William Symington demonstrates his Charlotte Dundas, the…

William Symington demonstrates his Charlotte Dundas, the "first practical steamboat", on January 5, 1803, in Scotland.

Development of experimental steam engined paddle boats by Symington had halted when the sponsor, Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, abandoned the project.

Symington had continued building steam pumping engines and mill engines

In 1793 he had developed a drive using a pivoted crosshead beam above the vertical cylinder to transmit power to a crank.

Miller's project and Captain John Schank's unsuccessful attempt at a canal steam tug had come to the attention of Thomas, Lord Dundas, Governor of the Forth and Clyde Canal Company, and at a meeting of the canal company's directors on June 5, 1800, had approved his proposals on the basis of "a model of a boat by Captain Schank to be worked by a steam engine by Mr Symington".

The boat was built by Alexander Hart at Grangemouth to Symington's design with a vertical cylinder engine and crosshead transmitting power to a crank driving the paddlewheels.

Trials on the River Carron in June 1801 were successful.

This first boat may have been named Charlotte Dundas and the trials apparently included towing sloops from the river Forth up the Carron and thence along the Forth and Clyde Canal.

There was concern about wave damage to the canal banks, and possibly the boat was found to be underpowered on the canal, so the canal company had refused further trials.

In 1801 Symington had patented a horizontal steam engine directly linked to a crank, and got the support of Lord Dundas for a second steamboat which will become famous as Charlotte Dundas, named in honor of his Lordship's daughter.

Symington has designed a new hull around his powerful horizontal engine, with the crank driving a large paddle wheel in a central upstand in the hull, aimed at avoiding damage to the canal banks.

The new boat is fifty-six feet (seventeen point one meters) long, eighteen feet (five point five meters) wide and eight feet (two piont four meters) depth, with a wooden hull.

After a model of the boat was made and shown to Lord Dundas, the boat had been built by John Allan, and the engine by the Carron Company.

The first sailing was on the canal in Glasgow on January 4, 1803, with Lord Dundas and a few of his relatives and friends on board.

After some improvements, in March 1803 Charlotte Dundas tows two seventy-ton barges thirty kilometres (nineteen miles) along the Forth and Clyde Canal to Glasgow, and despite "a strong breeze right ahead" which stopped all other canal boats it took only nine and a quarter hours, giving an average speed of about 3 kilometers per hour (one point nine miles per hours).

This had demonstrated the practicality of steam power for towing boats.

Plans to introduce boats on the Forth and Clyde canal are thwarted, largely by fears of erosion of the banks, and a project to build tug boats for the Bridgewater Canal had ended with the Duke of Bridgewater's death a few days before the March trial.