The Last 1,945 Sailing Ships

More than three decades ago, John Hughes and Stanley Reiter published an article that has been widely recognized as a major milestone on the path to the “Cliometric Revolution.” In “The First 1,945 British Steamships” (1958), Hughes and Reiter, employing both the techniques of marine engineering and Purdue University’s then newly installed mainframe computer, analyzed the technical characteristics of the British steam mercantile fleet in 1860.1 The authors concluded that, because maritime historians had badly underestimated the carrying capacity of the steam driven fleet, the degree of the new technology’s market penetration was much greater than had been thought. Moreover, they suggested that, current historiography aside, steam had become the dominant maritime technology by the beginning of the sixth decade of the nineteenth century.