April 27, 2018


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Dutch river steam-tugboat “Mascotte II”

steamboat is a boat that is propelled primarily by steam power, typically driving propellers or paddlewheels. Steamboats sometimes use the prefix designation SSS.S. or S/S (for ‘Screw Steamer’) or PS (for ‘Paddle Steamer’), however these designations are most often used for steamships.



Limitations of the Newcomen steam engine

Early steamboat designs used Newcomen steam engines. These engines were very large and heavy and produced little power (unfavorable power to weight ratio). Also, the Newcomen engine produced a reciprocating or rocking motion because it was designed for pumping. The piston stroke was caused by a water jet in the steam-filled cylinder, which condensed the steam, creating a vacuum, which in turn caused atmospheric pressure to drive the piston downward. The piston relied on the weight of the rod connecting to the underground pump to return the piston to the top of the cylinder. The heavy weight of the Newcomen engine required a structurally strong boat and the reciprocating motion of the engine beam required a complicated mechanism to produce propulsion

Rotary motion engines

James Watt‘s design improvements increased the efficiency of the steam engine, improving the power to weight ratio, and created an engine capable of rotary motion by using a double-acting cylinder which injected steam at each end of the piston stroke to move the piston back and forth. The rotary steam engine simplified the mechanism required to turn a paddle wheel to propel a boat. Despite the improved efficiency and rotary motion, the power to weight ratio of Boulton and Watt steam engine was still low.

High-pressure steam engines

The high-pressure steam engine was the development that made the steamboat practical. It had a high power to weight ratio and was fuel efficient. High pressure engines were made possible by improvements in the design of boilers and engine components so that they could withstand internal pressure, although boiler explosions were common due to lack of instrumentation like pressure gaugesAttempts at making high-pressure engines had to wait until the expiration of the Boulton and Watt patent in 1800. Shortly thereafter high-pressure engines by Richard Trevithick and Oliver Evans were introduced.


Early designs


A steamboat was described and patented by English physician John Allen in 1729.In 1736, Jonathan Hulls was granted a patent in England for a Newcomen engine-powered steamboat (using a pulley instead of a beam, and a pawl and ratchet to obtain rotary motion), but it was the improvement in steam engines by James Watt that made the concept feasible. William Henry of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, having learned of Watt’s engine on a visit to England, made his own engine. In 1763 he put it in a boat. The boat sank, and while Henry made an improved model, he did not appear to have much success, though he may have inspired others.


The first steam-powered ship Pyroscaphe was a paddle steamer powered by a Newcomen steam engine; it was built in France in 1783 by Marquis Claude de Jouffroy and his colleagues as an improvement of an earlier attempt, the 1776 Palmipède. At its first demonstration on 15 July 1783, Pyroscaphe travelled upstream on the river Saône for some fifteen minutes before the engine failed. Presumably this was easily repaired as the boat is said to have made several such journeys Following this, De Jouffroy attempted to get the government interested in his work, but for political reasons was instructed that he would have to build another version on the Seine in Paris. De Jouffroy did not have the funds for this, and, following the events of the French revolution, work on the project was discontinued after he left the country.


Meanwhile, Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, near DumfriesScotland, had developed double-hulled boats propelled by manually cranked paddle wheels placed between the hulls, even attempting to interest various European governments in a giant warship version, 246 feet (75 m) long. Miller sent King Gustav III of Sweden an actual small-scale version, 100 feet (30 m) long, called Experiment. Miller then engaged engineer William Symington to build his patent steam engine that drove a stern-mounted paddle wheel in a boat in 1785. The boat was successfully tried out on Dalswinton Loch in 1788 and was followed by a larger steamboat the next year. Miller then abandoned the project.

19th century

The failed project of Patrick Miller caught the attention of Lord Dundas, Governor of the Forth and Clyde Canal Company, and at a meeting with the canal company’s directors on 5 June 1800, they approved his proposals for the use of “a model of a boat by Captain Schank to be worked by a steam engine by Mr Symington” on the canal.

The boat was built by Alexander Hart at Grangemouth to Symington’s design with a vertical cylinder engine and crosshead transmitting power to a crank driving the paddlewheels. Trials on the River Carron in June 1801 were successful and included towing sloops from the river Forth up the Carron and thence along the Forth and Clyde Canal.

In 1801, Symington patented a horizontal steam engine directly linked to a crank. He got support from Lord Dundas to build a second steamboat, which became famous as the Charlotte Dundas, named in honour of Lord Dundas’s daughter. Symington designed a new hull around his powerful horizontal engine, with the crank driving a large paddle wheel in a central upstand in the hull, aimed at avoiding damage to the canal banks. The new boat was 56 ft (17.1 m) long, 18 ft (5.5 m) wide and 8 ft (2.4 m) depth, with a wooden hull. The boat was built by John Allan and the engine by the Carron Company.

The first sailing was on the canal in Glasgow on 4 January 1803, with Lord Dundas and a few of his relatives and friends on board. The crowd were pleased with what they saw, but Symington wanted to make improvements and another more ambitious trial was made on March 28. On this occasion, the Charlotte Dundas towed two 70 ton barges 30 km (almost 20 miles) along the Forth and Clyde Canal to Glasgow, and despite “a strong breeze right ahead” that stopped all other canal boats it took only nine and a quarter hours, giving an average speed of about 3 km/h (2 mph). The Charlotte Dundas was the first practical steamboat, in that it demonstrated the practicality of steam power for ships, and was the first to be followed by continuous development of steamboats.


The American, Robert Fulton, was present at the trials of the Charlotte Dundas and was intrigued by the potential of the steamboat. While working in France, he corresponded with and was helped by the Scottish engineer Henry Bell, who may have given him the first model of his working steamboat. He designed his own steamboat, which sailed along the River Seine in 1803.

He later obtained a Boulton and Watt steam engine, shipped to America where his first proper steamship was built in 1807,North River Steamboat (later known as Clermont), which carried passengers between New York City and Albany, New YorkClermont was able to make the 150-mile (240 km) trip in 32 hours. The steamboat was powered by a Boulton and Watt engine and was capable of long-distance travel. It was the first commercially successful steamboat, transporting passengers along the Hudson River.


In October 1811 a ship designed by John StevensLittle Juliana, would operate as the first steam-powered ferry between Hoboken and New York City. Stevens’ ship was engineered as a twin screw-driven steamboat in juxtaposition to Clermont‘s Boulton and Watt engine. The design was a modification of Stevens’ prior paddle steamer Phoenix, the first steamship to successfully navigate the open ocean in its route from Hoboken to Philadelphia

Henry Bell’s PS Comet of 1812 inaugurated a passenger service along the River Clyde in Scotland.

The Margery, launched in Dumbarton in 1814, in January 1815 became the first steamboat on the River Thames, much to the amazement of Londoners. She operated a London to Gravesend river service until 1816, when she was sold to the French and became the first steamboat to cross the Channel. When she reached Paris, the new owners renamed her Elise and inaugurated a Seine steamboat service.

In 1818Ferdinando I, the first Italian steamboat, left the port of Naples, where it had been built.


The first sea-going steamboat was Richard Wright’s first steamboat “Experiment”, an ex-French lugger; she steamed from Leeds to Yarmouth, arriving Yarmouth 19 July 1813.[17]“Tug”, the first tugboat, was launched by the Woods Brothers, Port Glasgow, on 5 November 1817; in the summer of 1818 she was the first steamboat to travel round the North of Scotland to the East Coast.[page needed]

Use by country

United States

A typical river paddle steamer from the 1850s-the Ben Campbell

Mississippi Riverboats at Memphis, Tennessee (1906)

SS Savannah, the first steam powered ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean—1819


The era of the steamboat began in Philadelphia in 1787 when John Fitch (1743–1798) made the first successful trial of a 45-foot (14-meter) steamboat on the Delaware River on August 22, 1787, in the presence of members of the United States Constitutional Convention. Fitch later (1790) built a larger vessel that carried passengers and freight between Philadelphia and Burlington, New Jersey on the Delaware. His steamboat was not a financial success and was shut down after a few months service, however this marks the first use of marine steam propulsion in scheduled regular passenger transport service.

Oliver Evans (1755–1819) was a Philadelphian inventor born in Newport, Delaware to a family of Welsh settlers. He designed an improved high-pressure steam engine in 1801 but did not build it(patented 1804). The Philadelphia Board of Health was concerned with the problem of dredging and cleaning the city’s dockyards, and in 1805 Evans convinced them to contract with him for a steam-powered dredge, which he called the Oruktor Amphibolos. It was built but was only marginally successfulEvans’s high-pressure steam engine had a much higher power to weight ratio, making it practical to apply it in locomotives and steamboats.Evans got so depressed with the poor protection that the US patent law gave inventors that he eventually took all his engineering drawings and invention ideas and destroyed them to prevent his children wasting their time in court fighting patent infringements.

Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston, who owned extensive land on the Hudson River in New York, met in 1802 and drew up an agreement to construct a steamboat to ply a route between New York City and Albany, New York on the Hudson River. They successfully obtained a monopoly on Hudson River traffic after Livingston terminated a prior 1797 agreement with John Stevens, who owned extensive land on the Hudson River in New Jersey. The former agreement had partitioned northern Hudson River traffic to Livingston and southern to Stevens, agreeing to use ships designed by Stevens for both operations. With their new monopoly, Fulton and Livingston’s boat, named the Clermont after Livingston’s estate, could make a profit. The Clermont was nicknamed “Fulton’s Folly” by doubters. On Monday, August 17, 1807, the memorable first voyage of the Clermont up the Hudson River was begun. She traveled the 150 miles (240 km) trip to Albany in a little over 32 hours and made the return trip in about eight hours.

The use of steamboats on major US rivers soon followed Fulton’s 1807 success. In 1811 the first in a continuous (still in commercial passenger operation as of 2007) line of river steamboats left the dock at Pittsburgh to steam down the Ohio River to the Mississippiand on to New Orleans.n 1817 a consortium in Sackets Harbor, New York funded the construction of the first US steamboat, Ontario, to run on Lake Ontario and the Great Lakes, beginning the growth of lake commercial and passenger traffic.[25][page needed] In his book Life on the Mississippiriver pilot and author Mark Twain described much of the operation of such vessels.

Types of ships


The first paddle-steamer to make a long ocean voyage was the 320-ton 98-foot-long (30 m) SS Savannah, built in 1819 expressly for packet ship mail and passenger service to and from Liverpool, England. On 22 May 1819, the watch on the Savannah sighted Ireland after 23 days at sea. The Allaire Iron Works of New York supplied Savannah’s‘s engine cylinder,[27] while the rest of the engine components and running gear were manufactured by the Speedwell Ironworks of New Jersey. The 90-horsepower low-pressure engine was of the inclined direct-acting type, with a single 40-inch-diameter (100 cm) cylinder and a 5 feet (1.5 m) stroke. Savannah‘s engine and machinery were unusually large for their time. The ship’s wrought-iron paddlewheels were 16 feet in diameter with eight buckets per wheel. For fuel, the vessel carried 75 short tons (68 t) of coal and 25 cords of wood.


SS California (1848), the first paddle steamer to steam between Panama City and San Francisco—a Pacific Mail Steamship Company ship.




West Coast




Other steamships soon followed, and by late 1849, paddle wheel steamships like the SS McKim (1848) were carrying miners and their supplies the 125 miles (201 km) trip from San Francisco up the extensive Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta to Stockton, CaliforniaMarysville, CaliforniaSacramento, etc. to get about 125 miles (201 km) closer to the gold fields. Steam powered tugboats and towboats started working in the San Francisco Bay soon after this to expedite shipping in and out of the bay.



Civil War

Chromolithograph depicting the Monitor and the Merrimack


The Civil War in the West was fought to control major rivers, especially the Mississippi and Tennessee Rivers using paddlewheelers. Only the Union had them (the Confederacy captured a few, but were unable to use them.) The Battle of Vicksburg involved monitorsand ironclad riverboats. The USS Cairo is a survivor of the Vicksburg battle. Trade on the river was suspended for two years because of a Confederate’s Mississippi blockade before the union victory at Vicksburg reopened the river on July 4, 1863. The triumph of Eads ironclads, and Farragut’s seizure of New Orleans, secured the river for the Union North.



The Sultana on fire, from Harpers Weekly

Mississippi and Missouri river traffic



The American Queen, the world’s largest operating river steamboat

Most steamboats were destroyed by boiler explosions or fires—and many sank in the river, with some of those buried in silt as the river changed course. From 1811 to 1899, 156 steamboats were lost to snags or rocks between St. Louis and the Ohio River. Another 411 were damaged by fire, explosions or ice during that period.One of the few surviving Mississippi sternwheelers from this period, Julius C. Wilkie, was operated as a museum ship at Winona, Minnesota until its destruction in a fire in 1981. The replacement, built in situ was not a steamboat. The replica was scrapped in 2008.[citation needed]



Women started to become steamboat captains in the late 19th century. The first woman to earn her steamboat master’s license was Mary Millicent Miller, in 1884.n 1888, Callie Leach French earned her first class license.In 1892, she earned a master’s license, becoming the only woman to hold both and operating on the Mississippi River.French towed a showboat up and down the rivers until 1907 and boasted that she’d never had an accident or lost a boatAnother early steamboat captain was Blanche Douglass Leathers, who earned her license in 1894. Mary Becker Greene earned her license in 1897 and along with her husband started the Greene Line.[

20th century

The Belle of Louisville is the oldest operating steamboat in the United States, and the oldest operating Mississippi River-style steamboat in the world. She was laid down as Idlewildin 1914, and is currently located in Louisville, Ky.

Five major commercial steamboats currently operate on the inland waterways of the United States. The only remaining overnight cruising steamboat is the 432 passenger American Queen, which operates week-long cruises on the Mississippi, Ohio, Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers 11 months out of the year. The others are day boats: they are the steamers Chautauqua Belle at Chautauqua Lake, New YorkMinne Ha-Ha at Lake George, NY, operating on Lake George; the Belle of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, operating on the Ohio River; and the Natchez in New Orleans, Louisiana, operating on the Mississippi River. For modern craft operated on rivers, see the Riverboat article.


In Canada, the city of TerraceBritish Columbia (BC), celebrates “Riverboat Days” each summer. Built on the banks of the Skeena River, the city depended on the steamboat for transportation and trade into the 20th century. The first steamer to enter the Skeena was Union in 1864. In 1866 Mumford attempted to ascend the river, but it was only able to reach the Kitsumkalum River. It was not until 1891 Hudson’s Bay Company sternwheeler Caledonia successfully negotiated Kitselas Canyon and reached Hazelton. A number of other steamers were built around the turn of the 20th century, in part due to the growing fish industry and the gold rush.For more information, see Steamboats of the Skeena River.

S.S. Inlander on the Skeena Riverat Kitselas Canyon, 1911




The hulls were generally wooden, although iron, steel and composite hulls gradually overtook them. They were braced internally with a series of built-up longitudinal timbers called “keelsons”. Further resilience was given to the hulls by a system of “hog rods” or “hog chains” that were fastened into the keelsons and led up and over vertical masts called “hog-posts”, and back down again.


The SS Keno in Dawson City


In British Columbia, the Moyie, built by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in 1898, was operated on Kootenay Lake in south-eastern BC until 1957. It has been carefully restored and is on display in the village of Kaslo, where it acts as a tourist attraction right next to information centre in downtown Kaslo. The Moyie is the world’s oldest intact stern wheeler. While the SS Sicamous and SS Naramata (steam tug & icebreaker) built by the CPR at Okanagan Landing on Okanagan Lake in 1914 have been preserved in Penticton at the south end of Okanagan Lake.[citation needed]



Great Britain


Engineer Robert Fourness and his cousin, physician James Ashworth are said to have had a steamboat running between Hull and Beverley, after having been granted British Patent No. 1640 of March 1788 for a “new invented machine for working, towing, expediting and facilitating the voyage of ships, sloops and barges and other vessels upon the water”. James Oldham, MICE, described how well he knew those who had built the F&A steamboat in a lecture entitled “On the rise, progress and present position of steam navigation in Hull” that he gave at the 23rd Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement for Science in Hull, England on 7 September 1853. The first commercially successful steamboat in Europe, Henry Bell’s Comet of 1812, started a rapid expansion of steam services on the Firth of Clyde, and within four years a steamer service was in operation on the inland Loch Lomond, a forerunner of the lake steamers still gracing Swiss lakes.

On the Clyde itself, within ten years of Comet’s start in 1812 there were nearly fifty steamers, and services had started across the Irish Sea to Belfast and on many British estuaries. By 1900 there were over 300 Clyde steamers.

People have had a particular affection for the Clyde puffers, small steam freighters of traditional design developed to use the Scottish canals and to serve the Highlands and Islands. They were immortalised by the tales of Para Handy‘s boat Vital Spark by Neil Munro and by the film The Maggie, and a small number are being conserved to continue in steam around the west highland sea lochs.


















Seeing the great potential of the steam powered-vessels, Vietnamese Emperor Minh Mạng attempted to reproduce a French-made steamboatThe first test in 1838 was a failure as the boiler was broken. The task supervisor was chained and two officials Nguyễn Trung Mậu, Ngô Kim Lân from the Ministry of Construction were jailed for false report. The project was assigned again to Hoàng Văn Lịch and Võ Huy Trinh. In the second test two months later, the engine performed greatly. The Emperor rewarded the two handsomely. He commented that although this machine could be purchased from the Westerner, it is important that his engineers and mechanics could acquaint themselves with modern machinery. Therefore no expense was too great.Encouraged by the success, Minh Mạng ordered the engineers to study and develop steam engines and steamers to equip his naval fleets. At the end of Minh Mạng ‘s reign there were 3 steamers produced named Yến Phi, Vân Phi and Vụ Phi.However, his successor could not maintain the industry due to financial problems, worsened by many years of social unrest under his rule.


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