294 • 'The Atlantic 



Atlantic that were called "steamboats," "steamships" or "steam lin- 

 ers." This leaves us with the impression that they were entirely 

 dependent on steam power, but this is not the case. A good deal has 

 been written about the competition between sail and steam that is 

 supposed to have taken place in the middle of the last century and 

 this has led to a good deal of misunderstanding. There was not a 

 clear-cut competition between a full-rigged sailing ship on one hand 

 and a pure steamer on the other. The competition was actually 

 between the sailing ship and another form of sailing ship that also 

 carried power machinery. Gradually as the steam engine improved in 

 reliability and efficiency she was able to count more and more on her 

 motive power until finally she used her sails only in case of engine 

 failure, exhaustion of her fuel supply or other emergency. It was only 

 in the last quarter of the century that the steamers gave up the 

 practice of also carrying sail. Finally, toward the end of the century, 

 two new forms of propulsion of ocean vessels came into existence 

 simultaneously; one was a new form of steam engine called the tur- 

 bine and the other was the Diesel engine. 



Logically and technologically the steam engine and the metal hull 

 ship should go together, but this is one of the cases where history vio- 

 lated logic. The steam engine came into common use long before 

 metal hulls were thought practical for the ocean. The use of coal 

 fires and of steam in wooden hulls accounted for many fires at sea 

 and great loss of life. Iron hulls were used in fresh water within the 

 first quarter of the century, but the fact that iron is subject to de- 

 structive corrosion in salt water accounted for a long delay in their 

 use at sea. In fact these are the changes that happened to seagoing 

 ships in the twentieth century. Brief as they are they do provide an 

 orderly pattern. That is perhaps their trouble, they suggest an order 

 that is much more logical than the events with which they dealt. 



For one thing there were not clear-cut periods in which these 

 changes took place. For example there was not a point before which 

 ocean vessels were built of wood and after which they were built of 

 metal, nor a point before which vessels were driven by paddle wheels 

 and after which they were driven by propellers. In the first case there 

 were many transitional stages between the all-wood hull and the all- 

 metal hull, in the second case some of the very earliest steamboats 

 were driven by propellers, then there was a long period in which the 

 propeller was abandoned in favor of paddle wheels only to be rediscov- 

 ered at a later time. Metal hulls were used for large sailing ships at 

 the same time that wooden hulls were still being used for very large 



