Steamships became common for transatlantic travel in the 1860s and dominated global shipping by the 1870s. The transition from sail to steam took roughly four decades, starting with experimental voyages in the late 1830s and reaching near-total dominance on major passenger routes by 1873, when 97 percent of passengers arriving in New York came by steamship.
The First Transatlantic Crossings
Steam-powered boats appeared on rivers and coastal routes as early as the 1810s, but ocean crossings were a different challenge entirely. A ship needed to carry enough coal to fuel its engines for weeks at sea, and that coal took up cargo space that would otherwise earn money. The real proving ground came in April 1838, when two British steamships raced across the Atlantic to New York.
The SS Sirius left Cork, Ireland on April 4 and reached New York on April 22, making it the first steamship to complete a full transatlantic crossing under sustained steam power. The Great Western arrived the very next day, having left Bristol several days later. Despite finishing second, the Great Western was the more impressive performer: it completed the crossing in 15 days with 200 tons of coal still in its hold, while the Sirius notoriously ran out of fuel before reaching port. Sailing ships at the time averaged 33 days going westward. The Great Western cut that nearly in half and became the model for a new generation of ocean liners.
The Slow Shift Through the 1850s
Despite the 1838 breakthrough, steamships didn’t immediately replace sail. For the next two decades, they remained expensive to operate and dependent on coal supplies that limited their range. Sailing ships were cheaper, didn’t need fuel, and could carry more cargo. On most routes, steam simply couldn’t compete on cost.
Steamships first gained a foothold on the prestigious transatlantic passenger route between Liverpool and New York, where speed mattered and wealthy travelers would pay a premium. But even here, progress was gradual. Before the American Civil War, most immigrants crossing the Atlantic still traveled by sail. The steamship shortened the voyage from a minimum of five or six weeks to under two weeks and made arrival times far more predictable, yet the lower fares on sailing ships kept them competitive for years.
The 1860s: The Tipping Point
The decade of the 1860s is when steamships crossed from novelty into mainstream use. In 1861, only 31 percent of immigrants arriving in New York came on steamers. By 1863, that figure had risen to 40 percent. By 1864, it reached 45 percent. Sailing ships were still busy during this period (96,000 passengers arrived by sail in 1864), but steam was pulling ahead fast.
By 1867, roughly 193,000 passengers arrived in New York on steamships compared to about 47,000 on sailing vessels. The transition accelerated from there. By 1873, 97 percent of passengers reached New York by steam, with sailing ship arrivals dropping to just 8,000 people. The entire shift on the North Atlantic passenger route took about 15 years to complete, driven by rising immigrant volume, improving engine technology, and a shipbuilding industry that increasingly bet on steam.
The Suez Canal Changed Everything
While steamships were winning the Atlantic, sailing ships still dominated trade routes to Asia. The voyage around the southern tip of Africa was enormously long, and steamships couldn’t carry enough coal to make it without frequent, expensive refueling stops. Sailing ships, which needed no fuel at all, had a clear advantage on these routes. In 1868, just 2 percent of the 1.1 million tons of goods entering Britain from Asia came on steamships.
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 upended this balance overnight. The canal cut thousands of miles off the journey to Asia, and its narrow waters gave steam-powered vessels (which could navigate without wind) a decisive edge over sailing ships. In the four years after the canal opened, steam tonnage from Asia surged by roughly 178 percent, adding about 500,000 tons on top of growth already driven by improving technology. The canal didn’t just shorten the route; it made steam the only practical option for the most lucrative trade in the world.
The Coaling Station Network
Steamships could only go as far as their coal supply allowed, which meant global steam travel depended on a network of refueling points scattered across the world’s oceans. Britain, as the dominant maritime power, built this infrastructure aggressively after 1860. By 1884, Britain operated 46 naval and commercial coaling stations worldwide, from Gibraltar to Aden to Singapore, creating a chain of refueling stops that let steam-powered ships reach virtually any port on earth.
The concept was so new that when Britain seized the island of Perim at the mouth of the Red Sea in 1859 to use as a refueling point, newspaper reports put the phrase “coaling station” in quotation marks, as though it were unfamiliar slang. Within a few decades, these stations were the backbone of global trade. Up until World War I, Britain controlled the core infrastructure of globalization: merchant shipping, undersea communications cables, and the coaling network that made it all run.
From Common to Universal
By the mid-1870s, steamships were the standard on major passenger and cargo routes across the Atlantic and increasingly to Asia. Sailing ships didn’t vanish entirely. They lingered on bulk cargo routes where speed mattered less than cost, carrying grain, coal, and lumber into the early 1900s. But for passengers, mail, and high-value freight, steam was the unquestioned standard by 1875.
The full timeline breaks down roughly like this: experimental crossings in the late 1830s, growing use on premium Atlantic routes through the 1840s and 1850s, majority adoption on passenger routes in the mid-1860s, near-total dominance by 1873, and global expansion through the 1870s and 1880s as coaling infrastructure and the Suez Canal opened up Asian and African routes. What took decades of gradual improvement suddenly accelerated when infrastructure caught up with technology.