In spite of obvious advantages, the experimental line was dismantled some years later (as happened with a similar experiment in Germany) and Lévy installed his only commercial system on the Aisne-Marne Canal, what is electric cable towing the barges through the 2.6 kilometre (1.6 miles) long Mont-de-Billy tunnel. Secondly, if there were many locks along the canal, this necessitated the picking up and dropping of the cable a great number of times which caused considerable difficulty and loss of time. The boat could be started or stopped by connecting or disconnecting the grip with the cable by suitable devices on the boat. In Current Communications Group’s model of BPL, two other devices ride power poles to distribute Internet traffic. Protruding from the boat were suitable arms, to which devices were attached that were adapted to grip and hold the moving cable. The problem was that the Frenchman used steam engines to move the cable — in that time, he did not have much choice.

If you just drive the car to church on weekends, then this may all sound like great news — not so much if you fill your Saturdays with muddy exertions into the wilderness. A special app on the device does the heavy lifting, synthesizing the various gear you select so that the sound output is close to a guitar hooked up to actual amplifiers and effects pedals. Same goes for guitar amplifiers. Make your own lip balm with aloe vera and some oil, and moisturize with the same olive oil you find in your kitchen. Towards the end of 1893 (the same year that a propeller powered trolleyboat was tested on the Erie Canal), the first electrically powered submerged flexible cable system was set up in the Bourgogne canal in France. The machines were either run upon a track on the banks of the canal — this method being practically a railway along the banks, the boats being trailers connected by a 50 metre (165 feet) long tow line to the motor cars (illustration below) — or either run upon the towpath itself — this method somewhat resembling a land-based trolleytruck convoy (picture above). Typically, large ISPs lease fiber-optic lines from the phone company to carry the data around the Internet and eventually to another medium (phone, DSL or cable line) and into your home.

Cable towing had some interesting advantages over the previous method. This meant that the horses were led over the mountain while the boat was moved through the tunnel by human power. Furthermore, there was no need to place an engine onboard, which meant that no cargo space was sacrificed, and that existing barges could be used without any further adaptations, or without the use of a towboat. All of these chips and features need power to work. Every cable would be operated in lengths of about 8 kilometres (5 miles) each way from the power station, the outgoing cable being used for boats going in one direction and the return cable (after crossing the canal) for those going in the other way (see illustration below). The method was thus easy to combine with horse and mule powered canal boats (contrary to the methods described below). Contrary to the two systems described above, there was no motor or engine placed on the boat itself. Some automatic transmissions with advanced control systems can detect this situation after you have gone around a couple of the curves, and «learn» not to upshift again. The kind of stuff I don’t think I have to tell you not to do, because I can’t imagine a situation in which anyone else would ever have to do it.

You can buy a device called a mug warmer, which can keep your coffee, tea or any other kind of hot drink at a constant desired temperature with the help of a small electric heater. To the right, there was a fourth pulley carried by a small car fitted with a counterpoise which served to keep the cable uniformly taut. The cable was installed a few yards from the edge, in order to leave the tow path free. It was successfully tested in 1910 in Jarville, close to Nancy, and fully installed just before the start of the First World War, by another French engineer, Edouard Imbeaux. The first was the difficulty in rounding curves. The pulleys (shown on the smaller images above and below) were placed vertically on a straight line, and more or less inclined on curves. The hauling machinery was operated by an electric motor on the boat, which received current from an overhead trolley circuit (see picture above). The first sector of the electric utility industry to be deregulated was the network of high-voltage transmission wires, which were designed to make bulk power transfers, over relatively short distances, from large power-generating plants to the cities and towns where the power was needed.