He had stopped so much, and had been so careful to examine the walls of the shaft, that morning had now arrived in the upper world, and it was at this moment, as he sat with his eyes closed, that William Cunningham looked down into the mouth of the shaft.
Cunningham was an observing man, and that morning he had picked up a pin and stuck it in the lapel of his rough coat, but he had done this hastily and carelessly.

The pin was of a recently invented kind, being of a light, elastic metal, with its head of steel.

As Cunningham leaned forward the pin slipped out of his coat; it fell through one of the openings in the grating, and descended the shaft head downward.
For the first quarter of a mile the pin went swiftly in an absolutely perpendicular line, nearly at the middle of the shaft.

For the next three-quarters of a mile it went down like a rifle-ball.

For the next five miles it sped on as if it had been a planet revolving in space.
Then, for eight miles, this pin, falling perpendicularly through a greater distance than any object on this earth had ever fallen perpendicularly, went downward with a velocity like that of light.