For a number of years the iron screw steamer had small effect upon the transatlantic trade. The owners of the sailing packets were making as much money as ever--perhaps more than ever, for they were building larger ships. In 1850, however, William Inman, an Englishman who had been interested in sailing ships, put on a line of iron screw packets between Liverpool and Philadelphia, as noted, and that line sealed the doom of the sailing packet. For the Collins, the Bremen, and the Cunard lines had taken, or were to take, only the cabin passengers and the express freight from the sailing packets, while Inman was after the steerage passengers and the coarser freight. The emigrants were all travelling from Europe to America. The greater part, in bulk, of the freight carried across the Atlantic travelled from America to Europe. Inman filled his ships with emigrants bound west, and with coarse freight bound east. Having a cargo both ways is a most important feature of successful navigation. Inman made money from the first voyage, and he did so _without a penny of subsidy_. The _City of Manchester_, of his line, made a net profit of 40 per cent the first year. For the sake of emphasis let it be said that our transatlantic sailing packets lost their trade, not because the Cunard Company received a subsidy, and not because Collins lost the subsidy he had been receiving, but because of the evolution of a cargo carrier that was far more efficient than the American ship of the sail at its best. And the Collins and Bremen lines were beaten because they, too, were much less efficient than their competitors. The reader may now ask why the American ship-owner did not adopt the iron screw steamer. A brief review of the conditions will answer the question. He could secure all the capital he needed for the well-tried sailing ship, but no one would advance money for what seemed to be, then, an experiment with a curious device not yet well tried out. Almost incredible as the statement may seem now, the most influential American ship-owners, during the years before the Civil War, refused to have anything to do with the screw propeller. In an essay on "Screw Propulsion in the United States," read before the American Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, at a meeting held in New York in November, 1909, Mr. Charles H. Cramp, vice-president of the Society, said (see _Shipping Illustrated_, November 20, 1909):-- "The supremacy of British propulsion practically began with the advent of the fine screw steamship _Great Britain_ in 1844, but New York interests would not consider any other than the paddle-wheel, with its walking-beam engine; and as they knew nothing of any other type, they loudly and persistently proclaimed its superiority over all other types, and carried with them the ship-owners, shipbuilders, shipping men, mariners, and all others in general, and the screw propeller was sneered at by them."