The British-built clippers for the tea trade had an advantage over the American in that their designers knew what the intended cargo was and could estimate its weight and center of gravity beforehand, allowing for some slight variations in weights of different teas, and they could therefore design more precisely.

   In the early 1840s Aberdeen had produced anew type ofbow on small coastal schooners which had similarities to an American development and which, later in the decade, was being incorporated into tea trade ships, but it was the repeal of the Navigation Act which was instrumental in bringing much greater urgency to improving design. With the British ports now open to free competition, the Americans wasted no time in seizing their opportunity. Their clipper Oriental, built in New York in 1849, made her first voyage to Hong Kong and back to New York, the homeward leg taking 81 days. Her next trip back to Hong Kong took 8o days and some hours, which feat aroused the excited interest of British traders there, who immediately chartered her to take tea to London, where she arrived 97 days later, making a triumphant entry into the West India Dock on December 3, 1850 .

   The whole nautical community was aroused with admiration for this magnificent fine-lined vessel, and no little uneasy at her threat to British ships. In drydock at Blackwall, the home of the East Indiallen and their successors the Blackwall frigates, surveyors and shipwrights took offher lines, a practice which had been carried out many times before with captured American or French ships noted for their speed and good sailing qualities, as later the lines of the yacht America and clipper Challenge were also taken off.

   The only British sailing ship builders who had attracted any attention by" experimenting with anew hull form and had achieved any noteworthy improvement were at this time located in Aberdeen, Messrs Hall and Messrs Hood, and it was to these builders that owners turned to meet the American threat.
The Stornaway and the Chrysolite, built by Halls in 1850 and 1851, were the immediate reply to the Oriental, the previous study of whose lines in London resulted in the Blackwaller Challenger, built by Greens of Blackwall in 1852.

   The name Challenger was given to the British vessel as a reply to a much larger American clipper, the Challenge, a beautifully formed ship built in New York by Webb in 1851 . The Challenger was 174 ft long against the Challenge's length of 230 ft, and their first homeward passage together  in 1852 has been the source of some argument, by those who tend to T split up the true brotherhood of the sea along nationalistic lines like warring navies.