ride the wind above the sea from the New World to the Old.
Already United States mails are regularly carried through the air
from the Atlantic to the Golden Gate. It was twelve years after
the birth of Fulton's Clermont, and four years after the
inventor's death, before any vessel tried to cross the Atlantic
under steam. This was in 1819, when the sailing packet Savannah,
equipped with a ninety horsepower horizontal engine and paddle-
wheels, crossed from Savannah to Liverpool in twenty-five days,
during eighteen of which she used steam power. The following
year, however, the engine was taken out of the craft. And it was
not until 1833 that a real steamship crossed the Atlantic. This
time it was the Royal William, which made a successful passage
from Quebec to London. Four years more passed before the Great
Western was launched at Bristol, the first steamship to be
especially designed for transatlantic service, and the era of
great steam liners began.


If steam could be made to drive a boat on the water, why not a
wagon on the land?

History, seeking origins, often has difficulty when it attempts
to discover the precise origin of an idea. "It frequently
happens," said Oliver Evans, "that two persons, reasoning right
on a mechanical subject, think alike and invent the same thing
without any communication with each other."* It is certain,
however, that one of the first, if not the first, protagonist of
the locomotive in America was the same Oliver Evans, a truly
great inventor for whom the world was not quite ready. The world
has forgotten him. But he was the first engine builder in