any failing attempts. 



1 The strongest rope available was a quantity of rope of iron 

 wire and hemp spun together, able to bear fourteen tons, which was 

 prepared merely as buoy-rope (to provide for the contingency of 

 being obliged, by stress of weather or other cause, to cut and leave 

 the cable in deep or shallow water), and was accordingly all in 

 100 fathoms-lengths, joined by shackles with swivels. The wire 

 and hemp rope itself never broke, but on two of the three occasions 

 a swivel gave way. On the last occasion, about 900 fathoms of 

 Manilla rope had to be used for the upper part, there not being 

 enough of the wire buoy-rope left ; and when 700 fathoms of it had 

 been got in, it broke on board beside a shackle, and the remaining 

 200 fathoms of the Manilla, with 1,540 fathoms of wire-rope and 

 the grapnel, and the electric cable which it had hooked, were all 

 lost for the year 1865. 



