STEAM NAVIGATION

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 101, 14 September 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

STEAM NAVIGATION

CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS. The cables tell us that the centenary of the first steamship—the Comet —was celebrated at Glasgow recently Dy an imposing maritime pageant in which warships and merchantmen took part. It is scarcely correct to speak of this as the centenary of the steamship's appearance on the world's highways. It is, however, just a hundred years ago that steam was applied to the propulsion of a craft intended to carry passengers in Great Britain. Three-quarters of a century earlier, in 1736, Jonathan Hulls in England patented a method of propelling a vessel by steam by means of a stern wheel. In America James Rumsey and John Fitch Succeeded in 1786 in constructing each a vessel that was actually dtiven by steam; but the real precursor of the paddle-wheel steamer was constructed in 1788 by a Scottish landed proptietor, Patrick Miller, on Dalswinton LoCh, Duinfrieehire. This vessel, which Was a dbuble of twin boat, measured 25 feet in length by 7 feet in breadth, and Was fitted with two paddle-wheels, one Defore and the other behind the engine. The mechanical part was constructed in Edinburgh under the superintendence of William Symington, and the speed attained was about five miles an hour. The following year saw a larger boat built on the same principle and successfully tried on the Forth and Clyde Canal. In 1801 Lord Dundas employed Symington to construct a steamboat for use upon the Forth and Clyde Canal. This vessel, which was launched in 1802 and named the Charlotte Dundas, had one paddlewheel. near the stern, and was driven by a direct-acting horizontal engine with a connecting rod and crank. It was seen by Robert Fulton, an American engineer, who employed, in 1807, the English firm of Boulton and Watt to construct an engine upon the same principle, and this he fitted into a steamer called the Clermont, 130 ft long, which plied successfully upon the Hudson River. A number of steam vessels were soon after plying on American waters. Th'e first passenger steamer employed in Britain was the Comet, a vessel designed and built in 1812 to the order of Henry Bell by John Wood, of Port Glasgow, and fitted with an engine by John Robertson, of Glasgow. This was a wooden vessel, of 30 tons, 42 feet long, 11 feet broad, and 5 feet 6 inches deep, with 'a long funnei, which served as a mast, to which a large square sail was attached. The engine, in its first form, was 3-horse power, had a cylinder 11 inches in diaj meter, with a stroke of 16 inches, a flyj wheel, and two pairs of paddle-wheels, 7 feet in diameter, with a spur-wheel arrangement in order to make the paddles rotate at the same speed. The double-paddle-wheel arrangement proved a failure, and another engine was substituted with a cylinder 12y 2 inches in diameter, 4-4iorße-power," and a single pair of paddle-wheels. SEe plied between Glas- ! gow and Greenock till wrecked in 1820. Mr. Bell died in 1830, and a monument erected to his memory stands at Dunglass Point on the Clyde. After the Comet was successfully tried numerous steamboats were built. Among others was the Rob Roy (1818), which was the first to establish regular sailings between Greenock and Belfast, in 1819 the Savannah ■crossed the Atlantic from America to Liverpool in twenty-six days, under sail aided by steam. Regular transAtlantic steamboat communication, however, was not established till 1838, when the Sirius steamed from London to New York in seventeen days, and a few months later the Great Western made the passage from Bristol to New York in fifteen days. These were all paddlesteamers, a type that culminated in the Scotia (1861) of the Cunard Line, which crossed to New York in nine days. The measurements of this vessel wereLength 366 ft, breadth 47ft 6in; cylindet diameter lOOin, with a stroke of 18ft, and the engines were of the side-lever type. Meantime the screw-propeller was being experimented the first screw steamer in Great' Britain, the Archimedes, had been built on the Thames in 1839—and the paddle-wheel has in the last half-century disappeared from the open sea and is retained only in quiet land-locked harbor waters. Here also its hold is precarious, and soon its only haunt will be on the shallow rivers which feed the mighty streams of the great continent and act as the arterial systems through which huge commercial enterprises circulate.