Emergence. The Scottish engineer and inventor James Watt was the chief pioneer of steam power, and his experiments between the 1770s and the 1790s produced increasingly efficient steam engines that had a variety of potential uses. Not until the first decade of the nineteenth century, however, did pioneer steamboats such as the Charlotte Dundas in Scotland and the Clermont in Upstate New York demonstrate the practicality of steam-driven shipping. Despite these initial successes, however, steam power was introduced to ship construction in a piecemeal fashion, especially for ships traveling longer distances than those required on the canals of Scotland and New York. In the 1810s steam engines were added to some transatlantic sailing ships, but on these hybrid vessels steam power was only an auxiliary to sail power. The large amounts of fuel required to feed a steam engine and difficulties in adapting...