But the earliest records of practical telegraphy under water of which there are any particulars relate to the experiments conducted by Dr. O'Shaughnessy (afterward Sir William O'Shaughnessy Brooke, F.R.S.) across the River Hugli on behalf of the East Indian Company in 1838.[3] Referring to his practical researches a little later, O'Shaughnessy remarked: "Insulation, according to my experiments, is best accomplished by enclosing the wire (previously pitched) in a split rattan, and then paying the rattan round with tarred yarn; or the wire may--as in some experiments by Colonel Pasley, R.E., at Chatham--be surrounded by strands of tarred rope, and this by pitched yarn. An insulated rope of this kind may be spread across a wet field--nay, even led through a river--and will still conduct the electrical signals, without any appreciable loss." In 1840 Professor Wheatstone (afterward Sir Charles Wheatstone, F.R.S.) explained to a committee of the House of Commons the methods by which he thought it possible to establish telegraphic communication between Dover and Calais. He appears to have been unaware of the prior experiments just alluded to, for his system of insulation, though more fully developed, was practically the same. Prof. S. F. B. Morse, the well-known inventor of the telegraph apparatus bearing his name, also made a study of this problem in 1842, when he laid down an insulated copper wire across New York harbor, through which he transmitted electric currents. Hemp soaked in tar and pitch, surrounded with a layer of india-rubber, constituted the insulation. Morse was a great letter-writer, and records of his early work are solely based on his own statements at a time when he noted in his diary: "I am crushed for want of means. My stockings all want to see my mother, and my hat is hoary with age." In 1845 Ezra Cornell, who was afterward the founder of Cornell University, laid a cable, twelve miles long, to connect Fort Lee with New York, in the Hudson River. The cable consisted of two cotton-covered copper wires, insulated with india-rubber, and enclosed in a leaden pipe. It worked well for several months, but was broken by ice in 1846. In that year Mr. Charles West paid out by hand an india-rubber insulated wire in Portsmouth harbor, through which he signaled from a boat to the shore. The experiment was intended as the forerunner of the establishment of telegraphic communication between England and France, but for want of the necessary funds was not followed up.