THE development of steamboats in France and America had stalled, but up in Scotland mining engineer William Symington was enjoying better results. Though his first experiments, beginning in 1788, had been frustrating for their niggling flaws and breakdowns, on March 28th, 1803, the steamship ‘Charlotte Dundas’ successfully drew two seventy-ton barges almost twenty miles along the Forth and Clyde Canal.*

Unlike Jouffroy and Fitch, Symington had designed a boat that looked to the future, with a paddle-wheel and a Watt engine enhanced by Symington’s patented horizontal pistons. However, nothing more came of it, as the Canal company feared the boat’s wash would erode the banks.

Four years later, American entrepreneur Robert Fulton launched a steamboat of very similar design on the Hudson River, powered by a Boulton and Watt engine imported from Birmingham.** At last, the idea caught on, so quickly that in 1838 the British-built ‘SS Great Western’ and ‘Sirius’ became the first ships to cross the Atlantic under steam power alone.