They counseled caution and
reserve against an improvident investment of extensive capital in
schemes which still be only regarded as experimental, and which might
prove its grave. But the voice of remonstrance was drowned amid the
enthusiasm excited by the promise of an immediate practical realization
of a scheme so grand.
"It cannot," he continues, "be seriously imagined that any one who
had been conversant with the past history of steam navigation could
entertain the least doubt of the abstract practicability of a steam
vessel making the voyage between Bristol and New York. A steam vessel,
having as cargo a couple of hundred tons of coals, would, _caeteris
paribus_, be as capable of crossing the Atlantic as a vessel
transporting the same weight of any other cargo."
Dr. Lardner is generally credited with having asserted that a steam
voyage across the Atlantic was "a physical impossibility," but in the
work from which I took the liberty of copying his words he denies the
charge, and says that what he did affirm was, that long sea voyages
could not at that time be maintained with that regularity and certainty
which are indispensable to commercial success, by any revenue which
could be expected from traffic alone.
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