In this application they might have been successful, but for an untoward event, which dampened the confidence of the public in all submarine enterprises--the failure of the Red Sea Telegraph. The British Government, anxious to forward communication with India, had given that Company an unconditional guarantee, on the strength of which the capital was raised, and the cable manufactured and laid. But in a short time it ceased to work, a loss which the treasury of Great Britain had to make good. To the public, which did not understand the cause of the failure to be the imperfect construction of the cable, the effect was to impair confidence in all long submarine telegraphs. Of course, after such an experience, the Government was not disposed to bind itself by such pledges again. It was, however, ready to aid the enterprise by any safe means. It therefore increased its subsidy from fourteen thousand pounds to twenty thousand pounds; and guaranteed eight per cent on six hundred thousand pounds of new capital for twenty-five years, with only one condition--_that the cable should work_. This was a liberal grant, and under the circumstances, was all that could be expected. Still further to encourage the undertaking, it ordered new soundings to be taken off the coast of Ireland. These were made by Captain Hoskins, of the Royal Navy, and dispelled the fears which had been entertained of a submarine mountain, which would prove an impassable barrier in the path of an ocean telegraph. But the greatest service which the British Government rendered, was in the long course of experiments which it now ordered, to determine all the difficult problems of submarine telegraphy. In 1859, the year after the failure of the first Atlantic cable, the Board of Trade appointed a committee of the most eminent scientific and engineering authorities in Great Britain to investigate the whole subject. This was composed of Captain Douglas Galton, of the Royal Engineers, then of the War Office, who represented the Government; Professor Wheatstone, the celebrated electrician; William Fairbairn, President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; George Parker Bidder, whose name ranks with those of Stephenson and Brunel; C. F. Varley, who, in the practical working of telegraphs, had no superior in England; Latimer Clark and Edwin Clark, both engineers, who had had great experience in the business of telegraphing; and George Saward, the Secretary of the Atlantic Telegraph Company.