40 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to one-fortietb of what the cost had been before Heathcoat's improve- 

 ments were effected. Time would fail me if I were to attempt to 

 enumerate one tithe of these rare combinations of mechanical skill ; 

 and, indeed, no one will ever appreciate the labor and supreme mental 

 effort required for their construction who has not himself seen them 

 and their wondrous achievements. 



Steamboats, the electric telegraph, and railways, are more within 

 the cognizance of the world at large, and the progress that has been 

 made in them in little more than one generation is better known and 

 appreciated. It is not more than forty years since one of our scientific 

 men, and an able one too, declared at a meeting of this Association 

 tliat no steamboat would ever cross the Atlantic; founding his state- 

 ment on the impracticability, in his view, of a steamboat carrying 

 sufficient coal, profitably, I presume, for the voyage. Like most impor- 

 tant inventions, that of the steamboat was a long time in assuming a 

 form capable of being profitably utilized, and, even when it had as- 

 sumed such a form, the objections of commercial and scientific men 

 had still to be overcome. The increase in the number of steamboats 

 since the time when the Sirius first crossed the Atlantic has been very 

 great. Whereas in 1814 the United Kingdom only possessed two 

 steam-vessels, of together 456 tons burden, in 18'72 there were on the 

 register of the United Kingdom 3,662 steam-vessels, of which the 

 registered tonnage amounted to over a million and a half of tons, or 

 to nearly half the whole steam tonnage of the world, which did not at 

 that time greatly exceed three million tons. As the number of steam- 

 boats has largely increased, so also gradually had their size increased 

 until it culminated in the hands of Brunei in the Great Eastern. A 

 triumph of engineering skill in ship-building, the Great Eastern has 

 not been commercially so successful. In this, as in many other engi- 

 neering problems, the question is not how large a thing can be made, 

 but how large, having regard to other circumstances, it is proper at 

 the time to make it. 



A distinguished member of this Association, Mr. Froude, has now 

 for some years devoted himself to investigations carried on with a 

 view to ascertain the form of vessel which will offer the least resist- 

 ance to the water through which it must pass. So many of us in 

 these days are called upon to make journeys by sea as well as by land 

 that we can well appreciate the value of Mr. Fronde's labors, so far as 

 they tend to curtail the time which we must spend on our ocean-jour- 

 neys ; and we should all feel grateful to him if from another branch of 

 his investigations, which relates to the rolling of ships, it would result 

 that the movement in passenger-vessels could be reduced. 



There is no more remarkable instance of the rapid utilization of 

 what was at first regarded as a mere scientific idea than the adoption 

 and extension of the electric telegraph. Those who read Odier's letter 

 written in 1773, in which he made known his idea of a telegraph which 



