as some difference!" interrupted Stephen.

"Well, rather! Had you, however, told Samuel Cunard then that such
mammoth floating hotels were possible he would probably not have
believed you. He had task enough on his hands to carry the mails;
transport the few venturesome souls that dared to cross the sea; and
compete with the many rival steamship lines that sprang up on both sides
of the ocean as soon as some one had demonstrated that trans-Atlantic
travel was practical. For after Cunard had blazed the path there were
plenty of less daring persons ready to steal from him the fruits of his
vision and courage. From 1847 to 1857 the Ocean Steamship Company
carried mails between New York and Bremen, and there was a very popular
line that ran from New York to Havre, up to the period of the Civil War.
Among the individual ships none, perhaps, was more celebrated than the
_Great Eastern_, a vessel of tremendous length, and one that more nearly
approached our present-day liners as to size. Then there was the Collins
Line that openly competed with the Cunard Line; and to further increase
trans-Atlantic travel, in 1855 Cornelius Vanderbilt, ever at the fore in
novel projects, began operating lines of steamships not only to England
and France but to Bremen."

Mr. Ackerman paused a moment.

"By 1871 there was an American line between Philadelphia and Liverpool.
In the meantime, ever since 1861, there had been a slow but steady
advance in ocean shipbuilding. Although iron ships had gradually
replaced wooden ones the side-wheeler was still in vogue, no better
method of locomotion having been discovered. When the change from this
primitive device to the screw propeller came it was a veritable leap in
naval architecture. Now revolutions in any direction seldom receive a
welcome and just as the conservatives had at first hooted down the idea
of iron ships, asserting they would never float, so they now decried the
use of the screw propeller. Indeed there was no denying that this
innovation presented to shipbuilders a multitude of new and balking
problems. While the clipper ships had greatly improved the designs of
vessels the stern was still their weakest point and now, in addition to
this already existing difficulty, came the new conundrums presented by
the pitch, or full turn of the thread, in the screw propeller; also the
churning of the current produced by the rapidly whirling wheel, which
was found to retard the speed of the ship v