The Story of the Atlantic Telegraph

[B] "All during the night the process of picking up was carefully carried on, the Big Ship behaving beautifully, and hanging lightly over the cable, as if fearful of breaking the slender cord which swayed up and down in the ocean. Indeed, so delicately did she answer her helm, and coil in the film of thread-like cable over her bows, that she put one in mind of an elephant taking up a straw in its proboscis."--Russell. [C] So exquisitely sensitive was the copper strand, that as the Great Eastern rolled, and so made the cable pass across the magnetic meridian, the induced current of electricity, incomprehensibly faint as it must have been, produced nevertheless a perceptible deviation of the ray of light on the mirror galvanometer at Foilhommerum.--London Times.