He determined to build a steamboat. At first sight there does not seem to be much connection between baths and steamboats, but apparently it was the ownership of the one which led Henry Bell to build the other, and to become the first man in Great Britain who used a steamboat for what may be called public and commercial purposes.
She was a queer craft. Her funnel was bent and was used also as a mast, and she poured forth quantities of thick smoke. But she was successful, and laboured along at the rate of five miles an hour. Up and down the river she plied, and whatever else she did, or did not, she made the good folk of those days understand that steam could be applied to navigation.
She was called the Comet, not because, even in the opinion of her owner, she resembled a blazing meteor, but because, to use Bell’s own words, “she was built and finished the same year that a comet appeared in the north-west part of Scotland.”
“Whatever made you think of starting a steamship?” we can imagine a friend asking him as they stood on the bank and watched the Comet with her paddles shaped like malt shovels, splashing up the water.
“Partly it was Miller’s experiments, and partly it was a letter from Fulton. You know, Fulton has put the Clermont successfully on American waters. He had been over here talking with Symington, who had a steamer on the Forth and Clyde Canal you remember, and he wrote to me also asking about machinery and requesting me to inquire about Miller’s boats, and send him drawings.”
“And did you?”
“Oh ay, I did; but when he replied afterwards that he had made a steamboat from the drawings though requiring some improvements, I thought how absurd it was to send my opinions to other countries and not put them into practice in our own.”
“So you made the Comet?”
“Well, I made a number of models before I was satisfied; but when I was convinced the idea would work, I made a contract with John Wood & Co., of Port-Glasgow, and they built me this boat, which I fitted up with engine and paddles, as you see. John Robertson actually set up the engine. We will go aboard presently, and you shall see her.”