The Coming of Steam and Steel : 295 



steam vessels and so on through a whole series of unexpected combi- 

 nations. One aspect of this history is so curious as to deserve a spe- 

 cial mention in this place. 



The packet liners commenced operation in the year 181 8. They were 

 small old-fashioned trading vessels. In that bitter winter there were 

 often gales driving up the Mersey River at Liverpool and ice flows 

 clogged the harbor of New York. On their earliest trips, the Cour- 

 ier, the James Monroe and the other ships that made up the Black 

 Ball Service were frequently towed down the river at Liverpool or 

 assisted up the harbor at New York by early and strange looking lit- 

 tle steamers serving as tugs. Thus we see that a practical steam vessel 

 was already in existence before the great Age of Sail began. It was 

 after this that the whaling fleets of America and Europe reached their 

 maximum development; it was after this that the packets went 

 through their sixty years of evolution; it was long after this that the 

 clipper ships crowned the Age of Sail. All the changes in the sailing 

 vessel that took place between the Roman cargo ship to the trader of 

 181 8 were not as great as those that separated the trader of 181 8 from 

 the great clipper ships and that were crowded into the sixty years or 

 so after the steamship had already become a reality. 



Before you can have a steamship you must have a steam engine. 

 The first use of steam is usually attributed to a Greek author named 

 Hero of Alexandria, who left a manuscript of about 200 b.c. which 

 described and drew a device called an aeolipyle. This consisted of a 

 hemispherical copper kettle set over a wood fire. The steam gener- 

 ated was led through copper pipes to a round ball which was left free 

 to rotate. The steam, escaping from two bent tubes, caused the ball 

 to spin. This first steam device therefore represents the principle of 

 turbine or jet propulsion rather than the expansion of steam within a 

 cylinder producing reciprocating motion. Hero's engine seems to 

 have been used simply for amusement or instruction — an early fore- 

 runner of a Rube Goldberg device — a machine for doing nothing 

 with 100 per cent efficiency. 



The next references to steam were as ponderous and practical as 

 Hero's machine was light and frivolous. After the Renaissance in 

 Europe the idea of a practical steam engine stirred the imagination of 

 a number of people. It is said that as early as 1543 Blasco de Gar ay of 

 Barcelona proposed the plan of a steam-driven ship. It is not clear 

 what kind of an engine he had in mind. It was almost two centuries 

 later before Denis Papin, in 1707, made a steamboat run on the 

 Fulda River in Germany. It is doubtful if his boat would have had 



