Willis J. Abbot
Capitolo 54
England--with the invention of the steamboat, the adaptation of the grapevine
to the propulsion of vases and the invention of triple-expansion
motor, still it was England that has grabbed on these inventions and with
they won, and long it held, the commercial dominion of the seas. To-day (1902)
it seems that economic conditions are changed so that the shipyards of
the United States will compete again for the business of the world. We am
ships that build as good person--perhaps better--that you/he/she can be built wherever
other, but so far we have not been able to build them as convenient.
Accordingly our builders have been tightened to the construction of
war ships, ship of cabotage and yacht. National pride has naturally demanded that
all the vases for the military harbor are built in American shipyards and a federal law
you/he/she has tightened from very the work among harbors of the United States to ships
built here. The lake to send, also--prodigious in numbers and the activity--it is
purely American. But up to that among some years the American flag almost had
disappeared by vases taken part in international trade. American in many
examples are the owners of ships that fly the British flag for the united one,
Laws of States deny American recording--what to a ship is that that citizen is
to a man--to vases built to the foreign countries. While the result of this attempt to
protects American shipyards you/he/she has been to drive our flag from the ocean,
they are now there indications that our shipyards are prepared to form as
cheap as others, and that the flag will show up again on the tall seas.
Popular history has attributed the honor to build to Robert Fulton and
governing the first steamboat. As required to priority in many others
inventions, this is valiantly contested. Two years before Fulton
"Clermont" it appeared on the Hudson, John Stevens, of Hoboken built a
steamboat pushed by a grapevine, the model of what in the Stevens is still
Polytechnic institute. First anchor, John Fitch, of Pennsylvania had
made a steamboat, and it exhorted him on Franklin, on Washington and on