With this fact in mind, note that steamers made an extraordinary change in the conditions of transportation by ships. These conditions were so far removed from the old that a portrait-painter who had never learned any of the arts of the sea designed the first commercially successful steamer in the United States. The keeper of a bathhouse performed a similar service for the British public. When steam navigation had become an assured success, the splendid skill of the sailor _of the sail_ was no longer needed. The man at the throttle usurped the place of the man on the weather yard-arm, and this is true in spite of the curious and absurd fact that even now the captains of steamships do not reach the bridge by way of the stokehole. Then recall the fact that while the United States had produced excellent sailors of the sail, there was such a dearth of mechanics in Fulton's day that he was obliged to import the _Clermont's_ engine from England; and Stevens, though he built his own engines, was obliged to train men to work in iron before he could do so. The British had been building efficient engines for twenty years before Fulton bought his. In every application of steam power, the British were that much in advance of the Americans. As Day points out in his _History of Commerce_, inventors living in the United States, as well as in other countries, went to England to perfect their inventions, because of the superior facilities afforded in British machine shops; and this was done as late as 1836--even later. Some of the best machinery invented in the United States, in the period under consideration, was first put in use in Great Britain. The fact that abundant supplies of coal were to be had at low price in Great Britain is not to be overlooked in connection with this argument. With the consequent great progress in factory industries, the time was close at hand when all England was to become "a free port" for all the world, as well as a place for working up the raw materials of all other countries.