Industrialization of War, 1840–84 225
tary matters. The reason was that from the 1830s private firms vigor
ously set about the task of building steam vessels that would be capa
ble of crossing the Atlantic. Hope of profit and prestige rivalry that
pitted one group of financial entrepreneurs against another in order to
build bigger, better, faster, and more beautiful vessels hastened the
process forward; governmental subsidies for carrying the mail, ini
tiated by Great Britain in 1839, helped defray costs of developing new
designs without completely committing naval authorities to the new
steam and iron technology.^2
The pace of development was very rapid. Robert Fulton had dem
onstrated one of the first successful steam-drive vessels on the Hud
son River in 1807. Thirty years later the paddle wheeler Sirius crossed
the Atlantic under sustained steam power (assisted by sails to be sure)
in a mere eighteen days. Two years later, crossing time was reduced to
fourteen days and eight hours. In the 1840s propellers began to re
place the clumsy paddle wheels of the earliest successful steamships,
and in the same decade iron hulls supplanted wooden construction for
large, oceangoing steamships. Engines grew from the 320 horsepower
that impelled the Sirius across the Atlantic in 1837 to the 1,600
horsepower that propelled the vast bulk (680 feet long) of the Great
Eastern just twenty-one years later.^3
The pell-mell development of steamships did not at once alter the
way navies were managed. The principal seat of the new steamship
technology was in Great Britain; but the world supremacy of the
British navy, assured since Trafalgar (1805), depended on sails and the
skills required to fight in ships whose design had not fundamentally
altered since the 1670s. Under the circumstances, the British Admir
alty was perfectly justified in standing pat. Timber supply, naval ship
yard facilities for building and repairing warships, for casting of can
non and for preserving victuals: in short, all that was needed to keep
- British mail subsidies, administered by the Admiralty between 1839 and 1860,
were given only to ships deemed potentially useful in war. Specifications required, for
example, that the mail carriers be capable of mounting heavy guns in case of need. Until
experiences of the Crimean War proved differently, commercial steamships were pre
sumed to be capable of swift conversion into warships. This recapitulated the situation
that prevailed from 1300 to 1600, when stoutly built commercial vessels doubled as
warships as a matter of course. In the nineteenth century the presumed convertibility of
the new steamers lasted less than two decades—a measure of the heightened pace of
technical change after 1800. On steamers as reserve ships of war see David B. Tyler,
Steam Conquers the Atlantic (London, 1939), pp. 77–81, 170–72, 231–32.
- These statistics come from W. A. Baker, From Paddle Steamer to Nuclear Ship: A
History of the Engine-Powered Vessel (London, 1965), pp. 41–58. Cf. Francis E. Hyde,
Cunard and the North Atlantic: A History of Shipping and Financial Management (Lon
don, 1975); Tyler, Steam Conquers the Atlantic.
