Steamships and Their Story

In my previous book, “Sailing Ships and Their Story,” which, indeed, this present volume is meant to follow as a complement of the story of the development of the ocean carrier, I ventured to submit the proposition that a nation exhibits its exact state of progress and degree of refinement in three things: its art, its literature, and its ships; so that the development of the ship goes on side by side, and at the same rate, as the development of the State. And if this was found to be true with regard to the vessel propelled by sails, it will be seen that the same can be affirmed with no less truth in respect of the steamship.

In setting out on our present intention to trace the story of the steamship from its first beginnings to the coming of the mammoth, four-funnelled, quadruple-screw, turbine liners of to-day, it is not without importance to bear the above proposition in mind. For though the period occupied by the whole story of the steamer is roughly only about a hundred years, yet these hundred years represent an epoch unequalled in history for wealth of invention, commercial progress, and industrial activity. The extraordinary development during these years, alone, not merely of our own country and colonies, but of certain other nations—of, for instance, the United States of America, of Germany, of Japan—has been as rapid as it has been thorough. Consequently, if our proposition were correct, we should expect to find that the rate of development in the ship had been commensurate. Nor have we any cause for disappointment, for as soon as we commence to reckon up the achievements made in art and literature during the nineteenth, and the first decade of the twentieth centuries, and to compare the rate of progress of the ship during this same period, it seems at first not a little difficult to realise that so much should have been accomplished in so short a time.

When the inhabitant of the Stone Age had succeeded in putting an edge on his blunt stone implement, he had instantly “broken down a wall that for untold ages had dammed up a stagnant, unprogressive past, and through the breach were let loose all the potentialities of the future civilisation of mankind.” It is by no means an unfitting simile if I suggest that we liken the invention of steam to the discovery of the potentialities of the edge. Until the coming of the former we may well say that progress, as we now know it, remained stagnant, at any rate in respect of rapid movement. Omitting other uses for steam not pertinent to our present subject, we may affirm that in annihilating space, in quickly bridging over the trackless expanse of oceans, steamships have succeeded in accelerating the development of the countries of the world.