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The coal revolution
Published in Anthony N. Penna, A History of Energy Flows, 2019
With the passing of its golden age and the loss of its primacy in shipping and passenger travel on the nation’s rivers, steamboat service declined but did not disappear in the post–Civil War years, 1865 and beyond. Paradoxically, some of the industry’s largest and most luxurious steamboats became operational during these years. Steamboats of the 1,000-ton class capable of carrying cargo twice that amount plied the waters of the Mississippi–Missouri watershed in the 1870s. To attract wealthy passengers, the largest of these vessels decorated cabins with stained-glass skylights, rich carpets and elegant furnishings. Despite these efforts, steamboats greater than 200 tons declined by 50 percent from 1870 to 1890, while owners and operators of lower-tonnage vessels used them for short-distance travel. Contracting further with the growth of the railroads, the era of the steamboat ended in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the arrival of internal combustion engines in trucking and diesel-powered tugboats pushing coal- and iron ore–laden barges to industrial mills along the rivers.
Grasping the future
Published in Henry H. Perritt, Eliot O. Sprague, Domesticating Drones, 2016
Henry H. Perritt, Eliot O. Sprague
Disruptive technologies often have effects far beyond what their early adopters anticipated. Railroads turned out to be useful, not primarily to link one steamboat port to another, but to weave a transportation web across the whole country, making steamboats obsolete except as tourist curiosities. The telephone proved popular, not as a mechanism for receiving music, as its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, first anticipated, but as a ubiquitous mechanism for person-to-person communication, eventually making telegrams obsolete. Transport aircraft turned out not only to be vehicles for handfuls of the rich, able to fly mostly when the weather was good, but to be the mainstay of modern all-weather transportation for everyone. The jet aircraft engine turned out not only to be a boon for high-performance fighter aircraft, but to represent the propulsion system of choice for most airplanes and helicopters.
Political and Regulatory Aspects of Energy and Environment
Published in Anco S. Blazev, Power Generation and the Environment, 2021
During this time, new demands for flood control improvements began appearing, along with a new source of power from steam. By the 1830s, commercial success of steamboat navigation and transport became widespread and pushed demand for more river and canal improvements. With much the same technical expertise as needed for earlier roads and canals, the U.S. corps of engineers was assigned to conduct scientific studies of rivers and other water bodies to improve the country’s water system.
Steam power, native labor, and contested terraqueous mobilities during American settlement of Puget Sound, 1846–1873
Published in Mobilities, 2022
After the transcontinental railroads reached Puget Sound in the late nineteenth century, its non-Native population boomed. Steam vessels became ubiquitous, with so many buzzing over Puget Sound that residents called them ‘the mosquito fleet.’ Settlers increasingly saw Native canoes as picturesque and romantic symbols of a soon-to-be vanishing race. But canoes retained a powerful aura of mobility. In the early twentieth century, Seattle hosted an annual ‘Golden Potlatch’ festival, appropriating a banned Native ceremonial practice to celebrate settlers’ urban wealth. At these festivals, settlers dressed as Native people perched in canoes atop parade floats to ‘paddle’ the city’s streets (Wilma 2000; McConaghy 2007). Even as ersatz canoes floated through Seattle, Native people continued to use real canoes as functional transportation to reach seasonal agricultural work around Puget Sound into the early twentieth century (Lutz 2002; Raibmon 2006). Today, diesel-powered vessels have replaced steamboats. Settler maritime traffic continues to criss-cross Puget Sound. But Native people, of course, never vanished, and neither did Native canoes.
Trends in onroad transportation energy and emissions
Published in Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association, 2018
Samuel L. Altshuler, John D. Bachmann
Among the many changes wrought by the industrial revolution was the rapid development of new modes of transportation and related infrastructure. Railroads, steamboats, and long-distance rail and road networks, as well as canals, greatly increased both the capacity and speed of movement of goods and people. Yet, in the latter half of the 19th century, mass transport in major urban areas like New York and London was still largely horse-powered street cars that ran on rails.