Sailing ships and steamships

The first boats with engines were paddle-steamers. The engine drove two paddles, one on each side of the boat. In the early days, they worked only on rivers and lakes. But in the 1820s steamers were running between England and France. Experts agreed, though, that steamers could not make long voyages - there would be no room for all the coal they would need.

A steam paddle-boat did cross the Atlantic in 1819. But this was not a real victory for steam, as the boat used sails for most of the way. Brunel began a steamer service from Bristol to New York in 1838, but his ships also used sails as well as steam.

Sailing ships took a long time to die. In the mid-nineteenth century, the clippers were fast and cheap to run. Each year, they raced to bring the new season's crop of tea from China to England. After 1869, when steamers took over the China trade, clippers still carried wool from Australia. Even in 1900, a fifth of British ships still used sails.

From the 1850s, Britain began building ships of iron, and later steel. Iron ships could be bigger - Brunel's 'Great Eastern', built in 1858, was 19,000 tons, five times as large as the biggest wooden ships. Iron ships with steam engines began to take charge of the world's trade. Most of them were built in British yards. By 1900, Britain had a big lead as the world's first shipping and shipbuilding nation.

Walter Robson: Britain 1750 – 1900; Oxford University Press, 1993/2002, page 32 f.