Don Wildman
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
There's a lot of opposing realities on these things.
Obviously, you have the elite decks, but down below you have the boilers as you're working.
Let's talk about that.
I mean, you can imagine the ocean liner as a metaphor of this.
And down below, you got those guys shoveling the coal.
Well, this is the days before that.
I mean, are they powering these things with coal?
I mean, you're talking about a very shallow draft.
No, you're on the deck.
And these boilers, I mean, this happened everywhere.
These boilers were very hazardous.
I mean, they could explode and did on a frequent basis.
Charles Dickens made a famous tour around America.
He expressed his disdain for steamships because of their tendency to blow up.
American steamboats usually blow up one or two a week in the season.
Is that a fair assessment?
There's one particular incident.