Neal Stephenson's article in Wired 4.12 on laying submarine cable had an interesting alternative to standard pullquotes. Some of the text inline in the article is simply drawn in a one-step-larger font and a conspicuous color. For CSS-based pullquotes in web pages, this has the major advantage that it degrades very gracefully --- if the target browser doesn't support CSS, nothing looks strange. Other methods of doing pullquotes result in unexplained duplicated text in non-CSS browsers. This even works in Konqueror.
As Kelvin figured out the hard way, whenever you are reeling in a long line, you must first relieve all tension on it or else your reel will be crushed. The same problem is posed in reverse by the cable-laying process, where thousands of meters of cable, weighing many tons, may be stretched tight between the ship and the contact point on the seafloor, but the rest of the cable stored on board the ship must be coiled loosely in the tanks with no tension on them at all. In both cases, the cable must be perfectly slack on the ship end and very tight on the watery end of the winching machinery. Not surprisingly, then, the same machinery is used for both outgoing and incoming winch work.
At one end of the ship is a huge iron drum some 3 meters in diameter with a few turns of cable around it. As you can verify by wrapping a few turns of rope around a pipe and tugging, this is a very simple way to relieve tension on a line. It is not, however, very precise, and here, precise control is very important. That is provided by something called a linear engine, which consists of several pairs of tires mounted with a narrow gap between them (for you baseball fans, it is much like a pitching machine). The cable is threaded through this gap so that it is gripped on both sides by the tires. Monarch's linear engine contains 16 pairs of tires which, taken together, can provide up to 10 tons of holdback force. Augmented by the durms, which can be driven by power from the ship's main engines, the ultimate capacity of Monarch's cable engines is 30 tons.
The art of laying a submarine cable is the art of using all the special features of such a ship: the linear engines, the maneuvering thrusters, and the differential GPS equipment, to put the cable exactly where it is supposed to go. Though the survey team has examined a corridor many thousands of meters wide, the target corridor for the cable is 200 meters wide, and the masters of these ships take pride in not straying more than 10 meters from the charted route. This must be accomplished through the judicious manipulation of only a few variables: the ship's position and speed (which are controlled by the engines, thrusters, and rudder) and the cable's tension and rate of payout (which are controlled by the cable engine).
One cannot merely pay the cable out at the same speed as the ship moves forward. If the bottom is sloping down and away from the ship