that in 1835 a highly respected British scientist said in tones of authority:  “As to the project which was announced in the newspapers, of making the voyage from New York to Liverpool direct by steam, it was, he had no hesitation in saying, perfectly chimerical, and they might as well talk of making a voyage from New York or Liverpool to the moon.”  Nevertheless, in three years from that time transatlantic steam lines were in operation, and the doom of the grand old packets was sealed.

The American who will read history free from that national prejudice which is miscalled patriotism, can not fail to be impressed by the fact that, while as a nation we have led the world in the variety and audacity of our inventions, it is nearly always some other nation that most promptly and most thoroughly utilizes the genius of our inventors.  Emphatically was this the case with the application of steam power to ocean steamships.  Americans showed the way, but Englishmen set out upon it and were traveling it regularly before another American vessel followed in the wake of the “Savannah.”  In 1838 two English steamships crossed the Atlantic to New York, the “Sirius” and the “Great Western.”  That was the beginning of that great fleet of British steamers which now plies up and down the Seven Seas and finds its poet laureate in Mr. Kipling.  A very small beginning it was, too.  The “Sirius” was of 700 tons burden and 320 horse-power; the “Great Western” was 212 feet long, with a tonnage of 1340 and engines of 400 horse-power.  The “Sirius” brought seven passengers to New York, at a time when the sailing clippers were carrying from eight hundred to a thousand immigrants, and from twenty to forty cabin passengers.  To those who accompanied the ship on her maiden voyage it must have seemed to justify the doubts expressed by the mathematicians concerning the practicability of designing a steamship which could carry enough coal to drive the engines all the way across the Atlantic, for the luckless “Sirius” exhausted her four hundred and fifty tons of coal before reaching Sandy Hook, and could not have made the historic passage up New York Bay under steam, except for the liberal use of spars and barrels of resin which she had in cargo.  Her voyage from Cork had occupied eighteen and a half days.  The “Great Western,” which arrived at the same time, made the run from Queenstown in fifteen days.  That two steamships should lie at anchor in New York Bay at the same time, was enough to stir the wonder and awaken the enthusiasm of the provincial New Yorkers of that day.  The newspapers published editorials on the marvel, and the editor of The Courier and Enquirer, the chief maritime authority of the time, hazarded a prophecy in this cautious fashion: