The Birth Of The Steamboat
The crowds who welcomed the successive stages in the development of
American transportation were much alike in essentials--they were all
optimistic, self-congratulatory, irrepressible in their enthusiasm, and
undaunted in their outlook. Dickens, perhaps, did not miss the truth
widely when, in speaking of stage driving, he said that the cry of "Go
Ahead!" in America and of "All Right!" in England were typical of the
civilizations of the two countries. Right or wrong, "Go Ahead!" has
always been the underlying passion of all men interested in the
development of commerce and transportation in these United States.
During the era of river improvement already described, men of
imagination were fascinated with the idea of propelling boats by
mechanical means. Even when Washington fared westward in 1784, he met at
Bath, Virginia, one of these early experimenters, James Rumsey, who
haled him forthwith to a neighboring meadow to watch a secret trial of a
boat moved by means of machinery which worked setting-poles similar to
the ironshod poles used by the rivermen to propel their boats upstream.
"The model," wrote Washington, "and its operation upon the water, which
had been made to run pretty swift, not only convinced me of what I
before thought next to, if not quite impracticable, but that it might be
to the greatest possible utility in inland navigation." Later he
mentions the "discovery" as one of those "circumstances which have
combined to render the present epoch favorable above all others for
securing a large portion of the produce of the western settlements, and
of the fur and peltry of the Lakes, also."
From that day forward, scarcely a week passed without some new
development in the long and difficult struggle to improve the means of
navigation. Among the scores of men who engaged in this engrossing but
discouraging work, there is one whom the world is coming to honor more
highly than in previous years--John Fitch, of Connecticut, Pennsylvania,
and Kentucky. As early as August, 1785, Fitch launched on a rivulet in
Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a boat propelled by an engine which moved an
endless chain to which little paddles were attached. The next year,
Fitch's second boat, operated by twelve paddles, six on a side--an
arrangement suggesting the "side-wheeler" of the future--successfully
plied the Delaware off "Conjuror's Point," as the scene of Fitch's
labors was dubbed in whimsical amusement and derision. In 1787 Rumsey,
encouraged by Franklin, fashioned a boat propelled by a stream of water
taken in at the prow and ejected at the stern. In 1788 Fitch's third
boat traversed the distance from Philadelphia to Burlington on numerous
occasions and ran as a regular packet in 1790, covering over a thousand
miles. In this model Fitch shifted the paddles from the sides to the
rear, thus anticipating in principle the modern stern-wheeler.
It was doubtless Fitch's experiments in 1785 that led to the first plan
in America to operate a land vehicle by steam. Oliver Evans, a neighbor
and acquaintance of Fitch's, petitioned the Pennsylvania Legislature in
1786 for the right of operating wagons propelled by steam on the
highways of that State. This petition was derisively rejected; but a
similar one made to the Legislature of Maryland was granted on the
ground that such action could hurt nobody. Evans in 1802 took fiery
revenge on the scoffers by actually running his little five-horse-power
carriage through Philadelphia. The rate of speed, however, was so slow
that the idea of moving vehicles by steam was still considered useless
for practical purposes. Eight years later, Evans offered to wager $3000
that, on a level road, he could make a carriage driven by steam equal
the speed of the swiftest horse, but he found no response. In 1812 he
asserted that he was willing to wager that he could drive a steam
carriage on level rails at a rate of fifteen miles an hour. Evans thus
anticipated the belief of Stephenson that steam-driven vehicles would
travel best on railed tracks.
In the development of the steamboat almost all earlier means of
propulsion, natural and artificial, were used as models by the
inventors. The fins of fishes, the webbed feet of amphibious birds, the
paddles of the Indian, and the poles and oars of the riverman, were all
imitated by the patient inventors struggling with the problem. Rumsey's
first effort was a copy of the old setting-pole idea. Fitch's model of
1785 had side paddle wheels operated by an endless chain. Fitch's second
and third models were practically paddle-wheel models, one having the
paddles at the side and the other at the stern. Ormsbee of Connecticut
made a model, in 1792, on the plan of a duck's foot. Morey made what may
be called the first real stern-wheeler in 1794. Two years later Fitch
ran a veritable screw propeller on Collect Pond near New York City.
Although General Benjamin Tupper of Massachusetts had been fashioning
devices of this character eight years previously, Fitch was the first to
apply the idea effectively. In 1798 he evolved the strange, amphibious
creation known as his "model of 1798," which has never been adequately
explained. It was a steamboat on iron wheels provided with flanges, as
though it was intended to be run on submerged tracks. What may have been
the idea of its inventor, living out his last gloomy days in Kentucky,
may never be known; but it is possible to see in this anomalous machine
an anticipation of the locomotive not approached by any other American
of the time. Thus, prior to 1800 almost every type of mechanism for the
propulsion of steamboats had been suggested and tried; and in 1804,
Stevens's twin-screw propeller completed the list.
It is not alone Fitch's development of the devices of the endless chain,
paddle wheel, and screw propeller and of his puzzling earth-and-water
creature that gives luster to his name. His prophetic insight into the
future national importance of the steamboat and his conception, as an
inventor, of his moral obligations to the people at large were as
original and striking in the science of that age as were his models.
The early years of the national life of the United States were the
golden age of monopoly. Every colony, as a matter of course, had granted
to certain men special privileges, and, as has already been pointed out,
the questions of monopolies and combinations in restraint of trade had
arisen even so early as the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Interwoven inextricably with these problems was the whole problem of
colonial rivalry, which in its later form developed into an insistence
on state rights. Every improvement in the means of transportation, every
development of natural resources, every new invention was inevitably
considered from the standpoint of sectional interests and with a view to
its monopolistic possibilities. This was particularly true in the case
of the steamboat, because of its limitation to rivers and bays which
could be specifically enumerated and defined. For instance, Washington
in 1784 attests the fact that Rumsey operated his mechanical boat at
Bath in secret "until he saw the effect of an application he was about
to make to the Assembly of this State, for a reward." The application
was successful, and Rumsey was awarded a monopoly in Virginia waters for
ten years.
Fitch, on the other hand, when he applied to Congress in 1785, desired
merely to obtain official encouragement and intended to allow his
invention to be used by all comers. Meeting only with rebuff, he
realized that his only hope of organizing a company that could provide
working capital lay in securing monopolistic privileges. In 1786 he
accordingly applied to the individual States and secured the sole right
to operate steamboats on the waterways of New Jersey, Delaware, New
York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. How different would have been the
story of the steamboat if Congress had accepted Fitch at his word and
created a precedent against monopolistic rights on American rivers!
Fitch, in addition to the high purpose of devoting his new invention to
the good of the nation without personal considerations, must be credited
with perceiving at the very beginning the peculiar importance of the
steamboat to the American West. His original application to Congress in
1785 opened: "The subscriber begs leave to lay at the feet of Congress,
an attempt he has made to facilitate the internal Navigation of the
United States, adapted especially to the Waters of the Mississippi." At
another time with prophetic vision he wrote: "The Grand and Principle
object must be on the Atlantick, which would soon overspread the wild
forests of America with people, and make us the most oppulent Empire on
Earth. Pardon me, generous public, for suggesting ideas that cannot be
dijested at this day."
Foremost in exhibiting high civic and patriotic motives, Fitch was also
foremost in appreciating the importance of the steamboat in the
expansion of American trade. This significance was also clearly
perceived by his brilliant successor, Robert Fulton. That the West and
its commerce were always predominant in Fulton's great schemes is proved
by words which he addressed in 1803 to James Monroe, American Ambassador
to Great Britain: "You have perhaps heard of the success of my
experiments for navigating boats by steam engines and you will feel the
importance of establishing such boats on the Mississippi and other
rivers of the United States as soon as possible."
Robert Fulton had been interested in steamboats for a period not
definitely known, possibly since his sojourn in Philadelphia in the days
of Fitch's early efforts. That he profited by the other inventor's
efforts at the time, however, is not suggested by any of his
biographers. He subsequently went to London and gave himself up to the
study and practice of engineering. There he later met James Rumsey, who
came to England in 1788, and by him no doubt was informed, if he was not
already aware, of the experiments and models of Rumsey and Fitch. He
obtained the loan of Fitch's plans and drawings and made his own trial
of various existing devices, such as oars, paddles, duck's feet, and
Fitch's endless chain with "resisting-boards" attached. Meanwhile Fulton
was also devoting his attention to problems of canal construction and to
the development of submarine boats and submarine explosives. He was
engaged in these researches in France in 1801 when the new American
minister, Robert R. Livingston, arrived, and the two men soon formed a
friendship destined to have a vital and enduring influence upon the
development of steam navigation on the inland waterways of America.
Livingston already had no little experience in the same field of
invention as Fulton. In 1798 he had obtained, for a period of twenty
years, the right to operate steamboats on all the waters of the State of
New York, a monopoly which had just lapsed owing to the death of Fitch.
In the same year Livingston had built a steamboat which had made three
miles an hour on the Hudson. He had experimented with most of the models
then in existence--upright paddles at the side, endless-chain paddles,
and stern paddle wheels. Fulton was soon inspired to resume his efforts
by Livingston's account of his own experiments and of recent advances in
England, where a steamboat had navigated the Thames in 1801 and a year
later the famous stern-wheeler Charlotte Dundas had towed boats of 140
tons' burden on the Forth and Clyde Canal at the rate of five miles an
hour. In this same year Fulton and Livingston made successful
experiments on the Seine.
It is fortunate that, in one particular, Livingston's influence did not
prevail with Fulton, for the American Minister was distinctly prejudiced
against paddle wheels. Although Livingston had previously ridden as a
passenger on Morey's stern-wheeler at the rate of five miles an hour,
yet he had turned a deaf ear when his partner in experimentation,
Nicholas J. Roosevelt, had insisted strongly on "throwing wheels over
the sides." At the beginning, Fulton himself was inclined to agree with
Livingston in this respect; but, probably late in 1803, he began to
investigate more carefully the possibilities of the paddle wheel as used
twice in America by Morey and by four or five experimenters in Europe.
In 1804 an eight-mile trip which Fulton made on the Charlotte Dundas in
an hour and twenty minutes established his faith in the undeniable
superiority of two fundamental factors of early navigation--paddle
wheels and British engines. Fulton's splendid fame rests, and rightly
so, on his perception of the fact that no mere ingenuity of design could
counterbalance weakness, uncertainty, and inefficiency in the mechanism
which was intended to make a steamboat run and keep running. As early as
November, 1803, Fulton had written to Boulton and Watt of Birmingham
that he had "not confidence in any other engines" than theirs and that
he was seeking a means of getting one of those engines to America. "I
cannot establish the boat without the engine," he now emphatically wrote
to James Monroe, then Ambassador to the Court of St. James. "The
question then is shall we or shall we not have such boats."
But there were difficulties in the way. Though England forbade the
exportation of engines, Fulton knew that, in numerous instances, this
rule had not been enforced, and he had hopes of success. "The British
Government," Fulton wrote Monroe, "must have little friendship or even
civility toward America, if they refuse such a request." Before the
steamboat which Fulton and Livingston proposed to build in America could
be operated there was another obstacle to be surmounted. The rights of
steam navigation of New York waters which Livingston had obtained on the
death of Fitch in 1798 had lapsed because of his failure to run a
steamboat at the rate of four miles an hour, which was one provision of
the grant. In April, 1803, the grant was renewed to Livingston,
Roosevelt, and Fulton jointly for another period of twenty years, and
the date when the boat was to make the required four miles an hour was
extended finally to 1807.
Any one who is inclined to criticize the Livingston-Roosevelt-Fulton
monopoly which now came into existence should remember that the previous
state grants formed a precedent of no slight moment. The whole
proceeding was in perfect accord with the spirit of the times, for it
was an era of speculation and monopoly ushered in by the toll-road and
turnpike organizations, when probably no less than two hundred companies
were formed. It was young America showing itself in an unmistakable
manner--"conceived in liberty" and starting on the long road to learn
that obedience to law and respect for public rights constitute true
liberty. Finally, it must be pointed out that Fulton, like his famous
predecessor, Fitch, was impelled by motives far higher than the love of
personal gain. "I consider them [steamboats] of such infinite use in
America," he wrote Monroe, "that I should feel a culpable neglect toward
my country if I relaxed for a moment in pursuing every necessary measure
for carrying it into effect." And later, when repeating his argument, he
says: "I plead this not for myself alone but for our country."
It is now evident why the alliance of Fulton with Livingston was of such
epoch-making importance, for, although it may have in some brief measure
delayed Fulton's adoption of paddle wheels, it gave him an entry to the
waters of New York. Livingston and Fulton thus supplemented each other;
Livingston possessed a monopoly and Fulton a correct estimate of the
value of paddle wheels and, secondly, of Boulton and Watt engines. It
was a rare combination destined to crown with success a long period of
effort and discouragement in the history of navigation.
After considerable delay and difficulty, the two Americans obtained
permission to export the necessary engine from Great Britain and shipped
it to New York, whither Fulton himself proceeded to construct his
steamboat. The hull was built by Charles Brown, a New York shipbuilder,
and the Boulton and Watt machinery, set in masonry, was finally
installed.
The voyage to Albany, against a stiff wind, occupied thirty-two hours;
the return trip was made in thirty. H. Freeland, one of the spectators
who stood on the banks of the Hudson when the boat made its maiden
voyage in 1807, gives the following description:
Some imagined it to be a sea-monster whilst others did not hesitate to
express their belief that it was a sign of the approaching judgment.
What seemed strange in the vessel was the substitution of lofty and
straight smoke-pipes, rising from the deck, instead of the gracefully
tapered masts ... and, in place of the spars and rigging, the curious
play of the walking-beam and pistons, and the slow turning and splashing
of the huge and naked paddle-wheels, met the astonished gaze. The dense
clouds of smoke, as they rose, wave upon wave, added still more to the
wonderment of the rustics.... On her return trip the curiosity she
excited was scarcely less intense ... fishermen became terrified, and
rode homewards, and they saw nothing but destruction devastating their
fishing grounds, whilst the wreaths of black vapor and rushing noise of
the paddle-wheels, foaming with the stirred-up water, produced great
excitement....
With the launching of the Clermont on the Hudson a new era in American
history began. How quick with life it was many of the preceding pages
bear testimony. The infatuation of the public for building toll and
turnpike roads was now at its height. Only a few years before, a
comprehensive scheme of internal improvements had been outlined by
Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin. When a boy, it
is said, he had lain on the floor of a surveyor's cabin on the western
slopes of the Alleghanies and had heard Washington describe to a rough
crowd of Westerners his plan to unite the Great Lakes with the Potomac
in one mighty chain of inland commerce. Jefferson's Administration was
now about to devote the surplus in the Treasury to the construction of
national highways and canals. The Cumberland Road, to be built across
the Alleghanies by the War Department, was authorized by the President
in the same year in which the Clermont made her first trip; and Jesse
Hawley, at his table in a little room in a Pittsburgh boarding house,
was even now penning in a series of articles, published in the
Pittsburgh Commonwealth, beginning in January, 1807, the first clear
challenge to the Empire State to connect the Hudson and Lake Erie by a
canal. Thus the two next steps in the history of inland commerce in
America were ready to be taken.