Read "The Great Stone of Sardis" by Frank R. Stockton online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Steadily the Dipsey worked her way northward, and as she moved on her course her progress became somewhat slower than it had been at first. This decrease in speed was due partially to extreme caution on the part of Mr. Gibbs, the Master Electrician.
The attenuated cable, which continually stretched itself out behind the little vessel, was of the most recent and improved pattern for deep-sea cables. The conducting wires in the centre of it were scarcely thicker than hairs, while the wires forming the surrounding envelope, although they were so small as to make the whole cable not more than an eighth of an inch in diameter, were far stronger than the thick submarine cables which were used in the early days of ocean telegraphy. These outer wires were made of the Swedish toughened steel fibre, and in 1939, with one of them a little over a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, a freight-ship of eleven thousand tons had been towed through the Great New Jersey Canal, which had then just been opened, and which connected Philadelphia with the ocean.