The project stemmed from an agreement between the American Cyrus Field and the Englishmen John Watkins Brett and Charles Tilston Bright, and was incorporated in December 1856 with £350,000 capital, raised principally in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. The board of directors was composed of eighteen members from the United Kingdom, nine from the United States and three from Canada. The original three projectors were joined by E.O.W. Whitehouse as chief electrician. Curtis M. Lampson served ably as vice-chairman for over a decade. The board recruited the physicist William Thomson, who had publicly disputed some of Whitehouse's claims. The two enjoyed a tense relationship before Whitehouse was dismissed when the first cable failed in 1858. When a second cable, under Thomson's supervision, was proposed, the Admiralty lent the hulks of HMS Amethyst and HMS Iris to the Company in 1864, both ships were then extensively modified in 1865 for ferrying the Atlantic cable from the works at Enderby's wharf, in East Greenwich, London, to Great Eastern at her Sheerness mooring. A new subsidiary company, the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, under the chairmanship of John Pender was formed to execute the new venture. The cable was coiled down into great cylindrical tanks at the Wharf before being fed into Great Eastern. Amethyst and Iris transferred the 2500 miles of cable to Great Eastern, beginning in February 1865, an operation that took over three months. On the failure of the expedition to lay the second cable in 1865, a third company was formed to raise the capital for a further attempt, the Anglo-American Telegraph Company. Both the hulks and Great Eastern were put to use again in 1866 and again in 1869. The next expedition in 1866 was a success, also succeeding in recovering the lost second cable. The service generated revenues of £1000 in its first day of operation. The approximate price to send a telegram was: one word, one mile = $0.0003809 The Atlantic Telegraph Company operated the only two trans-Atlantic cables without competition until 1869, when a French cable was laid. Shortly after this company was established, an agreement was made to coordinate pricing of telegraph services and share revenues, effectively combining the French and Anglo-American interests into one combine. A second French company, compagnie française du télégraphe de Paris à New-York, was established in 1879.
