After a number of trials, this ship, which was named the Savannah, crossed the Atlantic in 1819 taking twenty-five days from Savannah, Georgia, to Liverpool. The passage attracted much attention, even though the ship had been under power for only a part of the time. This did not prove, however, that her engines were not capable of more extended operation. They were stopped for the excellent reason that the fuel ran out. While this voyage created widespread interest it also suggested to the wits of the day the necessity for a fleet of sailing ships to accompany the steamers of the future in order to keep them supplied with fuel.
Later, when the Savannah returned to America, her engines were removed, but she had served a useful turn, and she is accepted as the first steam-driven ship to cross the Atlantic.
With this mark to shoot at, the progress of steamships became more rapid, although for sixty years most of them that were intended for deep-sea work carried masts and spars from which sails could be spread.
ROBERT FULTON’S CLERMONT
The first completely successful steamboat ever built. Others built before the Clermont were made to go, but this ship carried passengers for years.
Confidence in steam grew slowly, and with reason, for the engines were anything but reliable, safety appliances were unknown or inadequately understood, and steam-driven vessels often broke down, or worse still, blew up. So common was this latter happening that an advertisement that appeared in an American paper enlarged upon it. The notice went on to say that there had been much talk about the explosions that had taken place on the vessel that was being advertised but that that was no cause for alarm for “not a passenger has been injured.”
The engines were single-cylinder affairs, with their parts, more often than not, improperly designed and imperfectly machined. Good lubricants were unknown and proper lubrication was almost impossible, with the result that parts wore out and shrieked dismally at their treatment. The boilers were crudely made of iron, riveted together by hand, so that leaking seams were, apparently, the rule, when any pressure was generated. Pressure gauges were long in coming and the safety valves worked so imperfectly that the engineer’s first notice of any excess pressure was often the bursting of a steam pipe, the further widening of a leaking seam, or, worse still, the sudden, and sometimes tragic, eruption of the whole boiler.
Then, too, another trouble affected the boilers. They were, more often than not, unprotected from the weather, and, their design being of the simplest, it was difficult, when the temperature was low, to get up enough pressure to operate the crude engines. They burned wood, at first, and ate cords of it, so that frequent stops were necessary in order to secure more fuel. There were no condensers, and so steamboats that sailed on salt water often ran out of fresh water for their boilers. Furthermore, good insulation had not been developed, and occasionally, when the perverse machines seemed ideally happy, when the cylinder energetically turned the awkward paddle-wheels with a will, to the tune of creaking bearings, clanking joints, and hissing steam, the whole vessel was thrown into a furor, the engine was stopped, the passengers and crew were forced to turn to in an effort to save the ship from some fire or other, started by a red-hot fire box, or a burning ember from the funnel.
