the commission on the Erie Canal, though he did not live to see that
enterprise begun.

The mighty influence of the steamboat in the development of inland
America is told elsewhere in this Series.* The steamboat has long since
grown to greatness, but it is well to remember that the true ancestor
of the magnificent leviathan of our own day is the Clermont of Robert
Fulton.

* Archer B. Hulbert, "The Paths of Inland Commerce".

The world today is on the eve of another great development in
transportation, quite as revolutionary as any that have preceded. How
soon will it take place? How long before Kipling's vision in "The Night
Mail" becomes a full reality? How long before the air craft comes to
play a great role in the world's transportation? We cannot tell. But,
after looking at the nearest parallel in the facts of history, each of
us may make his own guess. The airship appears now to be much farther
advanced than the steamboat was for many years after Robert Fulton died.
Already we have seen men 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