EARLY STEAMBOATS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 129, 24 July 1911, Page 6

EARLY STEAMBOATS.

The announcement recently made that a steamer with engines and boilers was constructed at Worsley and sot to work in 1799 is of very great interest. Although not the first steamer, she must have been the third boat to achieve any success. Probably the first steamer was one built in 1733 by William Symington for Patrick Miller, of Dalswinton, in Scotland. This boat was stated to have been a gratifying success, and in 1789 Symington superintended the construction of larger engines for a second boat, which was tried on the Forth and Clyde Canal, and attained a speed of seven miles an hour. Boulton and Watt seem to have been largely responsible for Miller’s failure to prosecute his pioneering work, for in 1790 v/e find James Watt writing to Mr .(afterwards Lovd* Cullen, throwing a . good , deal of cold water on Miller’s ideas and expressing the opinion that the Sym ngtun engine infringed his patents. However, in 1801 Lord Dundas commissioned Symington to build him a steamer, and this, the Charlotte Dundas, was tried on the Forth and Clyde Canal in 1802, when she towed two loaded sloops, each of 70 tons burthen, and took them 191 miles in six hours. Even at this speed the canal banks were damaged by the wash (chiefly from the paddles), and. the Forth and Clyde Navigation decided against the steamboat project. The success of Charlotte Dundas led the Duke of Bridgewater to order eight similar boats from Symington, but the Duke’s death, coining at the same time as the adverse decision of the Forth and Clyde Navigation, sterns to have prevented anything being done. Following the Charlotte Dundas a number of experiments were tried, and in 1807 Robert Fulton, an American, launched the Clermont, a boat 133 ft. long, to which belonged the honour of establishing the first commercial steamer service in the world, others n-ng bu : lt tc ply with the Clermont on the Hudson River between New York and Albany. The engine for this boat was supplied by Boulton and Watt from Birmingham. It was not until 1813 that Henry Bell launched the Comet, a much smaller boat than the Clermont, and established steamers in England. One more boat deserves mention, the Caledonia, purchased and engined by Jas. Watt, jun., which, in 1817, was the first steamer to cross from England to the Continent., She did so at a speed of seven and a half knots.