As everybody knows, the Clermont did not sink or otherwise come to grief when she started up the Hudson, August 11, 1807, for her maiden voyage to Albany. On the contrary, she made the journey, against the wind, at an average rate of nearly five miles an hour; and, with the wind again ahead, returned to New York at about the same speed. Compared with the steaming powers of the modern ocean leviathan, this was a sorry enough showing; but, with the continued success of the Clermont and her sister boats, the Raritan and the Car of Neptune,—which together constituted the world’s first regular line of steamboats,—it was sufficient to prove for all time that man had made another superb advance in the mastery of the forces of Nature.
MODEL OF ROBERT FULTON’S FIRST STEAMBOAT, THE CLERMONT
Constructed for the Hudson-Fulton celebration at New York in the fall of 1909.
INVENTOR OF THE SEWING MACHINE
BIRTHPLACE OF ELIAS HOWE
Amid these humble surroundings the inventor of the sewing machine was born at Spencer, Massachusetts, in 1819.
BEFORE THE WAR