This little craft is deserving of more than momentary interest, for she marked an important advance and considerably moulded the ideas of subsequent steamship inventors or adapters. Hers was the first horizontal direct-acting engine which was ever made, at any rate in this country, and in her simple mechanism may be easily recognised the nucleus of the engines in the modern paddle-wheel excursion steamer. She was built for Lord Dundas in 1801 as a steam tug-boat to ply on the Forth and Clyde Canal. The year after she was completed she towed for nearly twenty miles at a rate of 3¼ miles per hour two 70-ton vessels loaded, but just as bad luck had followed the efforts of Papin, de Jouffroy and other steamboat pioneers, so it was to be with the _Charlotte Dundas_. Although she had so splendidly demonstrated her usefulness, yet the wash from her paddle-wheel was such that the owners of the canal feared for the serious amount of injury which might be done to the canal-banks, and so the _Charlotte Dundas_ was laid up in a creek of the canal, and rotted out her years until one day she was removed and buried in Grangemouth Harbour. But we may look upon her with great respect as being one of the parents of those two notable steamboats which were to follow and set the seal of success finally on the steamship proposition. I refer, of course, to the _Clermont_ and the _Comet_. And so we come to the name of Robert Fulton, whose praises have recently been sung so loudly by his appreciative fellow-countrymen. Born in the year 1765 at Little Britain, Pennsylvania, of Irish descent, he left America in 1786 and came to England, whence in 1797[A] he crossed over to France, where he devoted himself assiduously to the production of various inventions, which included, amongst others, a submarine craft called a “plunging boat.” Fulton’s “good fairy” was a fellow-countryman whom duties of office had also sent to settle in Paris. This Robert R. Livingston was born in New York City in the year 1746, and died in 1813. A distinguished American politician and statesman, he was appointed in 1801 as the United States Minister to France. It happened that in his private capacity Chancellor Livingston was keenly interested in mechanical matters, and the experiments of Fitch and Rumsey had attracted his attention to the question of steamboats. By an Act passed in 1798, Livingston had been granted the exclusive right of navigating all kinds of boats that were propelled by the force of fire or steam on all waters within the territory or jurisdiction of the State of New York, for a term of twenty years, on condition that within the ensuing twelve months he should produce such a boat as would go at a pace of not less than four miles per hour. Thereupon Livingston immediately had a 30-tonner built, but her performance was disappointing, for she failed to come up to the four-mile standard. It was soon after this that he crossed to France