The first steamship across the Atlantic sailed with none of its booked passengers
When SS Savannah left for Liverpool in 1819, all thirty-two people who had reserved places stayed ashore. Their caution was understandable: the ship ran on steam for no more than 72 hours of a 27-day crossing, relying mostly on sail. Within two decades, powered liners were racing each other across the ocean for glory.
Doubt ran deep. In 1836 the science writer Dionysius Lardner scoffed that a direct steam voyage from New York to Liverpool was as fanciful as sailing to the moon. A year later SS Sirius left Liverpool on 4 April and reached New York on 22 April, though the crew ran short of coal and fed cabin furniture into the boilers. A condenser supplying fresh water made it possible, sparing the engineers from stopping to clear salt. The record lasted a day. Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western, which had departed on 8 April, arrived averaging 8.66 knots against 8.03, and the contest that became the Blue Riband began.
Brunel grasped the arithmetic that shaped liners for a century: a hull's carrying capacity grows with the cube of its dimensions while water resistance grows only with the square, so bigger ships burn proportionally less fuel. His ambitions ran ahead of luck, though. SS Great Britain, the first ship combining an iron hull with a screw propeller, ran aground in 1846, and SS Great Eastern of 1858, able to carry 4,000 passengers and the largest passenger ship for 43 years, suffered an explosion on her maiden voyage.
Mail contracts supplied the steady money. Samuel Cunard founded his line in 1839 around carrying post on fixed schedules, and in 1840 RMS Britannia opened regular steam service from Liverpool to Boston. Ships under Royal Mail contract earned the RMS prefix. Liners were built differently from cruise ships, with higher freeboard, thicker plating and deeper drafts to survive open-ocean storms on a timetable.
Airliners began displacing them in the 1950s. Since Queen Elizabeth 2 retired in 2008, only Cunard's Queen Mary 2, introduced in 2004 and the largest ever built, remains in service as a true ocean liner.
Source: Ocean liner
