The Steamboat by A. Smith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 21, 1882

The Steamboat

By A. Smith

The Wonders of a Century.—No. 6.

BY A. SMITH.

The Steamboat.

The idea of propelling water-craft by steam was nearly contemporary in its origin with the introduction of steam locomotion by rail. But the best talent, or the strongest influence, was diverted to the latter enterprise, delaying, for a time, the practical development of the steamboat.

In 1801 William Symington, of England, constructed the Charlotte Dundas, the first practical steamboat ever built; but, although practical, it was not put to a practical use. In 1804 Oliver Evans constructed an engine at Philadelphia, and placed it on a large scow mounted on wheels. This amphibious piece of mechanism was propelled up Market street, and to the Schuylkill, where it was launched, and provided with a stern paddle-wheel. It then sailed down the river, a distance of sixteen miles, to the Delaware.

In 1807 Robert Fulton completed the construction of the steamer Clermont; a decided improvement upon the rude conceptions of English and other inventors. When she made her trip, without the use of sails, against wind and tide, from New York to Albany, the ridicule that had attended the idea of steam navigation was changed to amazement.

“That voyage did more. It spread terror over the surface of the river, and created wide alarm along its borders. The steamboat was an amazing revelation to the fishermen, the farmers, and the villagers. It came upon them unheralded, and seemed like a weird craft from Pluto’s realms, a transfiguration of Charon’s boat into a living fiend from the infernal regions. Its huge black pipe vomiting fire and smoke, the hoarse breathing of its engine, and the great splash of its uncovered paddle-wheels, filled the imagination with all the dark pictures of goblins that necromancers have invented since the foundation of the world. Some thought it was an unearthly monster of the sea ravaging the fresh waters; others regarded it as a herald of the final conflagration at the day of doom. Managers of river craft who saw it at night, believed that the great red dragon of the Apocalypse was loose upon the waters. Some prayed for deliverance; some fled in terror to the shore and hid in the reeds.”

In 1837 the project of establishing a permanent steamship line across the Atlantic was advanced in England at a meeting of the British Scientific Association held at Bristol. The Savannah, an American steamship of three hundred tons, had crossed the Atlantic between New York and Liverpool, partly by steam power, nearly ten years before.