RIASSUNTO
The nostalgia that Victor Hugo expressed in Les Misérables for old-fashioned sailing ships was equaled only by his disdain for the newfangled steam-powered ones: “A thing which smoked and clacked on the Seine, making the noise of a swimming dog, came and went beneath the windows of the Tuileries. It was a worthless mechanism, a sort of toy, an inventor's pipe dream, a utopia: a steamboat. The Parisians looked upon the useless thing with indifference.” John Ruskin, meanwhile, complained that steam was “the very curse and unmaking of us” and had little use for iron as a structural material.1 Poets might have railed against the intrusion of such technologies into their carefully constructed aesthetic, but societies as a whole adopted steam, iron, and later, steel, for railways, river and canal boats, and ocean shipping, all owing to one overarching reason—predictability. Predictable transportation greased the skids of commerce, leading to lower market costs, increased throughput, higher profits, and thus greater confidence by business owners for making future investments.