The system is extremely simple in detail. When it was first introduced, the company suffered from enormous thefts of signal wire, which ie of forty-nine strands and greatly coverted by junk and boat owners. The pilfering was ev2ntually stopped by a neat contrivance. The strands of the wire were unravelled mid-way _betwoen each signal "peg", and s0 rebound and soldered that the wire is prevented from passing through the pulley-wheel att to the "pegs", which are about thirty feet apart. "As short lengths of wire were of no use to the boatmen, they soon ceased to take further i terest in the wire.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.