Robert Gudmestad

Showed their signs of wear and some boilers would crack or some boilers would have a slight seam or the seam in them wasn't.

It began to weaken.

Right.

And boiler explosions were common on Western River steamboats because these are high pressure engines.

And boilers were long tubes and you'd have water in the tubes.

And then, of course, you're heating the water, making it into steam, and then you're pumping more water into the boilers.

But you're taking the water from the Mississippi River and it's muddy.

And there was supposed to be a way to filter the water.

It was a machine called the doctor, but it didn't work very well.

And so boilers would also get sediment in them.

And if too much sediment buildup, that would be a problem for the boilers as well.

And I talked about before that Americans loved fast steamboats and there were actually steamboat races.

And we can talk about that if you want to, but captains like to have a fast start from a port.

So if they're leaving Memphis, they want to have a fast start because that would get people talking.

There'd be a buzz about the steamboat.

And one way to do that was to sort of preserve the steam and

and then have it shoot into the boiler at one time.

But this was a problem because your boilers, if they weren't heated well enough, they could, when the steam hit them, and if there was a crack in the boiler, that would cause an explosion.

And so this mania for speed led to boiler explosions.

It wasn't the only reason, but it increased the number of boiler explosions.