All would be charmed with towage by steam, if done with economy, dispatch, regularity and safety; but quite another feeling prevails under the suggestions of changing drivers for engineers, stables for engine-rooms, horses for machinery, and light cargos for full ones, as in case of converting the horse-boat to a steamer.
Steam, as used for towing purposes, would be acceptable and subservient to the several thousand boatmen constantly in service.
If we give to the automaton system of steam any privileges over horse-boats—excepting for incidental initiatory encouragement to steam—we have a war of the many against the few. In the former era the double toll system was obliged to be suspended, and the no-toll system of this era is only a temporary sufferance.
Therefore, steam must stand or fall by its own merits, and should be fostered and developed until horses possess no competitive ability.
Canal Necessities.
The history of the experiments for means of propulsion on our canals shows that no system has been developed by means of which the carrying power of these great channels of communication can be made available by steam. If this deplorable fact is to be overcome, it must be through the aid of the inventor; we must have some instruments of propulsion not hitherto in use, and some other means of application of the propelling power than those now in practice, or steam can never be sufficiently utilized to supersede horses on canals.
We see the New York and Albany tow-boats, with from twenty to forty loaded canal boats, running at four miles per hour, and they have taken over sixty boats in a single tow from New York to Albany. But an engine, with a respectable part of their steam, can take but a small fraction of their boats, and at a largely reduced speed on the canal.
The doom of 1845, of 1858 to '62, and of 1871 to '72, hangs over steam like a shroud; it is a mechanical doom. Steam should be mechanically elevated so that it can utilize from a third to half of its power, and so that an engine can develop an equivalent of thirty to fifty horses on the tow-path to a train of boats, and so that it can take trains of ten to fifteen boats on the two sixty-miles levels—where large hulls can be built and used without necessity of passing locks—and somewhat smaller trains on the other parts of the canal, averaging eight to ten boats per tug, or moving from 70,000 to 80,000 bushels of corn, all as fast as they can be safely handled, and then the day of horses is limited, and canals will need new arrangements, new regulations and new customs.
Tugs on the canal have never exceeded a utility of eight to fifteen per cent. of the inherent power of their steam. Hence, they have never had towing power to develop the movement of trains of boats; but when they can be made mechanically to utilize from thirty to fifty per cent., the train movement becomes initiated with boats just as absolutely as with cars, and the tow-boat system will be just as prominently and universally established between Buffalo and Albany as it is between New York and Albany.
It is perfectly practical for steam, when it shall possess a respectable mechanical adaptation to canal duty; that is, when it shall not be so shamefully profligate in expenditures of power—to double the average speed of horses, or lessen the general average of ten days on the canal to five days, of which the down trips may overrun and the up trips fall short, as with horse average.