Early in my career I worked with a bunch of old school phone guys who told me they used to put a harness on a ferret, attached a fish tape, and sent the animal

Early in my career I worked with a bunch of old school phone guys who told me they used to put a harness on a ferret, attached a fish tape, and sent the animal through a fairly long section of pipe in order to pull a 25-pair phone cable they were installing. They literally "ferreted the pipe" and it was no big deal. There was a rhyme they used for remembering the correct sequence of the colored pairs too. It wouldn't surprise me if one of the physicist's saw the phone guys doing this during construction.