The Coming of Steam and Steel : 307 



California and Australia with cargoes of grain. In 1891 as many as 

 seventy-seven sailing ships or sailing barks left Australia with cargoes 

 of wool. 



At the beginning of the new century, that is in 1902, there was 

 launched one of the largest sailing vessels. She was 403 feet in length 

 with a steel hull. This was not a square-rigged ship but a seven- 

 masted schooner, the Thomas W. Lawson. Sailing vessels, both 

 square-rigged and fore-and-afters, have continued in use right down 

 to the present time. The transition from sails to steam has been grad- 

 ual but it has been relentless. Thousands of us now living who have 

 had the good fortune to see large square-rigged sailing ships in oper- 

 ation, or better yet to sail aboard them, have had an experience of 

 beauty combined with power and utility that will be enjoyed by no 

 future generation. It has been my good fortune to have sailed with 

 Arthur Curtis James on his square-rigged steam auxiliary yacht 

 Corsair, and to have been on a four-masted bark sailing the Pacific 

 out of Oakland, the Santa Clara and to have seen the departure from 

 that port of a number of the square-riggers that sailed in the fleet of 

 the Alaska packers. On the east coast we can well remember vessels 

 like the Tusitala, commanded by Captain Barker, which James Fer- 

 rel kept in operation for a number of years out of affection for the 

 vessel and the vessel's friends, and the yacht Seven Seas and Allen Vil- 

 liers' little gem, the Conrad, and mention of her brings to mind the 

 fact that his many books with their photographs provide a beautiful 

 and sympathetic record of the closing days of the square-rigged sail- 

 ing vessel. 



Before the last century closed two new inventions were added to 

 the history of mechanical power at sea, and they appeared simultane- 

 ously. Experiments with engines that substituted for steam, the explo- 

 sion within a cylinder of a gas created by the evaporation of a liquid 

 fuel, were carried on for a number of years. These early developments 

 depended upon electricity or a "hot bulb" to ignite the gases within 

 the cylinders. The most important development in this field took 

 place in 1893 when Dr. Diesel of Germany created an engine that 

 ran at such high compression and high temperature (i,ioo°F.) that 

 combustion of the fuel was automatic. 



The other invention related to a new use of steam power. The 

 Honorable Sir Charles A. Parsons invented the steam turbine to gen- 

 erate electricity on land, but a year after the Diesel engine, that is in 

 1894, he began working on the use of the steam turbine to drive ships. 

 He created a small, fast hull and christened her the Turbinia. She 



