FIRST OCEAN STEAMER
It was in 1807 that Robert Fulton built the Clermont and established steam navigation by running a regular service between New York and Albany, and it was twelve years later that the Atlantic Ocean was first crossed by a steam-driven vessel. It was an American vessel, the Savannah, that made the trip. She was a 380-ton ship equipped with steam power to help her along when the wind failed. Seventy-five tons of coal and twenty-five cords of kindling wood were taken aboard to feed her furnace. This was thought to be ample for the voyage, but before the trip was completed the fuel was all gone. The log of the Savannah bears this entry the night before sighting the Irish coast: “2 A. M. Calm. No cole to get up steam.” However the captain did raise steam just before reaching Kinsale, Ireland, by burning wood. Watchers ashore beholding the smoke issuing from her stack were convinced that the vessel was afire and boats were dispatched to the rescue. The Savannah made the trip from Savannah to Kinsale in 23 days and was under steam propulsion for only 80 hours of this time.
Regular trans-Atlantic steam service was not inaugurated until 1838, but for many decades steamers were equipped with sails to assist them when the wind was favorable.
The most notable of early steamships was the Great Eastern, a combined screw and paddle-wheel ship, 692 feet long, built in 1858. She held the record for size until 1899 when the Oceanic, 704 feet long, was put into service. At present the Leviathan, formerly the Vaterland, holds the record with a length of 920 feet. It is difficult to judge of the size of a vessel out on the open water. If the Leviathan were placed in Broadway, New York, she would span nearly four blocks. Because of her 100-foot beam she would be too wide to be wedged in between the skyscrapers that border lower Broadway. If she were set up on end she would tower 158 feet above the pinnacle of the Woolworth Building. Her power plant consists of four turbines which total 90,000 horsepower and the huge vessel is driven at a speed of 25.8 knots or nearly thirty miles per hour.
The wonder of these huge floating structures lies not merely in their gigantic proportions but in the fact that they are able to weather the terrific wrenching strains of heavy ocean storms. A skyscraper is built to withstand only the steady and direct pull of gravity and the variable thrust of the wind which, except in western cyclones, seldom amounts to thirty pounds per square foot. Bridge building is more difficult because of the leverage of the parts overhanging the foundations. Wind pressures must be calculated and also the live load of objects moving over the structure. In naval architecture enter the problems of building construction combined with those of bridge building, complicated by the fact that there is no fixed foundation for the structure to rest upon. At one moment a ship may be spanning a trough in the seas and at the next it may be seesawing over the crest of the wave. Of course the bottom of the boat is seldom if ever out of the water and a certain amount of support is provided throughout the length of the vessel, but the ship is subjected to the strains of a cantilever bridge when she is passing over a wave, and to the strains of a truss bridge when spanning a wave trough. These strains are increased by the fact that the structure is in constant motion. A certain degree of flexibility is demanded of the materials which go into the structure and of the joints between the frame members.