The smoking gun in this mystery is the vessels that Symington and Fulton actually produced. In January 1803 Fulton drew up the plans for his first steamboat. Overtly she did not much resemble the Charlotte Dundas. long and lean instead of short and stubby, with a different arrangement of the machinery and a distinct means of converting the engine’s reciprocating action to rotary motion. But in four crucial respects the boats may be linked. In both cases the engine’s cylinder was put in the exact centre of the hull, with the boiler behind it. Like the Charlotte Dundas, and unlike the vessel recently proposed in his agreement with Livingston, Fulton’s first steamboat was a towboat, with room on board just for the machinery, fuel and crew. Both vessels were propelled by paddle wheels: Symington’s by a single wheel at the stern, Fulton’s by two wheels attached to the sides. And – the most telling detail – Fulton’s paddle wheels were placed quite high in the boat, as in the Charlotte Dundas, so that only three paddles were under water at once, avoiding the wasted up-and-down motions of a more deeply immersed wheel.

It seems more than probable that Fulton did see the Charlotte Dundas and borrow from her design without ever acknowledging the debt. His first steamboat, built to the plans of January 1803, underwent a successful trial on the Seine later that year. Fulton eventually returned to the United States and, with Livingston’s support and a Boulton and Watt engine imported from England, made the paddle wheel steamboat later known to history as the Clermont. Her machinery and paddles closely resembled those of Fulton’s first steamboat of 1803 – and therefore may also be linked to the Charlotte Dundas. With the Clermont and her successors, Fulton ran a profitable steamboat service between Albany and New York City, marking the first sustained commercial use of steam navigation. The unfortunate Symington faded into obscurity and died penniless in 1831.

From this point on, geography largely determined the separate development of steamboats in America and Great Britain. In the United States, with its vast internal networks of inland lakes and long, broad, navigable rivers, steam navigation typically took the form of riverboats: large, fragile craft of shallow draught, driven at top speed by high-pressure boilers prone to explosion and disaster. In Britain, the characteristic steamboats were smaller and slower but safer, with low-pressure boilers, and sturdy hulls and high bulwarks designed to survive the heavier seas of coastal and ocean traffic. The future of Atlantic Ocean steamships would unfold mostly in the British Isles.

William Symington’s many frustrations had an apparent chilling effect on steamboat building in Great Britain. After he finally laid up his unwanted creation at Bainsford, nine years passed before another British steamboat was launched. The Comet, completed in the summer of 1812, became the first passenger steamer in Europe. Her planner and owner, Henry Bell, had been interested in steam navigation for over two decades. But his mercurial nature – his ‘restless volatile genius’, as a friendly biographer put it, ‘flying from one daring scheme to another’ – kept Bell pushing on to the next experiment before finishing his last one. It took him a long time to settle down and produce his first actual steamboat.

Like Watt and Symington, Bell was a Scotsman, born in 1767 near Linlithgow, west of Edinburgh. He came from a family of millwrights and was trained as a mason, millwright and shipbuilder, with early stints in Glasgow and London. (‘I was not a self-taught engineer, as some of my friends have supposed,’ he later insisted.) Settled in Glasgow, he built houses and public works and started to focus intermittently on steamboats around 1800, after Watt’s patent expired. Bell tried to interest various patrons and governments but got no favourable responses. He hung around the Carron Works when the engine and machinery of the Charlotte Dundas were being constructed, to the point even of making himself a nuisance to the workmen. Later he repeatedly inspected Symington’s boat at Bainsford.

When Bell became the owner of the Baths Hotel in the resort town of Helensburgh, on the Clyde some twenty miles west of Glasgow, he acquired the necessary practical goad that pushed him finally to build a steamboat – for bringing Glaswegian customers out to his hotel. The Clyde, as yet undredged, was then a winding, shallow stream, often filled with sandbanks. Sailing boats drawing only five feet still might be grounded for an hour or two; passengers would be obliged to run on deck from side to side, rocking the hull and loosening the keel from the sand. To reach Glasgow, at the river’s eastern and narrowest point, Bell’s steamboat for the Clyde had to be small.

In the autumn of 1811 he contracted with John Wood, a shipbuilder in Port Glasgow, for a hull forty-two and a half feet long, eleven and a half feet wide, and five and a half feet deep, and a total capacity of only twenty-five tons. John Robertson of Glasgow, a builder of textile-mill machinery, made the engine: a cylinder eleven inches in diameter, stroke of sixteen inches, and four horsepower. Four small paddle wheels hung on the boat’s sides. Her smokestack at the bow doubled as the mast for a single square sail (as on an old Viking ship). The Comet was named not to suggest her speed but in tribute to Halley’s Comet, recently visible in the night sky. Launched in July 1812, she began her Glasgow to Helensburgh to Greenock service a month later. As she puffed along the river, local boys would run down to the water’s edge, expecting or hoping to see her blow up. She made the trip three times a week in each direction, covering the twenty-six miles to Greenock reliably in four hours, sometimes under three and a half – as fast as horse-drawn travel by land, and cheaper and much more comfortable than heavy, unsprung vehicles on bad roads. Within a year, four road coaches that had been taking passengers to Greenock stopped running for lack of business.

This quick success provoked a productive steamboat competition. For some years before the Comet, Bell had worked on steam navigation designs with John Thomson, a Glasgow engineer. Thomson had made sketches of a boiler and machinery, and he expected to help Bell produce his steamboat. But Bell instead went ahead on his own, leaving Thomson angry and disappointed. He took his revenge by building a bigger, faster boat, the Elizabeth. Also constructed by John Wood, she was fifty-nine feet long by twelve feet wide, and forty tons, with a nine-horsepower engine. Her cabin included such touches of luxury as carpets and a sofa, windows with tasselled curtains and velvet cornices, and even a small shelf of books. The Elizabeth ran from Glasgow to Greenock and back every day, instead of only thrice weekly, carrying as many as one hundred passengers at speeds up to nine miles an hour, cutting steadily into Henry Bell’s business.

Over the next few years, steamboats appeared on most of the major rivers of Great Britain. Just before the first railroads, they started to speed and discipline the pace of life, ratcheting up to the predictable, rationalized clock time of the Industrial Revolution. Steamboats ran at man’s pleasure, ploughing along through adverse winds and waves, coming and going as ordered. A clock soon became a necessary instrument for doing business. ‘The merchant, knowing the time of the tide, can count to an hour, in ordinary weather, when his goods will arrive; and will not be disappointed in one case out of thirty’ Henry Bell asserted. ‘I expect in a short time to see all our ferries, and our coasting trade carried on by the aid of steam-vessels.’

In May 1815, the first long ocean passage by a steamboat in Europe tested steam’s potential for that coasting trade. The Glasgow (later renamed the Thames) had been built by John Wood a year earlier. She showed steady progress in size and power: seventy-two feet long by fifteen feet wide, sixteen horsepower, and seventy-four tons. Sold to London interests for service on the Thames, she put to sea just for delivery to her new owners, not to start a regular ocean service between Scotland and England. Under the command of George Dodd, a young architect and civil engineer, she set forth from Glasgow with an eight-man crew of a master, four sailors, and a cabin boy – and a smith and fireman for the engine.

The Glasgow ran easily down the Firth of Clyde into the narrow channel between Scotland and Ireland. Here she encountered more difficult sailing than anything normally seen on the Clyde, as the ebb tide collided with strong swells sweeping in from the North Atlantic. Unable to make progress, Captain Dodd had to seek shelter in Loch Ryan. The Glasgow ventured out again, was tossed around, and nearly wrecked on the rocky Irish coast. She stopped at Dublin for several days of rest and repairs. Naval officers came to see her, agreeing that she would probably not survive a true stormy sea and had better hug the shore. Watched by thousands of spectators ranged along her way, she left Ireland with just two brave passengers for London.

Away from the coast in the Irish Sea, she again met heavy swells. ‘The movement of the vessel differed entirely from that of one pushed by sails or oars,’ noted Isaac Weld, one of the passengers. ‘The action of the wheels upon the water on both sides, prevented rolling; the vessel floated on the summit of the waves, like a sea-bird. The most disagreeable movement took place when the waves struck the ship crossways; but here too its particular construction gave it a great advantage; for the cages which contained the wheels acted like so many buoys.’ As water flooded into the paddle box on the windward side, the compressed air exploded in an alarming report whose percussive force made the whole boat tremble. This noise exploded again, by reaction, on the other side of the Glasgow, then again, much diminished, on the first side. At this point she at least stopped rolling for a while. ‘During the rest of the voyage,’ according to Weld, ‘the vessel made what the sailors call, a dry way, that is, it danced so lightly over the waves, that it never took in one; and in all the passage we were not once wet…which could not be expected in any common ship.’

As they neared Wexford, at the southeastern corner of Ireland, the Glasgow’s thick coal smoke convinced local pilots that the approaching boat was on fire. They scrambled out to sea, expecting to save lives and perhaps seize some profitable salvage – and were surprised and disappointed that the Glasgow was just steaming along in safety. She crossed St George’s Channel to England, near Cape St David, and was again greeted by a flotilla of would-be rescuers not anticipating a smoking steamboat in those waters. Heavy seas tossed up waves so high that at times the crew of the Glasgow could not see the coast. Captain Dodd picked his way through, leaving far behind a fleet of sailing vessels trying to keep pace. They stopped for two days at Milford Haven for inspections and to scrape the saltwater scale from the boiler, a problem not encountered when sailing freshwater rivers.

Rounding Cape Cornwall into the English Channel, they encountered their highest swells yet. ‘It seemed impossible to pass,’ Weld recalled. ‘The vessel appeared to suffer… Night approached, and no harbour presented itself, except that which we had quitted, and which was already too distant.’ Captain Dodd hoisted sail, which helped steady her, and struggled against the waves for hours until reaching calmer waters. The rest of the trip was smooth and easy. At Portsmouth, tens of thousands of people came out to stand back and be amazed. The Glasgow reached the mouth of the Thames on 11 June, intact and in good order. She had covered 760 miles in a bit more than 121 hours of actual sailing time, spread over almost three weeks.

The voyage showed that a long ocean passage by steamboat was in fact feasible – though not as yet on a routine basis. The apparently insoluble limitation remained the fuel supply. The Glasgow burned two tons of coal every twenty-four hours. Coal was expensive and bulky, requiring inordinate storage space aboard ship and, therefore, frequent landfalls for refuelling. An extended ocean voyage across open water with no coaling stops was still impossible, awaiting bigger ships and the invention of better engines and boilers. It would be more than two decades before a steam vessel could cross the North Atlantic under sustained power.

Scotland produced the first British steamboats and then dominated that field ever after. By 1822, forty-eight steamers had been launched from the Clyde, more than from any other part of the country. Shipbuilders and marine engineers along the Clyde drew from well-entrenched west-of-Scotland traditions of millwrighting, iron smelting and founding, and engineering. Glasgow also lay at the western end of the geologic formation known as the Clyde Basin, rich in coal and iron deposits. All the necessary human and mineral resources were at hand. The river itself was periodically diked and deepened, allowing access all the way to Glasgow for even the newest, biggest steamships. In these burgeoning circumstances, the Napier and Elder families established durable steam shipbuilding dynasties. With an uncanny (and canny) consistency that came to resemble an orderly series of monarchical successions, these two families, their associates, and their lineal descendants in other firms would build and engine most of the notable Atlantic steamships of the nineteenth century.

David Napier, the first of this line, was born in 1790 in Dumbarton, on the Clyde about halfway between Glasgow and Greenock. The men in his family worked as blacksmiths and iron founders. He attended school briefly, acquiring a little Latin and French, but was inevitably bound for his father’s workshop. In 1803 he glimpsed his future when he saw the Charlotte Dundas at Port Dundas, near Glasgow. ‘Although then only twelve years of age,’ he recalled a half-century later, ‘having been reared among engines and machinery, I took particular notice of it.’ David went along when his father moved the family business to a foundry on Howard Street in Glasgow. At the age of twenty, after his father’s death, he took over. In another brush with British steamboat history, he built the boiler for Henry Bell’s Comet. ‘Not having been accustomed to make boilers with internal flues,’ he noted, ‘we made them first of cast iron but finding that would not do we tried our hand with malleable iron and ultimately succeeded, with the aid of a liberal supply of horse dung, in getting the boiler filled.’ (Napier never forgot that Bell had neglected to pay him for it.)

After the Glasgow’s pioneering voyage from the Clyde to the Thames, Napier set out to build a steamboat designed for regular ocean service. He studied the sailing packets that took up to a week to run from Glasgow to Belfast, the shapes of their bows and how they moved through the high swells of the Irish Sea. Under sail, the masts acted like tall levers, pushing down the forward part of the hull and demanding extra buoyancy there. Did steam propulsion therefore call for a different kind of hull? Napier tried various models in a tank of water. Eventually he decided to slice the full, rounded bow of the sailing packets into a sharper, finer wedge shape for his steamboats. The Rob Roy, the first vessel so designed, was built by his kinsman William Denny of Dumbarton in 1818. She was eighty feet long and eighty-eight tons, with a thirty-horsepower engine by Napier. Under Napier’s own command – he would try his hand at anything – she ran from Dublin to Greenock in an unprecedented twenty-six hours. For two years the Rob Roy gave reliable service between Greenock and Belfast, then was transferred to the English Channel to run between Dover and Calais.

Over the next few years Napier built progressively larger vessels, up to the 240-ton, 70-horsepower Superb and the 350-ton, 100-horsepower Majestic, for other packet lines to Dublin and Liverpool. These ocean steamers were bigger, stronger, and more powerful than anything else yet built in Great Britain. Their success meant that steamboats were starting to evolve into steamships – though still, for the time being, with the old masts and sails and wooden hulls. ‘I was the first that successfully established steam packets in the open sea,’ Napier claimed in 1822, when obliged to brag by competing claims on behalf of Boulton and Watt. ‘The Superb is now plying the third year between Greenock and Liverpool, and not a single article of her machinery has ever given way, although she has been out in the worst of weather… The truth is, I have made nearly double the number of engines for boats going to sea that Mr. Watt has, and their machinery has not in a single instance been so far deranged as to prevent them from making their passage in a reasonable time.’

As engineer, shipowner, packet entrepreneur and sometime ship captain, Napier was forever popping with ideas and inventions. He pushed the evolving steamship forms to their limits, skirting and sometimes exceeding those vague boundaries at which novelty became dangerous. For all his mechanical brilliance, he lacked a sense of due restraint and proportion. He charged ahead like a dashing cavalry regiment, leaving to humbler foot soldiers the grubby tasks of mopping up and administering details. In time he yielded the leadership of Clyde steamship engineering to his cousin Robert, who was less inventive and dazzling but more patient and meticulous and, ultimately, more sound and substantial.

Robert Napier was born in Dumbarton in 1791 with, as he liked to say, a hammer in his hand, the son and grandson of blacksmiths. Of Robert and his three brothers, one became a minister while the others followed family tradition into smithing and millwrighting. At the Dumbarton grammar school, Robert received a liberal education, supplemented by outside lessons in mechanical drawing which gave him a lifelong taste for fine paintings and beautiful objects. His father groomed him for college, but Robert preferred to apprentice in the family workshop. He excelled at ornamental ironwork, fashioning metal into art. In his spare time he made tools and guns, and practised drawing. At twenty he took off for Edinburgh, armed with an allowance of five pounds from his father and a certificate of good character from the minister of his parish. Soon he was back to work briefly for his father and then left home for good, this time to Glasgow. His artistic side may have craved the heady intellectual ferment of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment, but he was an engineer at heart, at home on the Clyde.

Bankrolled by fifty pounds from his father, in 1815 he bought the tools and goodwill of a small blacksmith shop. By making millwheels and tools for tinsmiths, he prospered enough to marry his first cousin Isabella Napier three years later. The marriage brought him into closer contact with her brother, cousin David. Restless as ever, in 1821 David let Robert take over his business at Camlachie Foundry, at the east end of the Gallowgate. Robert made iron pipes for the Glasgow Water Company, which had just started pumping from the Clyde, and then his first steam engine, for a spinning factory in Dundee.

In 1823, thirty-two years old, Robert Napier found his métier by making his first marine engine. It was installed in the Leven, built by James Lang of Dumbarton for the river traffic between that town and Glasgow. Napier was crucially assisted, with the Leven and for the next four decades, by his recently hired works manager, David Elder, who had come from a family of millwrights near Edinburgh. For the Leven’s engine, Elder made various refinements in the air pump, condenser and slide valves. He was using the rudimentary machine tools of the day, which were powered by a central steam engine linked to overhead belts and pulleys. At Camlachie Foundry these devices ran just a few turning lathes (the small pulleys and belts were forever slipping), a horizontal boring mill, and a smaller vertical boring machine. From these modest beginnings, Elder gradually improved his tools, products and men. The veteran millwrights of the time would not work to the tolerances he demanded, so he preferred to hire cartwrights and house carpenters instead, transferring their fine woodworking skills to the new problems of metal fabrication. ‘He was a man of great natural force of character,’ it was said of David Elder, ‘and maintained his opinions with considerable vigour.’

The Leven’s steadfast performance brought the firm other marine contracts. For the United Kingdom of 1826 – the biggest, fastest British steam vessel yet at 175 feet and 560 tons – they put an engine of 200 horsepower in the ship built by Robert Steele of Greenock. In 1828 they moved to a larger site in Glasgow, the soon-famous Vulcan Foundry on Washington Street, near the river. They added heavy new machine tools for making even more powerful engines. Robert Napier and David Elder became, by general reputation, the best engineers on the Clyde.

Any new steam-powered shipping company would routinely seek Napier’s advice and active participation; his approval could mark the difference between success and failure. In the workshop, Elder continued his ongoing technical improvements and trained several generations of the top Clyde engineers, including his distinguished son John. Eventually Napier acquired his own shipbuilding yard as well, at Govan on the south bank of the Clyde, and applied the firm’s exacting standards to every aspect of producing a steamship. One of his most loyal and long-term customers would be Samuel Cunard.

As Henry Bell had insisted about himself, these pioneers of Clyde steamboat building – from William Symington to Robert Napier – were not just self-taught engineers who worked simply by untutored intuition. They typically had mentors and family backgrounds in their fields. But most of their education did take place outside school, and the best of them then engaged in a continuous process of self-education all through their working lives. Immersed in such a bold new undertaking, they had to contrive their own patterns. They ‘read Nature’s laws in their own fashion’, the Scottish naval architect Robert Mansel remarked after the younger Robert Steele’s death in 1879. ‘Admittedly they knew little or no Latin or Greek, and, on the whole, were decidedly averse to talking and talkers.’ Diligent and laconic in the Scots manner, they left terse, incomplete surviving records of what they did, and nothing whatever about their private thoughts and feelings. Any curiosity about such intimacies would have puzzled them. They poured themselves into their steamboats and steam engines – which also have not survived, except for a few stray shards. Entering their world now requires an act of imagination, with casual leaps over yawning gaps in the historical evidence.

So wedded to the progressive nineteenth century, their work helped change the world within their lifetimes. Whatever they may have thought about this grand transformation has been lost to history, except for off-hand hints. Robert Napier’s fine mansion at Shandon on the Gareloch preserved a lingering trace of the old world within its opulent outer walls. The house was built in successive additions around the original modest cottage. A visitor in 1855 marvelled at the many beautiful paintings and art objects in the plush outer rooms. David Elder, a music lover, had made his boss a waterpowered pump for the pipe organ in the main gallery. Napier, sixty-four years old in 1855, liked to show the treasures from his lifetime of collecting. At the core of the mansion, happy to remain behind in one of the old cottage’s small rooms, sat his wife, Isabella Napier Napier. ‘A very simple and unaffected Scotch woman,’ the visitor surmised. The mother of seven children, five still living, she sat spinning by the fireplace, moving steadily to a rhythm older than steam on water. The great Steam Age roared on, around and past her.

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