“This letter led me to think of the absurdity of writing my opinion to other countries, and not putting it into practice in my own country; and from these considerations I was [a]roused (_sic_), to set on foot a steam-boat, for which I made a number of different models before I was satisfied. When I was convinced they would answer the end, I contracted with Messrs. John Wood and Company, shipbuilders, in Port Glasgow, to build me a steam-vessel according to my plan: 40 feet keel, and 10 feet 6 inches beam, which I fitted up with an engine and paddles, and called her the _Comet_, because she was built and finished the year that a comet appeared in the north-west part of Scotland. This vessel is the first steam-boat built in Europe that answered the end, and is, at this present time, upon the best and simplest method of any of them, for a person sitting in the cabin will hardly hear the engine at work. She plies on the Firth of Forth, betwixt the east end of the great canal and Newhaven near Leith. The distance by water is 27 miles, which she performs in ordinary weather in three and a half hours up, and the same down.” In another communication, Bell says, “when I wrote to the United States’ Government on the great utility that steam navigation would be to them on their rivers, they appointed Mr. Fulton to correspond with me.” No merit, as the inventor of the present system of steam navigation, can, however, be conceded to Bell more than to Fulton; nor for any progress beyond the improvements of which he had obtained cognizance from the previous experiments of Messrs. Miller, Taylor, and Symington. In fact, there can be no doubt, from existing drawings, that Symington’s _Charlotte Dundas_ was superior in mechanical arrangements to either Fulton’s _Clermont_ or Bell’s _Comet_. But what Fulton and Livingston accomplished in the United States, Bell effected in his own country; each was, therefore, instrumental in the introduction, for commercial purposes, of steam navigation.[97] [Sidenote: plies between Glasgow and Greenock,]