The first important successful application of the steam engine was embodied in the steamboat _Charlotte Dundas_ that was produced in Scotland in 1801. Other steamboats had appeared before, but they had not been successful. The first was tried on the Soane River in France in 1781. Later, Fitch and Ramsay made some unsuccessful attempts in the United States. Then, in 1788, Patrick Miller, with the assistance of an engineer named William Symington, had constructed a steam vessel that attained a speed of five knots on a lake in Scotland. In the next year, Mr. Miller and Mr. Symington had put another steamboat on the water that developed a speed of nearly seven knots. None of these experiments could be called successful of itself; but the experience gained by them induced Lord Dundas to build the _Charlotte Dundas_ and name it after his daughter. The _Charlotte Dundas_ was a practical success from the start; for, in March, 1802, it towed two vessels of 70 tons each a distance of 19-1/2 miles in six hours, while such a strong wind was blowing from ahead that no other vessel on the canal tried to move to windward. Whether or not this constituted an actual invention the present author will not attempt to determine, even in his own mind. It is clear, however, that it was the direct issue of several inventions, and that it was the first embodiment in a concrete form of the successful and practical application of steam power to transportation on the water. The next successful application was made by Robert Fulton, who built the _Clermont_ in 1807. This vessel went into regular service in 1808, plying between New York and Albany, on the Hudson River. The first steamboat to venture on the ocean was the _Phoenix_, that made the trip from New York to Delaware Bay by sea in 1808. It was built by Mr. R. L. Stevens, an engineer of Hoboken. If it accomplished nothing else, it supplied a precedent and gave encouragement to inventors everywhere. It made "le premier pas qui coute." Meanwhile, in June, 1802, Mr. Thomas Wedgwood had published "An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of making Profiles by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver," with observations by Sir Humphry Davy. In the course of his paper, he declared that he had secured profiles of paintings made on glass by throwing the shadows of those paintings on paper covered with a solution of the nitrate; the paper showing the objects delineated in tones that were dark or light inversely as they were in the painting. He also took profiles of natural objects by throwing their shadows on the prepared paper: the parts of the paper covered by the shadows being white, while the parts outside the shadows became dark.