THE STORY OF THE STEAMSHIP.*
THE evolution of the liner has been so rapid that some of the problems which confronted and perplexed the designers and engineers of half-a-century ago have almost passed out of memory. The story, therefore, will bear retelling, especially when it comes to us presented by a guide so lucid and so instructive as Mr. Chatterton. Early in his book he dis- cusses Fulton's experiments at some length (Robert Fulton, of Little Britain, Pennsylvania, 1765-1815), and shows us that his great merit lay in his carefulness, his thoroughness, his painstaking comparison of other men's experiments. There was nothing in the Clermont,' it may be said, that was the man's own invention; but then, on the other hand, no one else could have put all the parts together in one vessel ana made that vessel a commercial success. This may be a commonplace test ; but it is a very useful one, which early essays seldom satisfy. As a matter of fact, the
Clermont' paid 5 per cent. on her capital in her very first season. Her designer manifestly had common-sense as well as courage.
After the motive-power came the material ; the next great step in steamship progress was the use of iron. The Great
Britain,' one of Brunei's ideas, if not the first iron steamship, was from her size a novel and daring departure. Moreover, she was specially strengthened longitudinally, had transverse bulkheads, which divided her into five water-tight compart- ments, and bilge keels. She had also iron railings with netting instead of the old wooden bulwarks. This last was an improvement of which the importance may not appear at first sight. The bulwarks held a heavy sea if it had been shipped, sometimes drowning a man on his own deck, to say nothing of the deadly danger to the ship's buoyancy. Finally, though the motive-power remained the same, it was differently applied. The screw replaced the paddle-wheel. The most ingenious of modern engineers must envy the man whom circumstances enabled to bring such novelties together in one vessel.
Brunei's next important experiment was the designing, in conjunction with Scott Russell, of the ' Victoria,' whose slim lines were characteristic of the true "liner." But she soon had to give way to the Oceanic,' launched in 1870. It was an innovation to have a beam one-seventh only of her length, but the Oceanic' had ten beami to her length, and she had may seem a more trifling detail than it is—that great comfort of the sea-passenger, revolving armchairs. The paddle-wheel era may be said to have ended when the Scotia'
• (1) Steamships and ther.Story. ' .By Chatterton. •LotidOu'l Cassell:
and. Phi. net.]—(.1Steam/lops and their Story. By B. A. Fletcher.. "Loaden ;'SidgInck and Jackson: [16s.' net.] was launched in 1862; but the " side-wheeler " did not imme- diately disappear. The screw, it must be remembered, was as old as Fulton, but the invention had suffered temporary eclipse. Another step was the substitution of steel for iron. In 1881 the Cunarder Servia,' built of steel, was launched. The triumph of the new material has been complete. In 1909, Mr. Chatterton tells us, no hulls were built of iron, and the output of wooden shipping was limited to a few hundred tons. All the remaining millions were steel. The sobriquet of "Greyhound of the Atlantic" was first given to the Oregon,' with her eighteen knots in the hour. She had the ill luck to be sunk by a sailing ship. But her successors were more than equal. Perhaps the best-known steamships of any line were the Etruria ' and the 'Umbria,' craft which have done an extraordinary amount of work, while giving their owners as little uneasiness as possible. Yet another move was the launching by the Inman Company of their twin-screw "liners." The company had the distinction, it will be remem- bered, of launching the first screw "liner." Then came the Teutonic' and the Majestic.' Nor must the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse' be forgotten, nor Oceanic IL,' which exceeded by a few feet the length of the Great Eastern.' Finally we are told of the turbine-driven giants of to-day. Mr. Chatterton has other information to give us, and he supplies an abundance of effective illustrations which should appeal to the reader, whether he be expert or layman.
Mr. R. A. Fletcher has written on the same subject a volume which claims to be the companion to Mr. Chatterton's Sailing Ships and their Story. The details and illustrations of early American steamships are especially interesting ; we see how much attention the subject of steam navigation was attracting in the States a hundred years ago. Full treatment is also given to the experiments in warship-building as well as to the development of steam-power in our own Navy. If we are to compare the two volumes, we may say that the collection and illustration of miscellaneous types of steam. ships of all ages is certainly more comprehensive in Mr. Fletcher's work, though not impossibly the very abundance of his material may hinder the uninitiated reader from getting as clear a view as he may obtain from Mr. Chatterton's more fluent and better-arranged narrative. Mr. Fletcher's details are sometimes more pertinent to company history than to the development of marine engineering. Excellent as many of his chapters are, they might have been improved by condensa- tion, if only out of regard to the too common weakness of the human memory. One volume may be preferred for general reading, the other for purposes of reference. Both are well worthy of a great subject.
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