Steamships. In his classic study, Sea Power in the Machine Age, Bernard Brodie observed that navies were relatively late in utilization of the technological advances of the machine age. Progress in steampower development was followed closely by the various admiralties—Great Britain, France, and the United States being most active. During the nineteenth century, the steam warship was by far the most important of the great naval revolutions, the most significant such innovation in warships since the fifteenth century. Steampower completely revised naval tactics and strategy; now ships could go anywhere, any time. During a transition period at midcentury, the largest warships retained masts and sails while adding steampower and either paddle wheels or screw propellers. Actually, the transition from the warfare of sailing ships to modern naval warfare involved multiple technological developments: steam propulsion, iron (later, steel) construction, armor plate, replacement of paddle wheels with screw propellers, advances in naval ordnance such as the shell gun and rifling, the development of torpedoes and mines, and even some experimentation with the ram. Former reliance on wind and weather for the sailing ships was superseded by dependence on fuel sources—first the burning of wood, then coal, and finally oil. Logistical supplies of these sources became decisive factors. Naval steampower used on a global basis made overseas bases essential.

The earliest steam‐powered engines, initially developed in Great Britain through the collaboration of James Watt and Matthew Bolton in the late eighteenth century, were crude, inefficient, and bulky. They were initially used to pump water to facilitate mining at deeper levels. Installation of increasingly efficient engines in vehicles for water transport took place in Great Britain, France, and the United States in the early nineteenth century. Key contributions were made by James Rumsey, John Fitch, Robert Fulton—all Americans—and a Swedish immigrant to America, John Ericsson. For the steam engine, reciprocation into rotary motion, compound pressurization, and separation of the condenser as a detached unit contributed to efficiency, portability, and use at sea.

Fulton's “North River Steamboat,” erroneously dubbed Clermont, was the first unqualified commercial success, operating on the Hudson River from New York to Albany beginning in 1807. Fulton also designed the first steam‐powered warship, “Fulton Steam Frigate,” to be used for harbor defense and as a blockade runner during the War of 1812. Fulton died in early 1815, and the steam warship was completed too late for use during the war. Its paddle wheel arrangement was centered amidships, a less vulnerable location. Fulton I, as it was later named, was diverted for use as a receiving ship in New York Harbor, where it accidentally blew up in 1829.

In the continuous naval competition between the British and French, invasion panics arose in Great Britain in the early 1840s when the French announced advances in steam warship design. In 1845, the British Admiralty sponsored a demonstration to determine which was superior, the paddle wheel or screw propeller; the latter clearly won. Steam warships proved their effectiveness and capability irrespective of wind and weather when used by the British and French during the Russian (Crimean) War, 1854–56. The French Gloire of 1859 was the first seagoing armored warship, built of wood with a covering of iron plate. The following year, the British response, HMS Warrior, contained an iron hull. Metal hulls facilitated larger size. In the next decade, the British entry, HMS Devastation, contained turrets and no sails. (HMS Warrior has been restored. Along with the ultimate sailing ship‐of‐the‐line, HMS Victory, Lord Nelson's flagship of 1805, it is on display at Portsmouth, England.)

For the U.S. Navy, the transition from the first steam warship to the modern battle fleet occurred between the 1840s and 1880s, led by Benjamin Franklin Isherwood, engineer‐in‐chief. The USS Princeton, designed and built by Ericsson, qualified as the first steam‐powered, screw propeller warship, but a fatal gun accident in 1844 caused delays in its development. The expedition of Adm. Matthew Perry to Japan in 1854 included steam warships. Meantime, the American gun developed by John Dahlgren in 1856 proved temporarily superior. More important, Ericsson designed and built the USS Monitor just in time to participate in the famous Battle of Hampton Roads, Virginia, in March 1862, against the Confederate navy's Virginia (formerly USS Merrimac), a converted ironclad steam vessel. Monitor contained the first turret gun arrangement. The battle was a draw but nevertheless revolutionized naval warfare. Monitor was unstable and later sank off North Carolina. The USS Michigan was the first iron‐hulled, paddle wheel steamship of the U.S. Navy, in service for eighty years. Another advance was Isherwood's USS Wampanoag, completed in the late 1860s, a steam and sail cruiser capable of 18 knots speed.

Further advances in steampower, metal boilers, ex pansion systems utilizing high pressures, reduction gears, and more efficient propeller designs followed. By the 1880s, the navy had converted entirely to steampower and the age of sail was over. Steam remains the basis of propulsion for sea transportation, generated today by petroleum or nuclear fuel.

Bibliography

Bernard Brodie , Sea Power in the Machine Age, 1941; 1969.
Edward W. Sloan , Benjamin Franklin Isherwood, Naval Engineer, 1965; 1980.
K. T. Rowland , Steam at Sea, 1970.
Wallace Hutcheon, Jr. , Robert Fulton, 1981.
Andrew Lambert, ed., Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship, 1815–1905, 1993.

Eugene L. Rasor

Steamships

Sources

Emergence. The Scottish engineer and inventor James Watt was the chief pioneer of steam power, and his experiments between the 1770s and the 1790s produced increasingly efficient steam engines that had a variety of potential uses. Not until the first decade of the nineteenth century, however, did pioneer steamboats such as the Charlotte Dundas in Scotland and the Clermont in Upstate New York demonstrate the practicality of steam-driven shipping. Despite these initial successes, however, steam power was introduced to ship construction in a piecemeal fashion, especially for ships traveling longer distances than those required on the canals of Scotland and New York. In the 1810s steam engines were added to some transatlantic sailing ships, but on these hybrid vessels steam power was only an auxiliary to sail power. The large amounts of fuel required to feed a steam engine and difficulties in adapting steam engines to operate in saltwater environments limited the use of this new technology in transatlantic shipping until the late 1830s. In 1838 the Sirius and the Great Western became the first ships to cross the Atlantic entirely under steam power, and in 1840 the first regular transatlantic steamship service began.

India. Both the British and French governments established steam routes serving their interests in the Mediterranean. British East India Company officials in India also began experimenting with steam-powered shipping, believing that it would cut the long journey times between Britain and India. Initially anxious about the high cost of providing the large amounts of coal required to fuel steamships, by the early 1830s company officials were convinced that the greater speed of steam-ships offered significant commercial and strategic benefits. By 1837, when the British government established a Select Committee to inquire into maritime communication with India, it was clear that steam power had made the overland routes to India (through Egypt and the Red Sea or from Syria down to the Persian Gulf) more efficient than the old sea route to Asia around the Cape of Good Hope. The ascendancy of the route through the Red Sea was confirmed in 1839 when the East India Company succeeded in annexing Aden to provide a ship-ping way station at the western edge of the Indian Ocean. Although the conquest of Aden was initially the subject of outcry in Britain, it soon became a crucial strategic key for British interests in the East.

Private Passenger Service. In the 1840s popularization of steam travel occurred, as private interests soon began running steamship services that linked distant parts of the empire together in increasingly fast and efficient travel networks. The most important of these was the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, popularly known as P…O, which became the dominant passenger service in both the British Empire and the world by the 1860s. P…tO’s origins lay in the Dublin and London Steam Packet Company, which established a route to Vigo in Galacia and then to Malta and Alexandria. By 1842 it was renamed P…O, and it began operations in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Within three years it was serving Penang, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and by the 1860s it also provided a regular steamer service to Australia.

Technology. This steam boom was underpinned by three important technological shifts. First and most important, the rise of efficient and reliable steamships

depended upon a shift from ships constructed from wood to iron. Because of the greater strength of iron, these new ships could be much larger than the old wooden ships and carry a higher percentage of cargo. In fact, cargo made up less half of the total weight of most wooden ships, but it could comprise around two-thirds of the total weight of iron ships. Moreover, a ship constructed in iron was faster, more durable, and safer than wooden ships. The iron steamers of the 1850s not only dwarfed all previous ships, but they were also much less likely to sink or catch fire than either the hybrid steam-sail ships of the 1810s or the pioneering wooden steamers of the 1820s. Second, new engine technology pioneered by Samuel Hall in the 1830s (and subsequently refined during the 1840s) allowed engineers to avoid the salt deposits that had previously plagued oceangoing steamships. Third, in 1838 the screw propeller was used as a method of propulsion for the first time, and it was quickly adopted as the new standard form of propulsion for seaworthy steamers. It replaced the older paddle wheel that was better suited to river travel than the rigors of the open sea.

Size, Speed, and Efficiency. These technological refinements allowed the rapid expansion of steam shipping in the Victorian age, a new technology that brought distant parts of the empire into closer connection. In the 1820s it could take up to eight months for an East India Company official to reach India from London. By 1858 it was possible to travel by steamer from London to Bombay in a month. Travel not only became quicker and easier but also allowed increasing numbers of individuals to travel at speed. In 1839 less than three hundred people traveled to India via the Red Sea, but by 1850 this number exceeded five thousand. The size, speed, and efficiency of steamships meant that they played a key role in moving millions of migrants from Europe to North America, southern Africa, and Australasia from the 1860s through to 1914. Their increased capacity and greater speed made migration not only more comfortable but also more profitable. Equally important, steam travel made imperial postal systems more efficient, delivering large volumes of letters and printed material at a speed that was unimaginable in even the 1820s. By the second half of the nineteenth century, steam travel became commonplace, and steamer routes provided the crucial filaments that knitted the empire together. Along these routes the ideas, commodities, and personnel of empire flowed.

Sources

Boyd Cable, A Hundred Year History of the P. & 0., Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, 1837-1937 (London: I. Nicholson 5c Watson, 1937).

Henry Fry, The History of North Atlantic Steam Navigation with Some Account of Early Ships and Shipowners (New York: Scribners, 1896).

Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940 (Oxford 6c New York: Oxford Universitya Press, 1988).

Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

K. T. Rowland, Steam at Sea: A History of Steam Navigation (New York: Praeger, 1970).

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steam·er / ˈstēmər/ • n. 1. a ship or boat powered by steam. ∎  inf. a steam locomotive.2. a type of saucepan in which food can be steamed. ∎  a device used to direct a jet of hot steam onto a garment in order to remove creases.3. (in full steamer clam) another term for soft-shell clam.4. inf. a wetsuit.

steam·ship / ˈstēmˌship/ • n. a ship that is propelled by a steam engine.