_The Contractors' Share._--Shortly after the first Atlantic cable was laid, Messrs. Glass, Elliot & Co. availed themselves of the services of Mr. Canning and Mr. Clifford, whose engagements on Sir Charles Bright's staff for the "Atlantic" Company had terminated. Thus, with an additional staff of electricians, they had placed themselves in a position to undertake direct contracts for laying, as well as manufacturing, submarine telegraphs. They had, indeed, carried out work of this character in the Mediterranean during the year 1860; and on the amalgamation of the two businesses above mentioned into a limited liability company, their position was still further strengthened. The capital raised for the new cable by the Atlantic Telegraph Company was £600,000; and, by agreeing to take a considerable proportion of their payment in "Atlantic" shares, the contractors practically found more than half of this amount. In the result, the undertaking became a contractors' affair from first to last. _Design and Construction._--It will be seen that the new cable was to be an expensive one as compared with that of 1857-'58. It was the outcome of six years' further experience, during which several important lines, referred to in the last chapter, had been laid. It also followed upon the exhaustive Government inquiry to which allusion has been made. [Illustration: FIG. 34.--The Main Cable, 1865-'66.] The actual type adopted (Fig. 34), on the recommendation of Sir Charles Bright and other engineers who were additionally consulted, was much the same in respect to the conductor and insulator--300 pounds copper to 400 pounds gutta-percha per nautical mile--as that which the former had suggested for the previous Atlantic line. This combination for the length involved was based on Professor Thomson's law for the working speed of a cable, as depending inversely on the resistance of the conductor as well as on the electrostatic capacity of the core. The armor consisted of a combination of iron and hemp, each wire being enveloped in manila yarns. The object of incasing the separate wires in hemp was (1) to protect them from rust due to exposure to air and water, and (2) to reduce the specific gravity of the cable, with a view to rendering it more capable of supporting its own weight in water. This form of cable, bearing a stress of about eight tons,[59] and suspending eleven miles of itself, was considered by most of the authorities at that period to perfectly fulfil the conditions required for deep-sea lines.[60] The claims of light hempen cables, without any iron, had been urged for meeting the difficulty of lay and recovery in deep water; and this type formed a sort of compromise, its total diameter being 1.1 inch, weighing 1 ton 16 hundredweight in air, and only 14 hundredweight in water. The shore end was to have a further outer sheathing of twelve strands, each strand containing three stout galvanized-iron wires of No.