When submarine cables came to be manufactured and laid all this had to be changed. For they were expensive; an Atlantic cable, for example, cost half a million sterling. The state of the cable had to be ascertained at short intervals during manufacture; a similar watch had to be kept upon it during the process of laying, and afterwards during its life of telegraphic use. The observations made by one observer had therefore to be made available to all, so that, with other instruments and at another place, equivalent observations could be made and their results quantitatively compared with those of the former. To set up a system of measurement for such purposes as these involved much theoretical discussion and an enormous amount of experimental investigation. This was undertaken by a special committee of the Association, and a principal part in furnishing discussions of theory and in devising experimental methods was taken by Thomson. The committee's investigations took place at a date somewhat later in Thomson's career than that with which we are here dealing, and some account of them will be given in a later chapter; but much work, preparatory for and leading up to the determination of electrical standards, was done by the volunteer laboratory corps in the transformed wine-cellar of the old College. The selection and realisation of electrical standards was a work of extraordinary importance to the world from every point of view--political, commercial, and social. It not only rendered applications of electricity possible in the arts and industries, but by relieving experimental results from the vagueness of the specifications formerly in use, made the further progress of pure electrical science a matter in which every step forward, taken by an individual worker, facilitated the advance of all. But like other toilsome services, the nature of which is not clear to the general public, it has never received proper acknowledgment from those who have profited by it. If Thomson had done nothing more than the work he did in this connection, first with his students and later with the British Association Committee, he would have deserved well of his fellow-countrymen.