The chairman of the company (the Right Honorable J. Stuart Wortley, M.P.), in the course of a deputation to Lord Palmerston later on, stated that "far too high charges of electricity were forced into the conductor. It was evidently thought at that time by certain electricians that you could not charge a cable of this sort too highly. Thus they proceeded somewhat like the man who bores a hole with a poker in a deal board; he gets the hole, to be sure, _but the board is burned in the operation_." Professor Thomson (now Lord Kelvin), writing in 1860, expressed the following opinion: It is quite certain that, with a properly adjusted mirror-galvanometer as receiving-instrument at each end, twenty cells of Daniell's battery would have done the work required, and at even a higher speed if worked by a key devised for diminishing inductive embarrassment; and the writer--with the knowledge derived from disastrous experience--has now little doubt but that, if such had been the arrangement from the beginning, if no induction-coils and no battery-power exceeding twenty Daniell cells had ever been applied to the cable since the landing of its ends, imperfect as it then was, _it would be now in full work day and night, with no prospect or probability of failure_.[50] Summing up the _cause_ of the untimely ending to the ill-used cable, perhaps the concisest verdict would be, in mechanical-engineering _parlance_, that "high-pressure steam had been got up in a low-pressure boiler." PART III INTERMEDIATE KNOWLEDGE AND ADVANCE CHAPTER XII OTHER PROPOSED ROUTES North Atlantic Telegraph Project--Exploring Expedition--Ice Troubles--South Atlantic Telegraph Project. The gradual failure of the 1858 cable after a short period of working, and the slow rate at which messages were capable of being transmitted, naturally deterred capitalists from providing the means for another cable of such length in deep water. Several schemes, however, for a fresh line on other routes were brought forward; and there was an alternative route between Great Britain and America by which the transmission of the electric current could be subdivided into four comparatively short sections. This was known in 1860 as the North Atlantic Telegraph project, in which the route was from the extreme north of Scotland to the Faroe Islands, thence to Iceland; from there to the southern point of Greenland, and so on to Labrador or Newfoundland. The distances were (varying a little according to landing-places selected) approximately: