Thus has the old-time hero of the waves been transformed
into one fitted to serve as a clown of the vaudeville
stage.
The advent of steam navigation came early in the nineteenth
century, though interesting steps in this direction
were taken earlier. No sooner was the steam-engine developed
than men began to speculate on it as a moving power on sea
and land. Early among these were several Americans, Oliver
Evans, one of the first to project steam railway travel, and
James Rumsey and John Fitch, steamboat inventors of early
date. There were several experimenters in Europe also, but
the first to produce a practical steamboat was Robert Fulton,
a native of Pennsylvania, whose successful boat; the Clermont,
made its maiden trip up the Hudson in 1807. A crude
affair was the Clermont, with a top speed of about seven
miles an hour; but it was the dwarf from which the giant
steamers of to-day have grown.
Boats of this type quickly made their way over the American
rivers and before 1820 regular lines of steamboats were
running between England and Ireland. In 1817 James Watt,
the inventor of the practical steam-engine, crossed in a steamer
from England to Belgium. But these short voyages were far
surpassed by an American enterprise, that of the first ocean
steamship, the Savannah, which crossed the Atlantic from
Savannah to Liverpool in 1819.
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