The work was done handily and cheaply by the labor-saving plan of hitching a locomotive to a plough.

Five ploughs were jerked apart before the work was finished.
Then, into this trench were laid wires with every known sort of covering.

Most of them, naturally, were wrapped with rubber or gutta-percha, after the fashion of a submarine cable.

When all were in place, the willing locomotive was harnessed to a huge wooden drag, which threw the ploughed soil back into the trench and covered the wires a foot deep.

It was the most professional cable-laying that any one at that time could do, and it succeeded, not brilliantly, but well enough to encourage the telephone engineers to go ahead.
Several weeks later, the first two cables for actual use were laid in Boston and Brooklyn; and in 1883 Engineer J.P.Davis was set to grapple with the Herculean labor of putting a complete underground system in the wire-bound city of New York.