SHIPPING. The use of ships and shipping, using the words in the large sense, goes back very early in the history of civilization. Ships figure in the earli est records of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Chinese and Hindus. The inhabitants of the Nile Valley constructed vessels capa ble of carrying large cargoes or half a hundred persons some 4,000 years be fore the Christian era. It is probable that even at that early time the principles of the oar and the sail had become known and put into practice. By the time the Phoenicians dominated in the Mediterra nean, the use of the oar and the sail had been developed and vessels of large size had become numerous. Little improve ment was discernible in the craft that sailed the seas during the period of the Greeks anji Romans. It can well be im agined that in the case of a people, in whom the sense of beauty was so highly developed as in the Greeks, vessels in their day must have had very distinctive features. The actual form of the vessel could not necessarily be subjected to much variation. Space, speed and seaworthi ness had to be the governing principles alike in the case of the primitive Egyp tian and the highly cultivated Athenian, but such representations as exist of the craft both of the Greeks and the Romans show that the greatly developed artistic sense, exhibited in the case of almost every object in the world of classical an tiquity, found an outlet also in the build ing of ships. From the time of the Greek: and Romans to the sixteenth century, when voyages around the world became the vogue, the improvement was not very considerable. The stern and bow rising sheer out of the water had been retained and a hundred feet seemed to be the limit in length from the point of view of safety. The discovery of America and of the way to India round the Cape of Good Hope awakened the desire for ves sels of a larger type and of greater speed, and immense activity was expended in construction so that some of the largest sailing vessels attained a length of 200 feet and were carried forward with an immense spread of canvas. The high bows and sterns were retained, but the hull was modified. The proportion of beam to length was about one to four. Differences were made between merchant vessels and war vessels, but as in those days a merchant vessel on the ocean might be called on at any time to defend itself from pirate ships the differences were not great.
As long as ships relied on the sail as a driving agent progress could not neces sarily be other than slow, but with the arrival and development of steam engines it took an immense step forward. Sailing
ships came to be regarded as useless as a fighting unit. As in the case of almost everything new, the advent of steam so far from immediately displacing the sail, aroused the older method to new activity. In the sailing vessel every other consider ation was abandoned in the effort to com pete with steam in the attainment of speed. As a result the best clipper ships were able to make long voyages at a pace rivaling that of the steamer. The voy age between New York and Liverpool was cut down to thirteen and fourteen days, when the fast mail-steamer passage took ten days. The type of sailing vessel has since varied according as to whether speed or carrying capacity was desired. Steel has displaced wood in the more mod ern sailing ships, but the total displace ment of the sailing vessel by the steamer for utilitarian purposes appears only a matter of time, though a combination of sail and steam or oil power may delay the inevitable end.
There had been many experiments in the direction of using steam as the driving power for boats before Watt took out his first patent in 1769. The earliest authentic case seems to have been that of Professor Denis Pepin of Blois who in 1707 built a steamboat which he navi gated on the river Fulda. Watt, whose engines were single-acting pumps, sug gested in 1770 their use for propelling vessels. In 1782 he brought out the double-acting engine and improved the principle of its working by cutting off the steam at a point fixed by experiment instead of allowing it to complete the stroke. This development by Watt brought into existence the engine needed for propulsion and from that time for ward the development of the steamer was only a matter of time. In 1784 and after, James Rumsey put on the water at Berkeley Springs, Va., a number of small boats, which, by the ejection of water through a tube at the stern, at tained a speed of over four miles an hour. In 1788 a boat made by James Fitch with paddles at the stern made a trip from Philadelphia to Burlington, a distance of 20 miles, in a little over three hours. Fitch in 1789 built a larger boat with side paddles that made a speed of eight miles per hour and was made a passenger and freight boat on the Delaware river in 1790.