Cross Dock, an alternative to the less efficient paddle steamer. By 1845 the Admiralty had settled upon screw propellers as the optimal form of propulsion, and a slew of new battleships were built in London dockyards equipped with the new technology. The largest and most famous ship of its day, the SS Great Eastern, a collaboration between John Scott Russell and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was constructed at the Millwall Iron Works and launched in 1858. It still holds the record as the largest ship to have been launched on the Thames, and held the record as the largest ship in the world by tonnage until 1901. Despite the astonishing successes of the shipbuilding industry in the first half of the century, in the last decades of the 19th century the industry experienced a precipitous decline that would leave only one large firm, the Thames Ironworks, in existence by the mid-1890s. London shipyards lacked the capacity, and the ability to expand, for building the large vessels in demand by the later 19th century, losing business to newer shipyards in Scotland and the North of England, where labor and overhead costs were lower, and iron and coal deposits much closer. The ancient Royal Dockyards at Woolwich and Deptford, founded by Henry VIII in the 16th century, were too far upriver and too shallow due to the silting up of the Thames, forcing their closure in 1869. Finance The City of London's importance as a financial centre increased substantially over the course of the 19th century. The city's strengths in banking, stock brokerage, and shipping insurance made it the natural channel for the huge rise in capital investment which occurred after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The city was also the headquarters of most of Britain's shipping firms, trading houses, exchanges and commercial firms like railway companies and import houses. As the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, an insatiable demand for capital investment in railroads, shipping, industry and agriculture fueled the growth of financial services in the city. The end of the Napoleonic Wars also freed up British capital to flow overseas; there was some £100 million invested abroad between 1815 and 1830, and as much as £550 million by 1854. At the end of the century, the net total of British foreign investment stood at £2.394 billion. The 1862 Bradshaw's Guide to London listed 83 banks, 336 stockbroking firms, 37