CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

In my previous book, “Sailing Ships and Their Story,” which, indeed, this present volume is meant to follow as a complement of the story of the development of the ocean carrier, I ventured to submit the proposition that a nation exhibits its exact state of progress and degree of refinement in three things: its art, its literature, and its ships; so that the development of the ship goes on side by side, and at the same rate, as the development of the State. And if this was found to be true with regard to the vessel propelled by sails, it will be seen that the same can be affirmed with no less truth in respect of the steamship.

In setting out on our present intention to trace the story of the steamship from its first beginnings to the coming of the mammoth, four-funnelled, quadruple-screw, turbine liners of to-day, it is not without importance to bear the above proposition in mind. For though the period occupied by the whole story of the steamer is roughly only about a hundred years, yet these hundred years represent an epoch unequalled in history for wealth of invention, commercial progress, and industrial activity. The extraordinary development during these years, alone, not merely of our own country and colonies, but of certain other nations--of, for instance, the United States of America, of Germany, of Japan--has been as rapid as it has been thorough. Consequently, if our proposition were correct, we should expect to find that the rate of development in the ship had been commensurate. Nor have we any cause for disappointment, for as soon as we commence to reckon up the achievements made in art and literature during the nineteenth, and the first decade of the twentieth centuries, and to compare the rate of progress of the ship during this same period, it seems at first not a little difficult to realise that so much should have been accomplished in so short a time.

When the inhabitant of the Stone Age had succeeded in putting an edge on his blunt stone implement, he had instantly “broken down a wall that for untold ages had dammed up a stagnant, unprogressive past, and through the breach were let loose all the potentialities of the future civilisation of mankind.” It is by no means an unfitting simile if I suggest that we liken the invention of steam to the discovery of the potentialities of the edge. Until the coming of the former we may well say that progress, as we now know it, remained stagnant, at any rate in respect of _rapid_ movement. Omitting other uses for steam not pertinent to our present subject, we may affirm that in annihilating space, in quickly bridging over the trackless expanse of oceans, steamships have succeeded in accelerating the development of the countries of the world.

Ever since the time when primitive man first learned to harness the wind in his navigation of the waters of the earth, there had always been sailing vessels of some sort. For, at any rate, 8,000 years there is a chain of evidence illustrating one kind of sailing craft or another, and the work of later centuries was but to improve and increase the capabilities of the sailing vessels handed down from one generation to the other. But with the first experiments in steamships it was quite different. Here was a case of experimenting, with but few data on which to rely. For, granted that already some knowledge had been collected concerning the capabilities of steam, and notwithstanding the fact that a great deal more knowledge was extant concerning the art of shipbuilding, yet the condition of relationship between ships and steam was unknown, untried. How to generate the maximum of steam power at the lowest cost; how to apply this power in such a manner as to cause the hull to go through the water at a fair pace; whether the propelling power should find its expression at the side or the extremity of the ship--these and many other problems could be solved, not by previous history, but simply and solely by experimenting, as the primitive man had solved the problem of the mast and sail in their relation to the wind.

And yet it was scarcely probable that the value of the sail, which had been appreciated for so many thousands of years, should be suddenly found worthless. Inventions are no sooner born than they find themselves compelled in their weak infancy to fight for their lives against the militant conservatism of established custom. Seamen-descendants of ages and ages of seamen, themselves the most conservative of any section of society, were not likely to believe so readily that pipes and boilers were going to do as much for the ship as spars and sails. Nor, in fact, did they all at once. But something had to come as a greater propelling power than uncertain wind. For the world in the early part of this hundred years was waking up again after the dull Georgian period. It was perhaps rather a new birth--another Renaissance. Soon it began to get busy, and speed, not repose, became the general cry, whose noise is heard now louder and louder each day on land as well as sea. Every known device of the architect and builder was employed to coax additional knots out of the sailing ship: all the improvements in sails and gear were utilised to this purpose. As the result of these demands the magnificent clippers doing their marvellous passages homewards evolved. But that was all too slow. Passengers and freights were in a hurry to get from shore to shore, and, later, perishable food supplies could not be entrusted to the sailing ship. And so, when once the steamship had appeared, even though not as a pronounced success, yet the spirit of the times was such that she should be encouraged as being likely to satisfy the cravings of an

## active, restless age.

In the history of human progress we find everywhere exemplified a continuous effort through centuries and centuries of change to obtain an end with the least expenditure of labour. It is one of the most striking characteristics of our nature that we proceed along that road offering the least resistance and requiring the smallest amount of endeavour. Not more true is this assertion to-day than in the ages which have sunk into oblivion, and but for this human instinct, or failing, the progress of the world would have been impossible. The prehistoric man found the action of paddling his dug-out so irksome and wearying that he invented the sail as a means of harnessing the wind to do his work, and, as a result, what does the world not owe to his apparent laziness? How else would new countries have been discovered and peopled, commerce extended to nations beyond the seas, untilled areas made to yield their fruitful produce, and wealth amassed by production and exchange of commodities? It was not until Europe had at last begun to build her big caravels and caracks, and to learn how to handle them with adequate seamanship, that the art of navigation advanced so far as to enable Columbus to sail across the Atlantic, and to lay the foundation of the prosperity of the New World. To have attained such a feat by the means of physical propulsion would have been impossible; it was only by the invention of the sail and the perfection of the sailing ship after many centuries of experimenting that this came about. For man’s endurance is hedged in by stern limits. He can only work for part of the day, and he must eat and sleep. But by yoking the wind to the sail the voyage could be continued without the necessity for plying the oar, and most of the crew could be below at their rest or their meals.

But the sailing ship, too, has her limitations. When the wind drops her range of usefulness automatically ends. When the wind becomes contrary, or rises in sufficient fierceness as to become a gale, the sailing ship again loses some of her utility, whilst tides and currents in like manner combine to impede her advance from one port to another. And so, realising all these harassing circumstances, man has ever had a desire to shake himself free from such irritating restrictions, to assert his own independence of winds and seas and tides, and to steer his ships where he liked, and as fast as he liked with the minimum effort.

And yet he has been a very long time indeed finding the means of rising superior to the forces of Nature. He has had to fight very hard against heavy odds, he has had to devise no end of ingenious methods, most of which have been utterly useless, and many a man, overjoyed at his discovery of a sure means of overcoming the problem of propelling craft without sails or oars, has found at the last that in practice it was unworkable or too costly. Some have died from sheer want through sacrificing their all to this one end; others, rendered more sensitive by the ridicule and scorn of their fellow-men, have, on witnessing their own failure, died of a broken heart, and been reckoned by the least discerning as among those who wasted their lives in pursuing a shadow, frittered their time and money in seeking to attain the unattainable, and left behind them no monument except a pile of unworkable propositions and theories.

But no generation is at any time of its career independent. From its first moments it is under a debt to those which have come and gone. Literature is but a collection of data amassed by our predecessors and handed down to the next age, which adds a little more to what is already known. It is scarcely possible to point to one man and say that he alone was the inventor of any new theory or device, although in carelessness we actually so speak. His own conclusions have been based on the accumulation of what his predecessors have left for him; and it is the same with the invention of the steamship. Some writers of different nationalities have patriotically upheld one man or another as the father of the steamship with a zeal that does more credit to their national loyalty than to their sense of historical fairness. In point of fact, although in different epochs one man has been more successful in practical experiment than another, we cannot, at any rate in the history of the steamship, give to that man a place of honour to the exclusion of all those who have gone before. Without their help he would never have succeeded. Their failures, even if they left him little to work on, at least showed him what to avoid. As an example we might here cite the instance of using a propeller shaped after the manner of a duck’s foot, which, being a close copy of the method employed by a species of animal which has its being on the surface of the water, appealed powerfully to more than one inventor as the likely way to solve a great problem; just as the early days of aviation were wasted in endeavouring to follow too closely the methods of locomotion adopted by birds. The years of man are but threescore and ten, and he cannot go on wasting his allotted time in trying and discarding all the experiments possible; but from the disordered mass of accumulated data he can extract just those which have any semblance of sound sense and practicability, from which he can deduce his own new theory and put it to actual test.

Because, then, of this mutual inter-dependence we shall give the palm to no individual, but endeavour to show how, step by step, the ship has shaken herself free of entire slavery to the wind, one age helping her a little in her ambition, others sending her forward farther still towards her goal. Chance plays so curious a game with progress. A genius may spring up too early or too late to be appreciated. He may be hailed as a dangerous lunatic or as a benefactor of mankind, according to whether the time was ripe for his appearance.

Papin, as we shall see presently, was born out of due season. His fellow-men did not want his steamer, so they smashed it to pieces. Solomon de Caus, who showed that he knew more about the application of steam than anyone who had ever lived, was shut up as a madman, whereas Fulton, another man of rare genius and wonderful fertility of invention, has recently had his centenary celebrated and fêtes in his memory held, lest the recollection of his great gift to mankind should be easily forgotten. But Fulton was just the kind of man to acknowledge his dependence on the work of his predecessors, and, in fact, did this in so many words when he was being denounced by a rival inventor. Desblanc, a Frenchman, pretended that his was the prior invention, but Fulton wisely replied that if the glory of having invented the steamboat belonged to anyone, it belonged not to himself nor to Desblanc, but to the Marquis de Jouffroy, who had obtained a success with his steamer on the Saône twenty years before. And the designers and builders of the _Mauretania_ and _Lusitania_ to-day would be among the first to admit that such achievements as these mammoth ships are but the results of all that has gone before: in other words, it is evolution rather than sudden invention.

Genius is the exclusive possession of no particular nation, still less of any particular age: but it needs just that happy condition of opportunity which means so little or may mean so much. And the more we realise that this is so, and that it is even possible for two men, separated by thousands of miles, to be working at the same scientific problem and to arrive at similar solutions at about the same date (as happens more than once in the story of the steamship), so much more quickly shall we approach a fair and impartial verdict in assessing praise to whom praise is due. All the mutual recriminations and slanders, all the long years of law-suits, and the pain and grief to both parties in several instances regarding their rival claims for priority of invention of the essential characteristics of the steamboat, might have been thus avoided. Coincidence is a recognisable factor, and when men’s minds are at one particular time more keenly set on bringing about a craft capable of moving without sails or oars, and working with the same historical data before them, it is, in fact, more probable than improbable that the same conclusions will be arrived at by men who have never seen each other, nor availed themselves of each other’s secrets.

There had always been a feeling that some means other than sails or oars could be found for ship-propulsion, but it was not until the possibilities of steam had begun to be appreciated that the idea of a mechanically-propelled ship took on any practical form. Thus we might divide our study into two separate sections. The first would consist of all those vessels propelled by some mechanism moved by man or beast: in other words, by physical strength employed to turn a paddle-wheel or other arrangement. The other section would include all those efforts to turn the machinery, not by physical, but by steam force. The first dates from a time almost as old as the ship herself; the second in actual success covers, as we have already said, a space of about a hundred years only, but the first efforts date from the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Papin performed his historic achievement.

For years and centuries man has longed to be able to navigate the air, and to this end he has tried all shapes and kinds of balloons, yet he is always more or less dependent on the currents of the sky. But the recent jump from years of failure to marvellous success is due as much to the collateral invention and development of the motor. It was chance that caused the aeroplane and the motor industry to develop simultaneously, and yet but for the latter the former could not have advanced. It is much the same with the evolution of the steamship. It was only after Solomon de Caus had, early in the seventeenth century, published his treatise on the application of steam as a means for elevating water, and the Marquis of Worcester, in 1663, had published his description of “An admirable and most forcible way to drive up water by fire,” that Papin was able to supply the key to the question of the mechanical propulsion of ships. Even if it were possible to prove that he had never acquainted himself with the theories of de Caus and the Marquis of Worcester, that argument would avail but little, for the solution was bound to come sooner or later; it was inevitable. There must be, man reasoned, some means for propelling a ship along the water other than by sails or oars. The Chinese had been working at the idea, the Romans had at least attempted it; through the Middle Ages there had been actually accredited instances, and so the eighteenth century was not too soon for its accomplishment. Thus, when Papin determined to apply steam power to vessels, he was just one of those many benefactors of the world who have succeeded by means of Nature to overcome Nature: by employing fire and water to overcome water and space.

Let us, then, turn to the next chapter and see something more of the different methods which were tried before the satisfaction of full and undoubted success rewarded man in his struggle against the limits to his freedom. As this is a history rather of steamships than of all kinds of mechanically-propelled craft, we must examine not all the ingenious theories and the wild conceptions which many minds in many ages have conceived for propelling ships by mechanical means other than steam (for with those alone we could fill this book), but having shown something of the main principles which underlay these, we shall pass on to tell, for the benefit of the general reader, something of the vicissitudes through which has passed that swift and majestic creature which carries him across vast oceans and broad turbulent channels, as well as the peaceful waters of the land-locked lake and river. For this reason, while not omitting anything that shall contribute to the better understanding of the story, we shall omit from our study such technical details and theories as came to nothing practical and, notwithstanding their importance in fashioning the future of the steamship, are of less interest to the average reader than to the shipbuilder and engineer. Modern activity is now so rapid; event follows event so quickly; the ship of yesterday is already made obsolescent by a newer type, that we cannot fairly be accused of living too near the period to obtain an accurate perspective. Whether steamships will flourish much longer, or whether they will in turn be surpassed, as they have ousted the sailing ship, is a debatable proposition. At any rate, to anyone who has at heart one of the greatest and most powerful forces in the spread of civilisation, the story of steamship evolution, from comparative inutility to a state of efficiency which is remarkable even in this wonder age, cannot but appeal with an attractiveness commensurate with its importance.

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