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the first successful steamship was built in the 1790s by an American named

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John Fitch. it was bulky slow and if we're being [Fitch on steam ships]

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honest pretty ugly. that's a face only a mother could love.

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well uglier not Fitch's steamship could carry 30 people up and down a river at a

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galloping 6 miles an hour. whoa hold on to your bonnets there ladies. as we

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already know the steam engine was in need of revisions if it was gonna be an

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efficient source of power. well by the early 1800s a standard kind of steamer

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had been built using the new Watt steam engines and a giant paddle wheel. think [steam ship sinks a little]

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about a classic Mark Twain kind of riverboat paddling up the Mississippi.

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paddle boats looked awesome but they had some problems. the worst being that their

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paddles operated best at a certain depth. if we loaded our boat down with heavy

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goods or too many people the boat would sink a little and the paddles well

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wouldn't work as well. it wasn't great especially in Gator country. yeah.

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ventually a new kind of steam propulsion swooped in to save the day. these new

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engines were called screw propellers which were giant underwater fans powered [men smile standing next to steamboat]

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by a steam engine.. well screw propellers just rolls off the

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tongue a little nicer don't you think? well propellers were smaller and more

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efficient but they already had that over big clunky paddle wheels. but on top of

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that they worked reliably no matter how deep they were in the water. great for

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people not so great for Gators. one last step in steam engine evolution was the

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steam turbine. aka high-pressure steam engines. these bad boys forced [kid smiles next to steam turbine]

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high-pressure steam through a narrow channel where it turned a turbine

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superfast. way more efficient way faster and probably way scarier for the Gators.

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whatever the technical details steamers had a few things in common. like the fact

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that they burn mountains of coal. they needed extra storage space and crews of

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unfortunate workers to feed the coal into the boiler widow. no one's idea

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of fun. working in a boiler room was kind of like sucking on a smokestack for a

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living. they all took some pretty serious industrial scale equipment to build and [men build equipment]

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assemble, including huge iron furnaces and gigantic welders. but they totally

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blew sailing ships out of the water. no more waiting for the correct wind and

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tide or current ,no more complicated rigging arrangements and no more 40 days

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to get across the Atlantic. well by the early 1900's we can cross the Atlantic

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in just nine days - and sure we can take a transatlantic flight in six hours these [airplane flies by]

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days but to don't tell our ancestors. only depress them .though probably no

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more than the whole being dead thing.

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