A fourth-grade teacher was giving her pupils a lesson in logic.
"Here is the situation," she said. "A man is standing up in a boat in the middle of a river, fishing. He loses his balance, falls in, and begins splashing and yelling for help. His wife hears the commotion, knows he can't swim, and runs down to the bank. Why do you think she ran to the bank?"
A girl raised her hand and asked, "To withdraw all his money from his savings account?"
Iron shipIn 1825, the first ship made in the U.S. with sheet iron was tested on the Susquehanna River. Named the Codorus, the vessel was built by Quaker John Elgar at York, Pa. using sheet iron fastened with iron rivets. The ship weighted five tons, of which two tons was for the coal- and wood- fueled boiler which provided power for an 8 h.p. engine. With a keel length of 60-ft and a 9-ft beam, the ship drew about seven inches of water. The next spring, the steamboat performed according to design by completing an upriver trip to Binghamton, N.Y. - the only steamboat to do so. The difficult three-month voyage proved that upstream navigation on the shallow, rock-filled Susquehanna was impractical. |
