But it was not to be. The story of the steamship, like that of the sailing ship, is one of evolution; but compressed into a few years instead of many centuries. As early as 1736 a steam vessel had been patented by Jonathan Hulls, to be used as a steam tug. It is even said that such a craft was built and experimented with in the following year; but at any rate the experiment was not continued. The essential idea was the use of a single paddle at the stern. Now follows the trend of invention. In 1783 a two-paddle-wheel steam craft, turned by a single horizontal steam cylinder, constructed by the Marquis de Jouffroy, actually went ahead for some time against the current of the Saône. For some time Patrick Miller had been experimenting with the old idea of propelling craft by hand-worked paddle-wheels. In 1787 William Symington had obtained a patent for a new steam-engine, and he was now asked to design an engine that would turn these paddle-wheels. Thus in the autumn of 1788 the engine was put into a double-hulled vessel, no bigger than the smallest yacht, measuring 25 feet long, with 7 feet beam, the engine being geared with chains and the two paddle-wheels being placed between the two hulls, one wheel astern of the other. This curious vessel was actually tried on Dalswinton Loch and was able to do her five miles an hour. Then in 1801 was built the stern-wheeler _Charlotte Dundas_ at Grangemouth, having engines supplied by Symington. She also had a double stern with two rudders controlled by a steering-wheel. She proved her efficiency to the extent of towing a couple of 70-ton, loaded vessels for nearly twenty miles along the Forth and Clyde canal; but as the owners of this waterway feared for the damage done to the banks of the canal, the ship was condemned. We have to look upon these as hardly anything more than interesting experiments, but six years later we see the first real steamship, not in England nor Scotland, but in North America, yet produced by a combination of British and American brains. This was the _Clermont_, measuring 133 feet long and 18 feet beam, and was produced by Robert Fulton, an American engineer, born in Pennsylvania of Irish parentage. In 1797 he came to Paris, where he devoted his attention to steam navigation, and in 1803 built a small steamboat which went up the Seine. Three years later he went back to America, having seen the trial trip of the _Charlotte Dundas_. He arranged with the British firm Boulton & Watt to make for him the principal portions of a suitable engine, and these were sent across the Atlantic to him and fitted into the wooden ship _Clermont_. The result was that in 1807 this craft travelled by steam power from New York to Albany up the Hudson, a distance of 150 miles, in thirty-two hours. This was a veritable triumph, and definitely settled the question as to whether steam vessels would ever become of practical utility. It is, indeed, one of the landmarks of history, and when we look on the