Speed and the Engineer 97 



road coaches will take the express traffic 

 as they have largely already filched the 

 local. 



Go back again a century for our com- 

 parison with the present speed on the ocean. 

 Under sail high speeds were frequently 

 registered when the wind served. Possibly 

 the best speed would equal fifteen land 

 miles an hour in the most favourable cir- 

 cumstances of wind and well-handled ships. 

 But we get a finer appreciation of what 

 steam has meant on the ocean when we 

 note that a fast passenger sailing ship from 

 Liverpool to New York took a round month, 

 occasionally it was run under that time, 

 but this involved weather conditions which 

 were ideal, and, therefore, rarely met with 

 on the North Atlantic. 



A century ago the fast clippers had yet 

 to appear on the scene, have their heyday 

 and then disappear before the onward 

 march of steam. The clipper represented 

 the triumph of speed in sail, and we might 

 say that the best was an equivalent of 

 twenty miles an hour. 



