The “Clermont.”
Three years before Bell’s achievement on the Clyde, a clever American, profiting by the experiments of Symington, applied his inventive genius to perfecting the application of steam as a motive power for vessels, and gained for himself the honour of being the first to make it available for practical use on a paying basis. This was Robert Fulton, a native of Pennsylvania, born in 1765, who commenced business as a portrait painter and followed that profession for some years in France and England. He invented a number of “notions,” among the rest a submarine torpedo-boat, in which he claimed that he could remain under water for an hour and a half at a time; but failing to receive the patronage of any naval authorities, he returned to New York, and, with the assistance of Mr. John Livingstone, had a steamboat built and fitted with an English engine by Boulton & Watt, of Birmingham. The Clermont (after being lengthened) was 133 feet long, 18 feet beam, and 7½ feet deep. Her wheels were uncovered, 15 feet in diameter, with eight buckets, 4 feet long, to each wheel, and dipping 2 feet. The cylinder was 24 inches in diameter, with 4 feet stroke of piston. The boiler was of copper, 20 feet long, 7 feet wide and 8 feet high.
FULTON’S “CLERMONT” ON THE HUDSON, 1807.
The Clermont made her first voyage from New York to Albany, August 7th, 1807. Her speed was about five miles an hour. During the winter of 1807-8 she was enlarged, her name being then changed to North River. She continued to ply successfully on the Hudson as a passenger boat for a number of years, her owners having acquired the exclusive right to navigate the waters of the State of New York by steam. The Car of Neptune and the Paragon, of 300 and 350 tons, respectively, were soon added to the Fulton & Livingstone Line. Both of these vessels were fitted with English engines. The Paragon continued to ply on the Hudson for about ten years, earning a good deal of money for the owners. About 1820, while ascending the river, she ran upon a rock and became a total wreck. Other steamboats were built for other waters, and very soon there were steamers plying on all the navigable rivers of the United States available for commerce. Mr. Fulton married a daughter of Mr. Livingstone. He died in New York in 1815, at the height of his fame and prosperity.
MISSISSIPPI STEAMBOAT “J. M. WHITE,” 1878.
OHIO STEAMBOAT “IRON QUEEN,” 1882.
The contrast between Fulton’s Clermont, or Bell’s Comet and the Atlantic Liner coursing over the sea at railway speed is very striking, and scarcely less remarkable the comparison of the river steamboat of to-day with these early experiments. America has developed a type of steamboat, or rather types of steamboats, peculiarly its own. The light-draught Mississippi steamers[6] bear little resemblance to the Hudson River and Long Island Sound boats while the American steam ferry-boat is a thing certainly not of beauty, but unique. Dickens in his American Notes speaks of the Burlington, the crack steamer on Lake Champlain in the early forties, as “a perfectly exquisite achievement of neatness, elegance and order—a model of graceful comfort and beautiful contrivance.” But Dickens never saw the Priscilla. She was only launched in 1894, and is claimed to be “pre-eminently the world’s greatest inland steamer—the largest, finest and most elaborately furnished steamboat of her class to be found anywhere.” The Priscilla is 440½ feet long, 52½ feet wide, or 95 feet over the paddle-boxes. The paddle-wheels are of the feathering type, 35 feet in diameter and 14 feet face. Her light draught is 12½ feet, and her speed easily 22 miles an hour, though the ordinary service of the line does not demand such fast running. Her night’s work is 181 miles, which she covers leisurely in ten hours. She cost $1,500,000. All the interior decorations are very elaborate and handsome. In her triple row of staterooms there is luxurious sleeping accommodation for 1,500 passengers. In the spacious dining-room 325 persons may be seated at one time. The grand saloon is a magnificent spectacle, large and lofty, superbly decorated and lighted by electricity. The Priscilla has cargo capacity for 800 tons of freight. “Her machinery is not only a marvel of design and workmanship, but it fascinates all persons interested in mechanical devices.” It consists of a double inclined compound engine, with two high-pressure cylinders, each fifty-one inches in diameter, and two low pressure, each ninety-five inches in diameter, all with a stroke of eleven feet. There are ten return tubular boilers of the Scotch type, each fourteen feet in diameter and fourteen feet long, constructed for a working pressure of 150 lbs. to the square inch. The indicated horse-power is 8,500. The machinery is principally below the main deck, leaving all the space on and above this deck available for general purposes.
“PRISCILLA.”
Fall River and Long Island Sound Line, 1894.
This floating palace was built at Chester, Pa., by the Delaware Iron Ship-building and Engine Works Company. She is built of steel. Her registered tonnage is 5,398 tons. Although so vast in her proportions, the Priscilla sits on the water as lightly and gracefully as a swan. Painted white as snow outside, as nearly all American river steamers are, she presents a beautiful, you might say a dazzling, appearance; and she is only one of five magnificent steamers of the Fall River Line, all substantially alike in design and equipment, running regularly all the year round between Fall River and New York, with a perfection of service that cannot be surpassed.
“NEW YORK.”
The latest Hudson River Day Steamer, 1897.
This cut, kindly furnished by the owners, gives a faithful representation of the exterior of a very beautiful Hudson River day steamboat. The New York is built of steel, 311 feet over all, breadth of beam 40 feet, and over the guards 74 feet; average draught of water 6 feet. She combines speed, luxuriousness of furnishing and a beauty of finish in all parts that has not been surpassed on vessels of this class. She is capable of running 24 miles an hour. This boat and her consort, the Albany, are claimed to be the finest day passenger river steamers in the world. She is not crowded with 2,500 passengers, of whom 120 may sit down together to an exquisite dinner in the richly decorated dining-room.
A distinct class of steamboats peculiar to America is the ferry-boat. In one of its forms it is to be found fully developed in New York harbour, and serves to convey daily countless thousands of people whose business lies in New York City, but whose homes are on Brooklyn Heights or elsewhere on Long Island, or the New Jersey coast. The boats are very large and very ugly, but do their work admirably, being adapted for the transport of wheeled carriages of every description as well as for foot-passengers. One of the sights of New York worth seeing is a visit to the Fulton Ferry in the morning or in the evening, when the crowds are the greatest. The Robert Garrett, which runs down the bay to Staten Island, carries from 4,000 to 5,000 passengers at a trip, and is said to be the largest steam-ferry passenger boat in existence. She is owned by the Staten Island Rapid Transit Co., and cost $225,000.
Another type of ferry-boat is that which, in addition to carrying passengers, is specially adapted for railway purposes. The best specimen of this kind of steamboat is probably to be found on Lake Erie, where a pair of boats, precisely alike, keep up regular communication twice a day, summer and winter, between Coneant, Ohio, and Port Dover, Ontario. They are named Shenango, 1st and 2nd. They are each 300 feet long and 53 feet in width. On the main deck are four railway tracks, sufficient for twenty-six loaded cars each containing 60,000 lbs. of coal. On the upper deck are handsomely fitted cabins for 1,000 passengers The ferry is sixty-five miles wide. Sometimes it is pretty rough sailing, but these steamers never fail to make the round trip in thirteen hours. They are fitted with compound engines, Scotch boilers, and twin screws; they draw 12½ feet of water when loaded and run twelve miles an hour; they are prodigiously strong, and can plough their way through fields of ice with marvellous facility.
“ROBERT GARRETT,” FERRY STEAMBOAT, NEW YORK.
CHAPTER II.
EARLY YEARS OF STEAM NAVIGATION.
The Accommodation—The Savannah—Enterprise —Royal William—Liverpool—Sirius and Great Western—Great Britain and Great Eastern—The Brunels—The screw propeller.
TWO years after the Clermont had commenced to ply on the Hudson, and three years before the Comet had disturbed the waters of the Clyde, the first steamboat appeared on the St. Lawrence. The Accommodation, built by the Hon. John Molson, of Montreal, made her maiden trip to Quebec on November 3rd, 1809, carrying ten passengers, in thirty-six hours’ running time. In accordance with the usual custom, which continued for many years, she anchored at night, so that the whole time occupied in the voyage was sixty-six hours. If she ascended the St. Mary’s current, she was towed up by oxen. The length of this vessel was eighty-five feet over all, her breadth sixteen feet, her engine was of six horse-power, and her speed five miles an hour. The Accommodation was built at the back of the Molson’s Brewery, and was launched broadside on. Her engine was made by Boulton & Watt, of Birmingham, England. The fare from Montreal to Quebec by this vessel was £2 10s.; children, half price; “servants with birth (sic), £1 13s. 4d.; without birth, £1 5s.” The Quebec Mercury, announcing her arrival, remarked: “She is incessantly crowded with visitors. This steamboat receives her impulse from an open-spoked perpendicular wheel on each side, without any circular band or rim. To the end of each double spoke is fixed a square board which enters the water, and by the rotatory motion of the wheels acts like a paddle. No wind or tide can stop her.”
“JEANIE DEANS,” CLYDE STEAMBOAT.
From “Mountain, Moor and Loch,” London, 1894.
The Savannah.—In the year 1818 there was built in New York, by Messrs. Crocker and Pickett, a full-rigged sailing ship of about 350 tons, named the Savannah. She was intended to be used as a sailing packet between New York and Havre, but before she was completed she was purchased by William Scarborough & Co., a shipping firm in Savannah, who fitted her up with a steam-engine of 90 horse-power, placed on deck, and a pair of paddle-wheels enclosed with canvas coverings, so constructed that they could be folded up and taken on deck in stormy weather, and that tedious operation seems to have been gone through pretty frequently in the course of her first voyages. Her maiden trip from New York to Savannah occupied 8 days, 15 hours. She left Savannah for Liverpool under steam, May 22nd, 1819, and arrived in the Mersey, “with all sail set,” on June 20th, making the run in twenty-nine and a half days. The whole time that the engine was at work during the voyage is said to have been only eighty hours. “She hove to off the bar, waiting for the tide to rise, at 5 p.m. shipped her wheels”—so the record of the period runs—“furled her sails and steamed up the river, with American banners flying, the docks being lined with thousands of people, who greeted her arrival with cheers.” From Liverpool, the Savannah sailed up the Baltic to Stockholm and St. Petersburg. On her return voyage, on account of stormy weather, the engine was scarcely used at all until the pilot came aboard off Savannah, when the sails were furled, and with the flood-tide she steamed into port. After several voyages of a similar kind, the machinery was removed and she plied for some time as a sailing packet between New York and Savannah, and was eventually wrecked on Long Island in 1822.
Shortly after this the British Government offered a prize of £10,000 to the party who should first make a successful voyage by steam power to India. The prize was won by Captain Johnston, who sailed from England on August 16th, 1825, in the Enterprise, of 500 tons and 240 horse-power,[7] and reached Calcutta on the 7th of December. The distance run was 13,700 miles, and the time occupied 113 days, during ten of which the ship was at anchor. She ran under steam sixty-four days and consumed 580 chaldrons of coal, the rest of the voyage being under sail.
THE “SAVANNAH,” 1819.
Eight years followed without any further attempts in the direction of ocean steam navigation. There seemed to be nothing in these costly experiments that would induce capitalists to invest their money in steamships. Sailing vessels had crossed the Atlantic in much less than thirty days, and had made the voyage to India in less time than the Enterprise took to do it. It would not pay! and had not scientific men and practical engineers pronounced the idea of transatlantic steamships as Utopian and utterly impracticable? “No vessel could be constructed,” they said, “that could carry enough coal to take her across the Atlantic by steam power alone.” Some of these unbelievers lived to see the day when large ocean steamers not only carry enough coal to take them from Liverpool to New York, but actually enough for the return voyage also.