As soon as possible after the adjournment of the scientific congress of 1879 the Panama Canal Company was organized, with Ferdinand De Lesseps as president. The company purchased the Wyse concession, and by 1880 sufficient funds had been secured to proceed with the preliminary work. The next two years were used for scientific investigations, surveys, etc., and the actual work commenced in 1883. The plan adopted was for a sea-level canal having a depth of 29.5 feet and a bottom width of 72 feet. This plan in outline and intent was adhered to practically to the cessation of operations in 1888. In that year operations on the Isthmus came to an end for want of funds. The failure of the company proved disastrous to a very large number of shareholders, mostly French peasants of small means, and for a time the project of interoceanic communication by way of Panama seemed hopeless. The experience, however, proved clearly the utter impossibility of private enterprise carrying forward a project of such magnitude and which had attained a stage where large additional funds were needed to make good enormous losses, due to errors in plans, to miscarriage of effort, and, last but not least, to fraud on stupendous scale. With admirable courage, however, the affairs of the first Panama Canal Company were reorganized, after the appointment of a receiver, on February 4, 1889. A scientific commission of inquiry was appointed to reinvestigate the entire project and report upon the work actually accomplished and its value in future operations. The commission, made up of eminent engineers, sent five of its members to the Isthmus to study the technical aspects of the problem, and a final report was rendered on May 5, 1890. The recommendation of the commission was for the construction of a canal with locks, the abandonment of the sea-level idea, and for a further and still more thorough inquiry into the facts, upon the ground that the accumulated data were "far from possessing the precision essential to a definite project." This took the project of canal construction out of the domain of preconceived ideas based upon guesswork into the substantial field of a scientific undertaking for commercial purposes. The receiver at once commenced to reorganize the affairs of the company, and accordingly, on October 21, 1894, the new Panama Canal Company came into existence under the general laws of France. The charter of the new company provided for the appointment of a technical committee to formulate a final project for the completion of the canal. This committee was organized in February, 1896, and reached a unanimous conclusion on November 16, 1898, embodied in an elaborate report, which is probably the most authoritative document ever presented on an engineering subject. The recommendation of the commission was unanimously in favor of a lock canal.[1]