It was natural that the restless mind of the American, untrammeled by traditions and impatient of convention, should turn eagerly and early to the question of crossing the ocean by steam. When the rivers had been made busy highways for puffing steamboats; when the Great Lakes, as turbulent as the ocean, and as vast as the Mediterranean, were conquered by the new marine device; when steamships plied between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Savannah, and Charleston, braving what is by far more perilous than mid-ocean, the danger of tempests on a lee shore, and the shifting sands of Hatteras, there seemed to the enterprising man no reason why the passage from New York to Liverpool might not be made by the same agency. The scientific authorities were all against it. Curiously enough, the weight of scientific authority is always against anything new. Marine architects and mathematicians proved to their own satisfaction at least that no vessel could carry enough coal to cross the Atlantic, that the coal bunkers would have to be bigger than the vessel itself, in order to hold a sufficient supply for the furnaces. It is a matter of history that an eminent British scientist was engaged in delivering a lecture on this very subject in Liverpool when the "Savannah," the first steamship to cross the ocean, steamed into the harbor. It is fair, however, to add that the "Savannah's" success did not wholly destroy the contention of the opponents of steam navigation, for she made much of the passage under sail, being fitted only with what we would call now "auxiliary steam power." This was in 1819, but so slow were the shipbuilders to progress beyond what had been done with the "Savannah," that in 1835 a highly respected British scientist said in tones of authority: "As to the project which was announced in the newspapers, of making the voyage from New York to Liverpool direct by steam, it was, he had no hesitation in saying, perfectly chimerical, and they might as well talk of making a voyage from New York or Liverpool to the moon." Nevertheless, in three years from that time transatlantic steam lines were in operation, and the doom of the grand old packets was sealed.