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Wednesday, February 22. 2006The Explosion of the Ben Lewis - June 25, 1860.Information on early steamboats and those who operated and traveled on them can be found in a number of sources. My personal preference are law suits and there depositions of witnesses. Newspapers are an excellent source as well as the reports of the local steamboat inspectors which were sometimes printed in the papers Beginning in 1853 the supervising inspector for each district met with his counterparts in a major city within one of the districts. Here they submitted "their annual report of the operation of the steamboat law of August 30, 1852, and their own proceedings and those of the local boards during the past year." These summaries were in turn printed in the annual "Report of the Secretary of the Treasury of the State of the Finances." The following is taken from the report for the year ending June 30, 1860; Trackbacks
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Michael,
did the reports mention in any way WHY this second engineer was running on such a low water level? Franz Franz,
Have gone back over the newspaper (Missouri Republican) accounts for any comments concerning the second engineer Arthur Sherer but the only mention was that he was killed as well as all the firemen. Although before the licensing of pilots and engineers a statement in an 1843 document relative to steamboat explosions, could very well apply to individuals in 1860. "these self-styled engineers are perfect tools in the hands of some of our Western steamboat captains; for many of the steamboat commanders on the Western waters are as unfit to have charge of a vessel as their engineers are to have charge of an engine – their promotion to the office being more owing to the few hundred dollars with which they have bought the office than to their skill in managing a vessel. He soon gets to think that he knows full as much as any old steamboat captain, and in fact he goes further than any experienced steamboat captain thinks proper; for the man of practical experience will hire only such men as he knows to be competent, while the inexperienced man hires the man who offers his services for the least sum of money. And for fear that his engineer does not properly understand the business for which he has been hired, or because he is well aware of the incompetency of the engineer, he (the captain) takes it upon himself to teach him the art of engineering. He tells the engineer he must shove the boat harder, and instructs him how it may be done – viz, by carrying a small supply of water in his boilers; and when steam blows off from the safety valve, he says to the engineer, "Don't waste your steam in that way, but weight the valve down, and work it through the engine;" and the engineer, not being any wiser than the captain on the subject, (and neither of them knowing the amount of steam they carry in the boilers,) suffers the captain thus to direct him, until, between the captain and the other "engineer," they blow the boiler out of the boat, and perhaps hundreds of persons into eternity." Michael |
