The wonders of the world

by John Loraine Abbott

STEAM NAVIGATION.

So far as we know, the ancients were unacquainted with the nature and properties of steam. Some accounts, indeed, have come down to us, of engines of a very early date, such, for example, as that proposed by Hero, of Alexandria, in which the mechanical agency of steam was more or less used; but it does not appear that those who invented and applied these machines, understood the properties of vapor, or had any correct idea of the effect of heat when applied to liquids. Even at a much later date, the effects produced by steam were ascribed, not to the vapor of water, but to the force of the air which was supposed to be expelled from water by heat. In the seventeenth century, De Caus proposed the construction of a machine by which a column of water was raised by the elastic force of steam, but he does not seem to have understood the principle on which it was effected. About the middle of the same century, Lord Worcester published the description of a high pressure steam-engine, which has since formed so remarkable a feature in all histories of steam-engines. Toward the latter end of the century, however, the actual properties of vapor began to be more unfolded. In 1683, Sir Samuel Morland discovered the exact numerical proportion in which water increases its volume when evaporated. A few years later, Papin discovered the method of producing a vacuum by the condensation of steam; and this discovery was, by others, soon applied to mechanical purposes. About the middle of the eighteenth century, Watt applied himself to the improvement of the steam-engine; and from this time forward, the various discoveries of chemistry, and the experiments of scientific and practical men, prepared the way for rapid progress in the application of steam.

In 1793, Fulton, the celebrated engineer, engaged actively in endeavoring to improve inland navigation. Even at that early period, he had conceived the idea of propelling vessels by steam; and he speaks, in some of his manuscripts, with great confidence of its practicability. In 1797, he went to Paris, and, while there, projected the first panorama that was ever exhibited there. He also planned a submarine boat. In 1803, he completed his first steamboat, which was tried upon the Seine, and proved completely successful. He now proceeded to New York, to carry his ideas of steam navigation into practical effect; and in 1807, his first steamboat, a view of which is given in the cut beyond, ascended the Hudson river, to the great delight and wonder of thousands of spectators. She was called the Clermont; and was only one hundred feet long, twelve wide, and seven deep. Her first trip was made, September first, 1807, from New York to Albany, one hundred and sixty miles, in thirty-six hours; the fare for the passage being seven dollars, exclusive of meals. Thus this great man brought to a successful issue his long meditated invention, and determined the possibility of applying steam to navigation. Several steamboats were soon after constructed under Mr. Fulton’s directions, and also a steam-frigate. He continued to make various experiments till his death, which occurred in 1815.

FULTON’S FIRST STEAMBOAT.

Still later than this, we find a description of the Clyde steamboat, which is spoken of in an English magazine as follows: “Its extreme length is seventy-five feet, its breadth fourteen feet, and the hight of the cabins six and a half feet. She is built very flat, and draws from two feet and nine inches to three feet of water. The best or after-cabin, is twenty feet long, and is entered from the stern: between the after-cabin and the engine, a space of fifteen feet is allotted for goods. The engine is a twelve horsepower, and occupies fifteen feet; the fore-cabin is sixteen feet long, and is entered from the side. The paddles, sixteen in number, form two wheels of nine feet diameter, and four feet broad, made of hammered iron: they dip into the water from one foot and three inches to one foot and six inches. Along the outer edge of these wheels a platform and rail are formed quite round the vessel, projecting over the sides, and supported by timbers reaching down to the vessel’s side. This steamboat runs at the rate of four or four and a half miles per hour in calm weather; but against a considerable breeze, three miles only. It can accommodate two hundred and fifty passengers, and is wrought by five men. The engine consumes twelve hundred weight of coals per day. The funnel of the boiler is twenty-five feet high; and carries a square-sail twenty-two feet in breadth.”

In the same connection, we find an article published in the Monthly Magazine, by Sir Richard Phillips, with the express object of giving clear ideas of the utility of steamboats, and of quieting apprehensions as to their safety, which at the present day it is truly amusing to read. The writer says: “The groundless alarms relative to a supposed increase of danger from traveling by steam-packets, led the editor of the Monthly Magazine, within the current month, (July, 1817,) to make a voyage, in one of them, from London to Margate. This vessel left her moorings, at the Tower of London, about half past eight in the morning, at the time the tide was running strong up the river, and when no other vessel could make progress, except in the direction of the tides. The steam-packet proceeded, however, against the stream, in a gallant style, at the rate of six or seven miles an hour; and a band of music, playing lively airs on the deck, combined with the steadiness of the motion, to render the effect delightful. An examination of the steam-engine, and of her rate of working, proved that no possibility of danger exists. It appeared that the boiler had been proved at twenty-five pounds to the square inch; but that the valve was held down by a weight of only four pounds, and that the mercurial gauge did not indicate an employment of actual pressure of above two pounds and a half per square inch. Hence it follows, that, although the engine was capable of sustaining a pressure of at least twenty-five pounds, only four pounds, or less than a sixth, was the whole force which the valve would permit to be exerted; and that, in point of fact, a pressure of only two pounds and a half to the square inch, or only one-tenth of the proven power of the boiler, was employed. There is, therefore, less danger in passing some hours in contact with such a machine, than there is in sitting near a boiling tea-kettle, tea-urn, or saucepan, under circumstances in which they are often used. Opposite Greenwich, a fine commentary was afforded of the value of steam as a navigating power, in preference to winds and tides; a Margate sailing-packet passing toward London, which had been a day and two nights on its passage, a period of time which it appears is not uncommon. In short, with uninterrupted pleasure, and in an hour sooner than the captain had named at starting, the vessel was carried along-side Margate pier, having employed nine hours in performing a voyage of ninety miles. In this case it appeared, that a pressure of two pounds to the square inch, produced about forty rotations per minute of the acting water-wheels; and, as these were ten feet in diameter, the motion of the impelling floats, or wheel-paddles, would be at the rate of fifteen with, or against the stream, at an average of ten miles an hour. The consumption of coals during the voyage was less than a caldron; but it was described as amounting frequently to a caldron and a half. On the whole, nothing could be more demonstrative of the worth and security of this mode of navigation; and there can be little doubt but, in a few years, vessels of every size, and for every extent of voyage, will be provided with their steam-engine, which will be more used, and more depended upon, than winds or tides. The chances of accidents are lower than those under most other circumstances in which men are placed in traveling. By land, horses kill their thousands per annum, open chaises their hundreds, and stage-coaches their scores; and, by water, the uncertainty of winds has destroyed thousands, by prolonging the voyage, and increasing the exposure to bad weather; but in a steam-packet, navigated by an engine whose proven powers necessarily exceed what can be exerted during its use, or in general by such engines as those used on the Thames or Clyde, no accident can possibly happen; unless, by a miracle, it were to happen, that a force of four pounds should overcome a resistance of twenty-four pounds.”

From the above amusing article, we pass to notice the immense ocean steamers of the present day, as they so forcibly illustrate the progress of steam navigation. The chief lines of those with which we are familiar, are the Cunard line and the Collins line, both plying between the United States and England. Before describing them particularly, however, it should here be mentioned, that the first steamship that ever crossed the Atlantic sailed from Savannah, in Georgia, for Liverpool, on the twenty-sixth of May, 1819, and made the voyage in twenty-two days. She was telegraphed at Liverpool as “a ship on fire” and a revenue-cutter was dispatched to her relief, when the officers and crew of the latter were struck with astonishment at not being able to overtake a vessel under bare poles. At Liverpool, and afterward at Copenhagen, Stockholm, and St. Petersburg, whither she went, she was visited by crowds of wondering people; and at the latter place a service of plate was presented to her officers. She was commanded by Captain Rodgers, of New London, Conn., and some of her officers are still living. After this, it was a long time before another steamship crossed the Atlantic. At last, however, the experiment was again and still again tried, until now the ocean is constantly traversed by the huge steamers above alluded to, in the average time of about eleven days and a half, though the passage has been made, in some single cases, in a little over nine days.

A good idea of these ocean steamers may be formed from the view given of one of them in the cut below, in connection with the following description of the Baltic, belonging to the Collins line.

AN OCEAN STEAMER.

The Baltic is of thirty-two hundred tuns’ burden, carpenter’s measure; in length, two hundred and eighty-seven feet; breadth of beam, forty-six feet; depth of hold, thirty-two feet; to the top of the gunwale, thirty-four feet and six inches. The diameter of her wheels is thirty-six feet; the number of floats, (corresponding to the buckets or paddles of a common water-wheel,) twenty-six in each wheel; their length, twelve feet and a half; their breadth, twenty-eight, and their thickness, three inches and a half; each float being armed with three hundred pounds of iron, so that it requires six men to lift it. The engine has two working cylinders, each ninety-six inches in diameter; the length of their stroke is ten feet; and the number of revolutions is from eleven to fourteen in a minute. The vacuum is equivalent to fourteen pounds upon the square inch; a near approximation to a perfect vacuum, which corresponds to fifteen pounds on the square inch. The pressure of steam is from twelve to twenty pounds upon the square inch; usually from twelve to fifteen pounds; this is all the amount of the power tending to produce explosion, while including what is gained by the vacuum, the effective motive power is equivalent to twenty-six, twenty-nine and thirty-four pounds on the square inch. The highest pressure used in an ordinary passage may be about eighteen pounds, equivalent to a working force of thirty-two pounds; and the lowest about seven or eight pounds, giving a moving force of twenty-one or twenty-two pounds. The ability of the boilers corresponds to fifty pounds, and with the addition of the vacuum, to sixty-four pounds; it follows, therefore, that they are generally worked with less than half their power. The entire weight of the steam machinery is one thousand tuns, and it occupies sixty feet in the length of the ship.

As to capacity for passengers, there are one hundred and sixty berths, aside from the accommodations for the people of the ship. As to strength of structure, the timbers are fitted side by side, and calked so tight that it was said the ship would float even before she was planked. Plates of iron six inches wide and an inch and a quarter thick, are let, obliquely, into the timbers at the distance of twenty-eight inches from the centers of each, and therefore they are twenty-two inches apart. These are crossed obliquely by other bars or plates of the same dimensions, which are let into the boards or planks that are nailed over them. Copper bolts, for twenty feet from the keel, pass through the plates of iron at their intersection, and in many other places, and copper sheathing covers eighteen feet of the lower part of the hull, the draught being nineteen feet, and twenty with the coal in. The ships of this line are as strong as wood, iron and copper can make them, and they hardly leak at all. They would bear long thumping upon the rocks before they would go to pieces. The movement of the machinery, and the stroke of the waves, produce scarcely a perceptible tremor, and not the slightest deviation in the deck from a right line can be seen, when viewed horizontally from stem to stern through its length of nearly three hundred feet. No opening of a joint is perceived even in the beams that form the capping of the gunwale; a knife-blade can not be passed between their contiguous ends.

The machinery rests on an iron bed-plate, on the keelson, or engine bed; and the bed-plate, which is cast in one piece, weighs forty tuns. The machinery is below, and is invisible from the deck, except through certain doors. A wave can hardly reach it at all, even should it break over the ship; and by closing the apertures above, the engine room is safe from flooding, while ventilation is secured by large tubes, having their orifices higher than the upper or promenade deck. The people below, on the level of the keelson, where there is little motion, hardly know when there is a storm above; they live in a comparatively quiet world of their own, and always in a tropical climate, even when among icebergs. The working of the machinery is admirable. It travels onward with the greatest ease and regularity; even with a heavy head-wind and opposing waves, it moves like clockwork, without apparent labor, throwing up its mighty arms and moving its ponderous levers as if there were no weight to be lifted, or vis inertiæ to be overcome. By observations made up to the tenth day of one of the passages, there had not been the slightest leak of steam, nor had it been necessary to turn a screw, although for several days together there was a heavy head-sea, impelled by adverse winds. Except the effect of hidden flaws in the immense masses of wrought iron that form some of the principal moving parts, there seems to be little cause for anxiety, as the machinery appears to be, in general, equal to every emergency.

Danger from fire, is always a subject of anxiety; but in ships protected as the Baltic is, the danger is believed to be less than in a sailing ship. The engine room is lined with iron; the boilers and their furnaces are everywhere surrounded by that metal and by water, and no wood is in a position to be unduly heated. All lights, except those necessary to the management of the ship, are extinguished at eleven o’clock; many people are up all night, and are about in every place; there are fire-engines always ready to flood the ship, and they are adapted so as to be wrought both by hand and by steam power. The behavior of the Baltic as a sea-boat, is admirable in every variety of weather. This immense vessel rides upon the waves like a duck, and has, in general, a dry and comfortable deck, rarely shipping a sea, although the spray dashes over the forecastle in showers. The ship is warmed by steam tubes, passing under the marble tables. More than fifty persons are employed about the machinery, of whom forty-eight attend to the coal and the fires, and there are six or eight engineers. There are between thirty and forty servants, twenty or twenty-five sailors, and three or four supernumerary officers; in all, about one hundred and forty, besides passengers. The style and furnishing of the Baltic are elegant, rich enough for a nobleman’s villa. Of mirrors, large and small, there are about fifty; indeed, they are in such excess that a passenger can not look in any direction without meeting his own image or the faces of his companions. The tables of these steamers are amply supplied, and have the best attendance; and of luxuries, there seems to be no end. The saloons of these steamers are fitted up in superb style. Some of the table-covers are of beautiful variegated marble, and the panels around are finely decorated with emblems of the various American states. The cabin-windows are of beautiful painted glass, embellished with the arms of various American cities. There are large circular glass ventilators reaching from the deck to the lower saloon. There is a rich and elegant ladies’ drawing-room near the chief saloon, and there are berths for about one hundred and fifty passengers. Each berth has a bell-rope communicating with one of Jackson’s patented American annunciators. Crossing the ocean in one of these steamers, some one has said, is no cross at all!

Such are the present ocean steamers; and yet even these immense structures will soon be thrown in the background by steamers of still vaster dimensions. For the Edinburgh Journal gives an account of an immense iron steamer, now (1855) being constructed for the Australian trade, which will far surpass them. The actual measurements of this leviathan vessel are, six hundred and seventy-five feet long, eighty-three feet wide at her greatest breadth of beam, and sixty feet deep in the hold, forming four decks. She will be furnished with paddle-wheels and a screw, the former of a nominal power of one thousand horses, the latter of sixteen hundred horses; but practically, the combined power may be estimated at three thousand horses. The four cylinders in which the pistons are to work, are the largest in the world; each of them weighs twenty-eight tuns. When they are lying on the ground, a man, with his hat on, may walk through them without touching the upper side. The engines, when erected and put together, will be upward of fifty feet in hight. The weight of the entire machinery will be about three thousand tuns, and of the hull, ten thousand tuns, making thirteen thousand tuns. She will carry several thousand tuns of coal and merchandise, sixteen hundred passengers, and her measurement capacity gives about twenty-five thousand tuns’ burden! Notwithstanding, her draught of water will be but small, not exceeding twenty feet when light, and thirty feet when fully loaded. She will carry five or six masts, and five funnels. Her cost will be about eighteen hundred thousand dollars. She will carry coal enough for a voyage round the world, and is built upon a model to insure great speed. Her ordinary speed is expected to be eighteen or twenty miles an hour. She is expected to make the voyage from England to Australia in thirty days, and return by Cape Horn in thirty days more; thus making the circuit of the globe in two months.

More wonderful still, it is said that Mr. Vanderbilt, of New York, is about building an immense steamer, which is to be eight hundred feet in length, and of corresponding proportions throughout, which of course will surpass even the huge steamship just described. Where the rivalry and enterprise in this matter are to end, who can tell?