Steam as a metaphor

As steam transportation spread across the United States, steam as a metaphor showed up increasingly in American language, both in published works and in private correspondence or diaries. Indeed, steam-as-metaphor may have spread faster than steam transit itself. For infrastructure to expand, corporations had to be created, funded, and then built. But metaphors required only publication in a newspaper or journal, which could then be mailed around the country. The cultural reach of steam transit could move faster than the physical reach of steam, particularly in the early decades.

One example of such writing comes from a short story entitled “The Young Lawyer,” published by Thomas Shreve in February 1835 in the Cincinnati Mirror and Western Gazette of Literature and Science. In the story, one character offers a lawyer an alcoholic drink, hoping to bring up the lawyer's spirits. The character making the offer says that “A man’s like a steamboat--he may have good works aboard, but damn the bit he goes ahead, till he gets steam up.” The lawyer declined the offer of drink, but kept the metaphor: “Thank you, Joe; I’ve got as much steam about my upper works as I can navigate well under. If I should take any more aboard, some of the flues might collapse, and the boiler burst, or some other mishap come over me.” The steam metaphor was perfect for both the offer of the drink and the refusal.

Metaphors such as these were all over the place in antebellum writing, as things were described happening with “railroad speed,” and so on. Such metaphors helped extend the cultural reach of steam transit throughout the United States, naturalizing the machine's presence on the landscape even if the reader had not yet encountered it in person.