The first declaration in favor of an underground system was made by the Boston company in 1880. "It may be expedient to place our entire system underground," said the sorely perplexed manager, "whenever a practicable method is found of accomplishing: it." All manner of theories were afloat but Theodore N. Vail, who was usually the man of constructive imagination in emergencies, began in 1882 a series of actual experiments at Attleborough, Massachusetts, to find out exactly what could, and what could not, be done with wires that were buried in the earth. A five-mile trench was dug beside a railway track. 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. This he did in spite of a bombardment of explosions from leaky gas-pipes, and with a woeful lack of experts and standard materials. All manner of makeshifts had to be tried in place of tile ducts, which were not known in 1883. Iron pipe was used at first, then asphalt, concrete, boxes of sand and creosoted wood. As for the wires, they were first wrapped in cotton, and then twisted into cables, usually of a hundred wires each. And to prevent the least taint of moisture, which means sudden death to a telephone current, these cables were invariably soaked in oil.