Steamship

A steamship carries its own power source. A steam engine — a boiler and cylinders burning coal or wood — turns a crank, and the crank turns paddlewheels at the sides or, later, a screw propeller at the stern. Because the power comes from fire rather than air, the boat is freed from the one thing every earlier vessel bowed to: the wind. It can steam directly into a headwind, hold a straight course up a current, and leave on a timetable.

Sailing ships were fast when the wind served and helpless when it did not; river traffic upstream meant poling, towing, or waiting. Robert Fulton, backed by the financier Robert Livingston, built the first steamboat that turned a profit, and its first job was the hardest one sail did badly — the upstream run. On 17 August 1807 his North River Steamboat (later remembered as the Clermont) made New York to Albany in about 32 hours of steaming, roughly 5 mph, a trip that could strand a sloop for four days. Scheduled passenger service began weeks later. For the first time a boat kept an appointment.

Steam put the schedule at sea. Rivers like the Mississippi became two-way highways; the paddle steamer opened the American interior to trade going both directions. Within a dozen years the SS Savannah crossed the Atlantic partly under steam (1819), and by mid-century scheduled steam liners had turned an ocean crossing from a gamble on the weather into a booking. The steamship, with the railroad, is what collapsed the travel time of the whole planet in a single century.