Steamboat

a boat propelled by steam. The notion of driving a boat by paddles is not new. The ancient Egyptians and Romans propelled their war galleys oft-times by wheels operated by means of a windlass turned by men, and later the Romans are said to have taken oxen aboard their boats to operate the capstans. Following the invention of the steam engine numerous efforts were made in Spain, France, England, and Scotland to apply steam power to paddle-wheels. A number of crude steamboats were operated for a time on the rivers of Europe and then abandoned. The first successful steam vessel in Great Britain was built at Glasgow in 1812. It had a hull sixty feet in length, and attained a speed of five miles an hour. In the meantime John Fitch of Connecticut applied steam to the paddles of a boat. He made his trial trip on August 22, 1787, and attained a speed of three miles an hour. Fitch constructed several boats with rather unsatisfactory results. He was a watch-maker by trade and died in poverty at Bardstown, Kentucky, in 1798. A number of American inventors struggled with the problem, but the credit is due to Robert Fulton for the construction of the first successful American steamboat. This he named the Clermont. It was a side-wheeler of considerable size, being 140 feet in length, 16 feet wide, and 7 feet deep. The trial trip from New York to Albany was begun August 17, 1807. Regular lines of steamboats soon appeared on the Hudson, on Long Island Sound, the Delaware, and in the coast service. A steamboat ran from Boston to Maine for the first time in 1823. The first steamboat to appear on the waters of the Mississippi was the New Orleans, built at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1811. Although superseded in part by railroads, fine lines of passenger steamboats, as well as freighting steel vessels, are found on the large rivers, lakes, and sounds of both continents.

The steamboat preceded roads and railways. It transported live stock, implements, and supplies. A special type of long, broad, flat-bottomed, light-draft boats, modeled on the barge, was developed on the Mississippi River without which the settlement and early development of the interior would have been impossible. The Mississippi and its branches were traversed by regular lines of boats with large capacity. Wherever the water was too shallow for a large boat, smaller boats were set up and these landed the machinery for still smaller boats, and so on, until the entire Mississippi system from the Rocky Mountains to the Alleghanies was covered by steamboat service. Where the steamer left off, the stage coach began. Stirring tales are told of reckless steamboat racing between rival lines. A famous race of 1,218 miles between the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee was run June 30th-July 4th in 1870, from New Orleans to St. Louis. It was won by the latter boat in three days, eighteen hours, and thirty minutes. Mark Twain's Old Times on the Mississippi gives an idea of life among the river boatmen.

See Steamship