There are fashions in remembering. Captain Scott, the Titanic, Dickens, the Queen: we have been well informed, even over-informed, about their lives this year in the commemorations marking the anniversaries of their demise, birth or accession.
But something else was born in 1812 that proved even more remarkable and influential than Dickens. On 6 August, 200 years ago on Monday week, a ship powered by steam made its maiden voyage up the Clyde from Greenock to Glasgow. This was the little Comet, commissioned by a millwright and hotel owner named Henry Bell. Thanks to Bell's efforts, the Comet was recognised as the first commercially successful steamship in Europe, enabling Bell to claim his title as the father of steam navigation, and thus a leading figure among the Britons, and particularly Scotsmen, who shaped the modern world.
Schools in Scotland used to teach this litany, and perhaps some still do: James Watt, Thomas Telford, John McAdam, Alexander Graham Bell, Alexander Fleming, John Logie Baird. Some were more securely placed than others (had Baird really invented television?) and nobody could match Watt in his eminence; the separate steam condenser was incontestably his invention and no device played a larger part in the industrial revolution. But Bell could surely be ranked with George Stephenson, successfully applying steam to sea transport as Stephenson had applied it to the movement of people and goods overland. In each case, children's books that were still current in the 1950s illustrated a narrative of progress. The railway locomotive began with the Rocket and ended with the streamlined Mallard. The steamship began with the Comet and ended with the Queen Mary. Even now I could draw the Comet without any visual reference to help: the thin and unfeasibly long funnel rigged with a square sail, the trailing smoke, the men in hats standing above the paddlewheels – in history, at least Scottish history, the picture came to symbolise the beginning of modernity.
The story, of course, had been simplified to fit patriotic demands and the prevailing theory that history was made by Great Men. Bell hadn't "invented" the steamship – if any single person deserves that credit it is Scottish engineer William Symington, whose craft puffed across a Dumfriesshire loch in 1788, or the American Robert Fulton, whose ships were steaming up the Hudson five years before the Comet hit the Clyde. Bell hadn't even built the Comet, whose engine, boiler and hull came from three separate firms. But his fame grew after his death in 1830. The banks of the Clyde sprouted a couple of obelisks in his memory, there to remind generations of steamer passengers of their benefactor, and a statue was later erected near his grave in Dunbartonshire.
The climax came in August 1912, when western Scotland went en fête to celebrate the centenary of the Comet's inaugural voyage. Nothing then was too good for Henry Bell. A public holiday was declared, a medal was struck, the secretary of state for Scotland proposed his memory at a grand lunch in Glasgow City Chambers.
Universities and technical colleges organised all kinds of festivities. There were fireworks, souvenir newspapers, a large exhibition in the city's art galleries and a procession of three steamships that followed the Comet's route downriver with a full complement of industrial craftsmen, sailors and shipbuilders.
Beyond Greenock, they met the most spectacular sight. A squadron of battleships, cruisers and destroyers under the command of Vice Admiral Jellicoe had sailed north in Bell's honour and lay anchored at the mouth of the Clyde, together with the finest selection of merchant vessels that Scotland's leading shipping companies could provide. Naval searchlights played across this scene by night; by day, excursion steamers wove in and out of the fleet to give their cargoes of schoolchildren a closer view.
The 150th anniversary in 1962 couldn't help but be a pale relation of such magnificence. Even so, the shipbuilder William Lithgow launched a full-scale working replica of the Comet at his yard in Port Glasgow, which set sail later for Helensburgh, Bell's hometown, with a deck filled with dignitaries in period costume. Crowds turned up – I was a schoolboy among them. Fifty years on, what do we have? A few hard-working Bell enthusiasts in Helensburgh have built a website and organised an exhibition in the local library. The paddle steamer Waverley will make a special cruise to the town. If the sea isn't too choppy, a small model of the Comet will sail round the pier. Governments have shown little interest. In England few know who Bell is, and perhaps not many more do in Scotland.
Bell had a terror of being forgotten, and spent the last decades of his life as a tireless promoter of his own cause. According to a Victorian account, "His mind was a chaos of extraordinary projects, the most of which, from his want of accurate scientific calculation, he never could carry into practice." He was mocked for his spelling, in which the Comet took on "the grate object of cheap and expedishous conveyance of pipale". He made little money from his ship – two better steamers were on the Clyde within a year. Seeking a government pension, he confected a biography in which his assistance had been vital to Fulton's success, and invented meetings with the Admiralty in which Lord Nelson alone had recognised his genius.
In terms of posterity, he was his own worst enemy, though for years several of his stupendous fabrications were widely accepted; no serious study of his life was attempted in the 150 years between a friend's hagiography in 1844 and the late Brian D Osborne's inquiring biography of 1995. Scepticism, however, can't demolish his achievement – he was, as Brunel said, the planner of Europe's first practical steamer – and nor does it account for our forgetting him. That has a different cause.
Osborne's book describes how, when in 1912 the thousands of Bell celebrants sailed down the Clyde, they passed no fewer than 29 shipbuilding yards, in which 175 vessels were either under construction or being fitted out, among them the Aquitania, which was about to become the largest liner afloat. No other place in the world could rival this scene, and out of it had come a distinctive economy and a way of life. To this society, Bell was what would now be called a "foundation story": somebody to be thanked for giving the Clyde its fame and prosperity, as modern votaries bless a medieval saint, and also somebody that a shipyard craftsman could see as an ancestor, an Adam with a chisel.
The river is almost empty now. The Comet's engine sits in London's Science Museum; the 1962 replica has come to rest near where the original was built in Port Glasgow, which is to say beside Tesco's.