in 1825 thirteen steamers plying on the Hudson burned sixteen hundred cords of wood per week.  Fourteen hundred cords more were used by New York ferry boats, and each trip of a Sound steamer consumed sixty cords.  The American who traverses the placid waters of Long Island Sound to-day in one of the swift and splendid steamboats of the Fall River or other Sound lines, enjoys very different accommodations from those which in the second quarter of the last century were regarded as palatial.  The luxury of that day was a simple sort at best.  When competition became strong, the old Fulton company, then running boats to Albany, announced as a special attraction the “safety barge.”  This was a craft without either sails or steam, of about two hundred tons burden, and used exclusively for passengers.  It boasted a spacious dining-room, ninety feet long, a deck cabin for ladies, a reading room, a promenade deck, shaded and provided with seats.  One of the regular steamers of the line towed it to Albany, and its passengers were assured freedom from the noise and vibration of machinery, as well as safety from possible boiler explosions—­the latter rather a common peril of steamboating in those days.

[Illustration:  “THE DREADNAUGHT”—­NEW YORK AND LIVERPOOL PACKET]

It was natural that the restless mind of the American, untrammeled by traditions and impatient of convention, should turn eagerly and early to the question of crossing the ocean by steam.  When the rivers had been made busy highways for puffing steamboats; when the Great Lakes, as turbulent as the ocean, and as vast as the Mediterranean, were conquered by the new marine device; when steamships plied between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Savannah, and Charleston, braving what is by far more perilous than mid-ocean, the danger of tempests on a lee shore, and the shifting sands of Hatteras, there seemed to the enterprising man no reason why the passage from New York to Liverpool might not be made by the same agency.  The scientific authorities were all against it.  Curiously enough, the weight of scientific authority is always against anything new.  Marine architects and mathematicians proved to their own satisfaction at least that no vessel could carry enough coal to cross the Atlantic, that the coal bunkers would have to be bigger than the vessel itself, in order to hold a sufficient supply for the furnaces.  It is a matter of history that an eminent British scientist was engaged in delivering a lecture on this very subject in Liverpool when the “Savannah,” the first steamship to cross the ocean, steamed into the harbor.  It is fair, however, to add that the “Savannah’s” success did not wholly destroy the contention of the opponents of steam navigation, for she made much of the passage under sail, being fitted only with what we would call now “auxiliary steam power.”  This was in 1819, but so slow were the shipbuilders to progress beyond what had been done with the “Savannah,”