PADDLE WHEEL STEAMERS In 1786, James Rumsey drove a boat on the Potomac four miles an hour by means of a power pump. About the same time John Fitch produced his oar-driven steamboats. A more prac ticable device was to be the paddle wheel. The "Charlotte Dun das," constructed by Symington in Scotland in 1801-2, was one of the earliest of these vessels. She proved her utility for towing work on the Forth and Clyde Canal. Fulton, having witnessed the success of this craft, in 1807 constructed the "Clermont" on the Hudson River in America. The engines for the vessel were made by Boulton and Watt in England. She proved very popular as a passenger boat between New York and Albany. The first steamer to make a regular sea voyage was the "Phoenix" which, in 1809, steamed from Hoboken in New Jersey to Philadelphia. In 1812 Bell produced his steamer "Comet," which carried passengers between Glasgow, Greenock and Helensburg. She was 42 feet long, 11 feet broad, 51 feet deep, and was driven by a one cylinder engine. The success of these early steamers soon pro duced others, and in 1814 there were five steamboats on the Thames, while the "Marjorie," built on the Clyde, was brought through the Forth and Clyde Canal and then down the East Coast to this river.
In the United States the monopoly that had been granted to Robert Fulton to maintain steamships on the waters about New York tended to check progress for a time, although it is doubtful whether he would have been able to develop his steamers so rapidly had it not been granted. As other inventors and engineers found themselves able to construct steamers Fulton's monopoly forced them further afield, and resulted in the development of the steamship business on other American waterways and then along the Eastern coast of the United States.
Similarly in Great Britain the steamship was first only used as a passenger carrier and tug along rivers and canals, but gradu ally increased competition forced the steamer to seek other spheres and in doing so she found herself able to perform short coast ing voyages. She then became a passenger carrier along the coast to the various holiday resorts, her novelty being her prin cipal attraction. It was not long before it was realised by the
owners that the steamship was capable of very much more than this and vessels were built to cross the North Sea, the Straits of Dover and the Irish Sea. They were all modelled on the sailing ships that they replaced and all carried auxiliary sail either on masts or on their funnel, while the low-pressure machinery was very wasteful and incapable of giving any considerable speed. The various methods of propulsion which had been experimented with in the eighteenth and earliest years of the nineteenth cen turies, including a rudimentary screw propeller and jet propul sion, gave way to the side paddle wheel which remained in favour for many years.
The ship to which it really belongs is very generally omitted in the histories, the Dutch steamer "Curacao." She was built at Dover in 1826 for the cross Channel service and was then renamed "Calpe," a wooden paddler of 438 tons register whose paddles were driven by independent engines. As soon as she was completed she was purchased by the Dutch Government as a man-of-war but was employed on the mail service to their West Indian Colonies. She left Rotterdam on her first passage to the West Indies in April 1827 and took a month to do the voyage, after which she made the regular sailing each year, until she was required as a warship during the troubles in Belgium in 183o, after which she never returned to the mail service.