THE STEAMBOAT AND THE COTTON GIN
I THINK you must now have learned a great deal about the history of your
country from the time Columbus crossed the ocean till the year 1800, the
beginning of the Nineteenth century. You have been told about discovery,
and settlement, and wars, and modes of life, and government, and other
things, but you must bear in mind that these are not the whole of
history. The story of our country is broad and deep enough to hold many
other things beside these. For instance, there is the story of our great
inventors, to whom we owe so much. I propose in this chapter to tell you
about some of those who lived near the year 1800.
First, I must ask you to go back with me to a kitchen in Scotland many
years ago. On the open hearth of that kitchen a bright fire blazed, and
near by sat a thoughtful-faced boy, with his eyes fixed on the
tea-kettle which was boiling away over the fire, while its lid kept
lifting to let the steam escape. His mother, who was bustling about, no
doubt thought him idle, and may have scolded him a little. But he was
far from idle; he was busy at work--not with his hands, but with his
brain. The brain, you know, may be hard at work while the body is doing
nothing.
How many of you have seen the lid of a kettle of boiling water keeping
up its clatter as the steam lifts it and puffs out into the air? And
what thought has this brought into your mind? Into the mind of little
James Watt, the Scotch boy, it brought one great thought, that of power.
As he looked at it, he said to himself that the steam which comes from
boiling water must have a great deal of force, if a little of it could
keep the kettle lid clattering up and down; and he asked himself if such
a power could not be put to some good use.
Our Scotch boy was not the first one to have that thought. Others had
thought the same thing, and steam had been used to move a poor sort of
engine. But what James Watt did when he grew up, was to invent a much
better engine than had ever been made before. It was a great day for us
all when that engine was invented. Before that time men had done most of
the work of the world with their hands, and you may imagine that the
work went on very slowly. Since that time most of the world's work has
been done with the aid of the steam-engine, and one man can do as much
as many men could do in the past. You have seen the wheels rolling and
heard the machines rattling and the hammers clanging in our great
factories and workshops. And I fancy most of you know that back of all
these is the fire under the boilers and the steam in the engine, the
mighty magician which sets all these wheels and machines at work and
changes raw material into so many things of use and beauty.
Now let us come back to our American inventors. I have spoken about the
steam engine because it was with this that most of them worked. They
thought that if horses could drag a wagon over the ground and the wind
could drive a vessel through the water, steam might do the same thing,
and they set themselves to see in what way a carriage or a boat could be
moved by a steam engine.
Very likely you have all heard about Robert Fulton and his steamboat,
but you may not know that steamboats were running on American waters
years before that of Fulton was built. Why, as long ago as 1768, before
the Revolutionary War, Oliver Evans, one of our first inventors, had
made a little boat which was moved by steam and paddle-wheels. Years
afterwards he made a large engine for a boat at New Orleans. It was put
in the boat, but there came a dry season and low water, so that the boat
could not be used, and the owners took the engine out and set it to work
on a sawmill. It did so well there that it was never put back in the
boat; so that steamboat never had a chance.
Oliver Evans was the first man to make a steamboat, but there were
others who thought they could move a boat by steam. Some of these were
in Europe and some in America. Down in Virginia was an inventor named
Rumsey who moved a boat at the speed of four miles an hour. In this boat
jets of water were pumped through the stern and forced the boat along.
In Philadelphia was another man named John Fitch, who was the first man
to make a successful steamboat. His boat was moved with paddles like an
Indian canoe. It was put on the Delaware River, between Philadelphia and
Trenton in 1790, and ran for several months as a passenger boat, at the
speed of seven or eight miles an hour. Poor John Fitch! He was
unfortunate and in the end he killed himself.
I am glad to be able to tell you a different story of the next man who
tried to make a steamboat. His name was Robert Fulton. He was born in
Pennsylvania, and as a boy was very fond of the water, he and the other
boys having an old flatboat which they pushed along with a pole. Fulton
got tired of this way of getting along, and like a natural-born inventor
set his wits to work. In the end he made two paddle-wheels which hung
over the sides and could be moved in the water by turning a crank and
so force the boat onward. The boys found this much easier than the pole,
and likely enough young Fulton thought a large vessel might be moved in
the same way.
He knew all about what others had done. He had heard how Rumsey moved
his boat by pumping water through the stern, and Fitch by paddling it
along. And he had seen a boat in Scotland moved by a stern paddle-wheel.
I fancy he had not forgotten the side paddle-wheel he made as a boy to
go fishing with, for when he set out to invent his steamboat this is the
plan he tried.
Fulton made his first boat in France, but he had bad luck there. Then he
came to America and built a boat in New York. While he was at work on
this boat in America, James Watt, of whom I have already told you, was
building him an engine in England. He wanted the best engine that he
could get, and he thought the Scotch inventor was the right man to make
it.
While Fulton was working some of the smart New Yorkers were laughing.
They called his boat "Fulton's Folly," and said it would not move faster
than the tide would carry it. But he let them laugh and worked on, and
at last, one day in 1807, the new boat, which he named the "Clermont,"
was afloat in the Hudson ready for trial. Hundreds of curious people
came to see it start. Some were ready to laugh again when they saw the
boat, with its clumsy paddle-wheels hanging down in the water on both
sides. They were not covered with wooden frames as were such wheels
afterwards.
"That boat move? So will a log move if set adrift," said the people who
thought themselves very wise. "It will move when the tide moves it, and
not before." But none of them felt like laughing when they saw the
wheels begin to turn and the boat to glide out into the stream, moving
against the tide.
"She moves! she moves!" cried the crowd, and nobody said a word about
"Fulton's Folly."
Move she did. Up the Hudson she went against wind and current, and
reached Albany, one hundred and forty-two miles away, in thirty-two
hours. This was at the rate of four and a half miles an hour. It was not
many years before steamboats were running on all our rivers.
That is all I shall say here about the steamboat, for there is another
story of invention I wish to tell you before I close. This is about the
cotton fibre, which you know is the great product of the Southern
States.
The cotton plant when ripe has a white, fluffy head, and a great bunch
of snow-white fibres, within which are the seeds. In old times these had
to be taken out by hand, and it was a whole day's work for a negro to
get the seeds out of a pound of the cotton. This made cotton so dear
that not much of it could be sold. In 1784 eight bags of it were sent to
Liverpool, and the custom-house people there seized it for duties. They
said it must have been smuggled from some other country, for the United
States could not have produced such a "prodigious quantity."
A few years afterwards a young man named Eli Whitney went South to teach
in a private family, but before he got there some one else had his
situation, and he was left with nothing to do. Mrs. Greene, the widow of
General Greene, who fought so well in the Revolution, took pity on him
and gave him a home in her house. He paid her by fixing up things about
her house. She found him so handy that she asked him if he could not
invent a machine to take the seeds out of the cotton. Whitney said he
would try, and he set himself to work. It was not long before he had a
machine made which did the work wonderfully well. This machine is known
as the "cotton-gin," or cotton engine, for gin is short for engine. On
one side of it are wires so close together that the seeds cannot get
through. Between them are circular saws which catch the cotton and draw
it through, while the seeds pass on.
The machine was a simple one, but it acted like magic. A hundred negroes
could not clean as much cotton in a day as one machine. The price of
cotton soon went down and a demand for it sprang up. In 1795, when the
cotton gin was made, only about 500,000 pounds of cotton were produced
in this country. By 1801 this had grown to 20,000,000 pounds. Now it has
grown to more than 12,000,000 bales, of nearly 500 pounds each. This is
sold to foreign countries and is worked in our own mills at home, being
made into millions of yards of cloth of many kinds to clothe the people
of the earth. All this comes from the work of Eli Whitney's machine. And
the seed taken from the cotton is pressed for the oil it contains, so
that from a year's crop we get nearly 150,000,000 gallons of useful
oil.