The Clermont on the Hudson
The first steamboat in the West was built at Pittsburg in 1811, and within a few years after the first trip of the Clermont, steamboats were being used on all the leading rivers of the country.
From the earliest times men had sailed the seas, but their ships were small and slow and subject to wind, tide, and current. The success of the river steamboat led to the use of steam in ocean navigation. The first steamship to cross the Atlantic was the Savannah, in 1818. The vessel relied almost as much upon wind as upon steam for motive power, but during the voyage of twenty-five days steam was used on eighteen days.
The wood required for fuel left little room in the vessel for freight. With the advent of coal for fuel, and better machinery, steamships grew in importance, and in 1837 two ships, the Sirius and the Great Western, crossed the Atlantic from Liverpool to New York with the use of steam alone. By 1850 the average time for a trans-Atlantic voyage had been reduced to eleven or twelve days.
The Lusitania of the Cunard Line
If the old Savannah could be placed beside the Lusitania, the giantess of the Cunard line of ocean steamers, a comparison would demonstrate the triumphs of the century in ocean navigation. If you were to cross the ocean on the Lusitania or her sister-ship the Mauretania, you would enter a vast floating mansion seven hundred ninety feet long, eighty-eight feet wide, eighty-one feet high from keel to boat deck, and weighing thirty-two thousand five hundred tons. Her height to the mastheads is two hundred sixteen feet; each of her three anchors weighs ten tons; and her funnels are so large that a trolley car could easily run through them. The Lusitania has accommodation for three thousand passengers, officers, and crew, and is driven by mighty turbine engines of sixty-eight thousand horse power. The steamer was built at a cost of $7,500,000. She has traveled the three thousand miles across the Atlantic in about four and a half days—the quickest trans-Atlantic voyage ever made. She moves through the great waves of the ocean with such steadiness that passengers can scarcely tell whether they are on water or land. A telephone system connects all parts of the ship; there are electric elevators, a special nursery in which children may play; a gymnasium for exercise, shower baths, and an acre and a half of upper deck. There are five thousand electric lights, requiring two hundred miles of wire. Wireless telegraphy flashes messages to the moving ship from distant parts of the world, and bears back greetings from her passengers. A daily illustrated newspaper of thirty-two pages is published on board ship.
CHAPTER IV