Inventions in the centuryDoolittle, William H. (William Henry)
History
Inventions in the century
Doolittle, William H. (William Henry)
Inventions
Robert Fulton, an American artist, and subsequently a civil engineer,
built a steamboat on the Seine in 1803, assisted by R. Livingston, then
American Minister to France. Then in 1806 Fulton, having returned to the
United States, commenced to build another steamboat, in which he was
again assisted by Livingston, and in which he placed machinery made by
Boulton and Watt in England. This steamboat, named the _Clermont_, was
130 ft. long, 18 ft. beam, 7 ft. depth and 160 tons burden. It made its
first trip on the Hudson, from New York to Albany and return, in August,
1807, and subsequently made regular trips. It was the first commercially
successful steamboat ever made, as George Stephenson’s was the first
commercially successful locomotive. In the meantime Col. John Stevens of
New Jersey was also at work on a steamboat, and had in 1804 built such a
boat at his shops, having a screw propeller and a flue boiler. Almost
simultaneously with Fulton he brought out the _Phœnix_, a side-wheel
steamer having hollow water lines and provided with feathering paddle
wheels, and as Fulton and Livingston had a monopoly of the Hudson,
Stevens took his boat by sea from New York around to Delaware bay and up
the Delaware river. This was in 1808, and was the first sea voyage ever
made by a steam vessel.
Transatlantic steamship navigation was started in 1819. A Mr.
Scarborough of Savannah, Ga., in 1818 purchased a ship of about three
hundred and fifty tons burden, which was named the _Savannah_. Equipped
with engine and machinery it steamed out of New York Harbour on the 27th
day of March, 1819, and successfully reached Savannah, Georgia. On the
20th of May in the same year she left Savannah for Liverpool, making the
trip in 22 days. From Liverpool she went to Copenhagen, Stockholm, St.
Petersburg, Cronstadt and Arundel, and from the latter port returned to
Savannah, making the passage in twenty-five days.
But Scottish waters, and the waters around other coasts of the British
Islands, had been traversed by steamboats before this celebrated trip of
the _Savannah_. Bell’s steamboat between Glasgow and Greenock in 1812
was followed by five others in 1814; and seven steamboats plied on the
Thames in 1817.
So the locomotives and the steamboats and steamships continued to
multiply, and when the first forty years of the century had been reached
the Iron Horse was fairly installed on the fields of Europe and America,
and the rivers and the oceans were ploughed by its sisters, the steam
vessels.
It was in 1840 that the famous Cunard line of transatlantic steamers was
established, soon followed by the Collins line and others.
A few years before, John C. Stevens in America and John Ericsson in
England had brought forward the screw propeller; and Ericsson was the
first to couple the engine to the propeller shaft. It succeeded the
successful paddle wheels of Fulton in America and Bell in England.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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