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Overview
In 1807, Robert Fulton, using an English mail-order steam engine, chugged four miles an hour up the Hudson River, passing into popular folklore as the inventor of the steamboat. However, the true first passenger steamboat in America, and the world, was built from scratch, and plied the Delaware River in 1790, almost two decades earlier. Its inventor, John Fitch, never attained Fulton's riches, and was rewarded with ridicule and poverty. Considering there was not a single working steam engine in America in the early 1780s, Fitch's steamboat's development was nothing short of remarkable. But he faced competition from the start, and he and several other inventors fought a string of bitter battles, legal and otherwise. Steam tells the dramatic story of Fitch and his adversaries, weaving their lives into a fascinating tale including the likes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. It is the story behind America's first important venture in technology, the persevering and colorful men that made it happen, and the great invention that moved a new nation westward.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466892620 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 287 |
| Sales rank: | 780,984 |
| File size: | 584 KB |
About the Author
Andrea J. Sutcliffe is an independent scholar and writer who has published nine books including Mighty Rough Times I Tell You, an edited compilation of narratives from former slaves, Touring the Shenandoah Valley Backroads, and The New York Public Library Writer's Guide to Style and Usage.
Read an Excerpt
Steam
The Untold Story of America's First Great Invention
By Andrea Sutcliffe
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2004 Andrea SutcliffeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9262-0
CHAPTER 1
Stream-boats and Steamboats
The natural mightiness of America expands the mind, and it partakes of the greatness it contemplates.
— Thomas Paine
Late on a drizzly September afternoon in 1784, George Washington guided his horse down a rocky trail into the mineral springs town of Bath. After slogging through thirty miles of muddy Virginia backcountry that day, the recently retired general was looking forward to an evening under roof in one of his favorite places.
A small crowd of people, the last to leave for the summer season, greeted America's first hero as he entered the tree-lined town square; they had been eagerly awaiting his arrival. Washington had not been in Bath, sometimes called the warm springs of Berkeley, since 1769. On that occasion, he and Martha had brought her daughter, Patsy, to take the waters in hopes of curing some unspecified "complaint." The town had grown considerably since then. A new tavern and boardinghouse, "at the sign of the Liberty Pole and Flag," had recently opened on the square, and it was here that Washington spent the next three nights. This time his stay was purely business, part of a month-long trip west that he had been planning all summer.
Among the townspeople welcoming the general was the part-owner of the tavern, a forty-one-year-old millwright and builder named James Rumsey. In a meeting described by an early Washington historian as "fortunate and undoubtedly prearranged," Rumsey at some point that evening spoke alone with Washington, and they agreed to meet the next day behind the tavern.
At the appointed time, Rumsey, carrying what looked like a toy wooden boat, found Washington and led him through the woods to a fast-moving spot on Warm Springs Run. He knelt down and gently set the model in the water, its bow facing upstream. Washington looked on, first skeptically and then in amazement. The little boat — a convoluted arrangement of poles connected to a front-mounted waterwheel — slowly began to push itself forward against the current. At that moment Washington must have thought that fate had blessed his visit here. That evening he recorded the demonstration in his journal:
... [I] was showed the model of a boat constructed by the ingenious Mr. Rumsey, for ascending rapid currents by mechanism; the principles of this were not only shown, and fully explained to me, but to my very great satisfaction, exhibited in practice in private under the injunction of secrecy, until he saw the effect of an application he was about to make to the assembly of the state, for a reward.
The model, 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; and in rapid currents; that are shallow. And what adds vastly to the value of the discovery, is the simplicity of its works; as they may be made by a common boat builder or carpenter, and kept in order as easy as a plow. ...
Rumsey's model looked something like a catamaran, except that a waterwheel was mounted above the bows of two connected boats. The flow of the downstream current turned the waterwheel, which was attached to a device on which setting poles were loosely mounted. The poles caught the river bottom and pushed the boat forward. This approach to working boats against the stream was purely mechanical; no engine was used.
Rumsey's idea — not original with him, according so some historians — drew on the age-old practice of poling, in which men push long wooden poles into the riverbed to move boats upstream and guide them downstream. Poling a vessel against the current for long distances is possible but never fast or easy. In those days, most cargo boats and barges were sent downstream as one-way, one-use vessels that were broken up and used for building materials at their destinations. The crews would then walk many miles back home and start the process over again. Inefficient as this method was, it beat the alternative. Horse-drawn wagons made slow progress over the miserable roads of the day, and goods shipped overland could cost ten times as much as those shipped over water.
Rumsey was delighted to see Washington's favorable and even excited response. Seizing the moment, Rumsey asked the general for a statement in writing that he could use to help attract investors and seek funding from the state of Virginia. Washington was happy to grant the favor. That same day, Washington hired Rumsey to build a house, a kitchen, and stables on two lots he owned in Bath. He had little time to lose. His deed required that structures of a certain size be erected on each lot by November 1785, just over a year away.
* * *
Washington had left Mount Vernon on September 1, accompanied by his close friend, Dr. James Craik. Leaving Bath, they were joined by his nephew, Bushrod Washington, and Dr. Craik's son, William. They brought with them a tent, cooking supplies, fishing gear, six horses, and three servants. The purpose of this nearly seven hundred–mile trip, Washington told friends, was to visit his numerous landholdings across the Alleghenies. The journey would take him to into western Maryland and Pennsylvania, as far west as present-day Pittsburgh, and then back through parts of today's West Virginia. He had a long to-do list: visit overseers, evict squatters, and lease or sell some of his properties. Eight years of war, all of it away from Mount Vernon, had left his business affairs in shambles. Since resigning his army commission the previous December, Washington had spent many frustrating hours trying to get his records in order.
In July, Washington had placed an ad in a Pennsylvania newspaper announcing an auction in Bath on September 7, at which he hoped to lease a large tract of farmland along the Potomac River twelve miles from town. By his own tally, Washington owned nearly fifty thousand acres of land in Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. He had come by some of it years earlier, as payment for his service as a young officer in the French and Indian War. The rest was obtained by hiring agents to buy up thousands of acres from his fellow soldiers, who preferred ready cash to owning property in some remote and dangerous wilderness.
Washington had a second and more visionary reason for this trip west: "... to obtain information of the nearest and best communication between the Eastern and Western waters. ..." His friends had long complained that he could spend entire evenings boring them with his thoughts on inland navigation — by which he meant a transportation network of rivers, canals, and roads. The Appalachian mountain range was the stumbling block. More than a hundred miles wide and running from Georgia to Maine, it formed a "castle wall ... and the 'doors' of this wall were few and far between."
He knew the area well. He began his working life in northern Virginia as a teenage surveyor for Thomas, the sixth Lord Fairfax, in the late 1740s; Lord Fairfax held title to more than five million acres of land in the Virginia colony. In 1753, Washington first crossed the Alleghenies as an emissary for the British army, and he later served in the Shenandoah Valley as colonel of the Virginia regiment during the French and Indian War. In 1759, at the age of twenty-seven, he resigned his military commission after being elected as the Frederick County delegate to the Virginia House of Burgesses. Even as a young man, he was impressed by the vast potential of the lands across the mountains. At one point he introduced a plan to the legislature that would improve the Potomac River for shipping; it died for lack of interest.
Fifteen years later, the idea had not left him. In 1774, with the help of his friend and future governor of Maryland, Thomas Johnson, he managed to get bills passed in Virginia and Maryland to form a company to make the Potomac navigable for a 150-mile stretch. The Revolution came along and put a halt to the project. In 1783, while waiting at his military headquarters in Newburgh, New York, for official word that the treaty ending the Revolutionary War had been signed, Washington still had inland navigation on his mind. He made a trip to western New York to take a look at the geography of the area where, half a century later, the Erie Canal would be built. He wrote to a friend, "I ... could not but be struck with the immense diffusion and importance of [inland navigation]; and with the goodness of that Providence which has dealt her favors to us with so profuse a hand. Would to God we may have wisdom enough to improve them. I shall not rest contented 'till I have explored the Western Country, and traversed those lines (or great part of them) which have given bounds to a New Empire."
Washington wasn't alone in these thoughts. Earlier that year, Thomas Jefferson had written him a letter encouraging him to revive his dream of finding a way to connect the western reaches of the Potomac with the tributaries of the Ohio — and for Virginia's sake, to do it before the New Yorkers managed to join the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. At every stop on this trip west, Washington questioned men who had explored the region, asking them for the smallest of details. His journal is filled with meticulous observations on distances, river conditions, and terrain. While in Bath, he noted that "from Colonel Bruce whom I found at this place, I was informed that he had traveled from the North Branch of the Potomack to the waters of the Yaughiogany, and Monongahela."
* * *
Rumsey was, like many men of his time, a jack-of-all-trades, largely self-taught. He had moved from Maryland to Virginia about two years prior to his fortunate meeting with Washington. He was born in March 1743 at Bohemia Manor in Cecil County, on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. His father was a farmer, the third generation of Welsh Rumseys in Maryland. As a young man, Rumsey left the family farm and ran a tavern near the head of the Bohemia River that had belonged to his great-grandfather. At some point he moved across the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore, where he was probably a millwright. A friend claimed he served in the Revolution, but no records survive to prove it.
In 1782, Rumsey purchased land on Sleepy Creek a few miles from Bath, a town popular since the 1750s for its warm springs, which were said to offer "cures" for various ailments. (The town is better known today as Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, about a two-hour drive west of Washington, D.C. Its bathhouses, now part of a state park, are still open to the public.) Two years after the Revolution, Bath was experiencing a building boom. During his first few years there, Rumsey built and operated a sawmill on his Sleepy Creek property. For others he built gristmills, an iron mill, and several buildings in and around the town.
By all accounts, Rumsey was personally charming and quite good-looking. A portrait of him made a few years later in London by the American artist Benjamin West shows a man with chiseled lips and large dreamy eyes. With powdered hair and ruffled shirt, he looks more like a poet than a millwright. He married twice. It seems likely his first wife died, because he mentions having a daughter, Susanna, when he married Mary Morrow of Shepherdstown, Virginia. In those days, Shepherdstown was a thriving community on the Potomac River, about thirty miles east of Bath. He and Mary soon had two children of their own. Rumsey apparently was drawn to the area by siblings who had moved there from Maryland. His sisters had married Shepherdstown men — one to his wife's brother, Charles Morrow, and the other to Joseph Barnes. Both brothers-in-law would become Rumsey's partners in boat-building.
As soon as Washington left Bath, Rumsey went to work to gather support for his boat idea. He placed an ad in a Richmond newspaper, the Virginia Argus, that reproduced the general's glowing endorsement.
I have seen the model of Mr. Rumsey's boats, constructed to work against the stream; examined the powers upon which it acts; been eye-witness to an actual experiment in running water of some rapidity, and give it as my opinion (although I had little faith before) that he has discovered the art of working boats by mechanism and small manual assistance against rapid currents; that the discovery is of vast importance and may be of the greatest usefulness in our inland navigation, and if it succeeds (of which I have no doubt) that the value of it is greatly enhanced by the simplicity of the works which, when seen and explained, may be executed by the most common mechanic.
Given under my hand at the town of Bath, County of Berkeley, in the State of Virginia, this 7th day of September, 1784.
George Washington
Although the records are fuzzy in this regard, it appears Rumsey had been tinkering with boat ideas for a year or two before he met Washington. On July 4, 1783, Rumsey's business partner, James McMechen, had asked the Continental Congress for a grant of land on the Ohio River should their invention — the mechanical poleboat — succeed. But the members of Congress were "very apprehensive" that such a boat would ever work and turned him down. Not wanting to discourage inventive ideas completely, they urged him to try again in the future. A year later, and three months before Washington's visit to Bath, Rumsey and McMechen asked the Virginia Assembly for financial support. But the best the cash-strapped legislature could do was to offer "a sum adequate to the importance of this discovery" should the invention prove practical and successful.
Around the time of Washington's visit — and Washington may have been the one to tell him — Rumsey learned that states, instead of giving inventors money or land grants to support their efforts, would sometimes award term monopolies, in which inventors were allowed exclusive use of their products in the state for a set time, usually ten to fourteen years. They were the closest things to patents at the time. Rumsey set out that fall and winter of 1784 to seek state monopolies for his mechanical poleboat — which he called a stream-boat, causing historians and proofreaders endless confusion for years to come. Within a few months, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania granted him monopolies for what presumably was the stream-boat. The wording of his applications was vague, though, perhaps deliberately so. He was unsuccessful in New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.
While Rumsey was on the road, Washington returned to Mount Vernon more convinced than ever of the need for a western trade route. He wrote in his diary that Virginia must "open a wide door, and make a smooth way for the produce of that country to pass to our markets before the trade may get into another channel." In those days before the thirteen states were bound by a strong federal government, citizens tended to think of their home state first, in competition with the others. Here, Washington still had the possibility of a New York canal on his mind. But he also talked of the importance of easy transportation to the nation as a whole, the western boundary of which extended to the east bank of the Mississippi River. With France and Spain holding the lands on the other side, he was concerned that as Americans continued to move west, they would be more likely to trade with those two countries. He worried that the United States might then split in two. The only force that could hold the country together, he believed, was trade between its eastern and western lands.
In a summary Washington wrote of his trip, he saw Rumsey's boat as a timely blessing: "... Rumsey's discovery of working boats against stream by mechanical powers principally, may not only be considered as a fortunate invention for these States in general but as one of those circumstances which have combined to render the present epocha favorable above all for securing ... a large portion of the produce of the western settlements and of the fur and peltry of the lakes, also — the importance of which alone, if there were no political considerations in the way, is immense."
A week after his return, Washington sent a long letter on the issue of inland navigation to Virginia Governor Benjamin Harrison urging that the state move quickly; he mentions Rumsey's boat idea as being a "very fortunate invention." Harrison quickly wrote back to tell him he had presented Washington's letter to the legislature. By November, a young delegate named James Madison had introduced several bills dealing with canal and river navigation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe. Copyright © 2004 Andrea Sutcliffe. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Table of Contents
Streamboats and Steamboats * A Ridiculous Idea * Brother Saintmakers * The War of the Pamphlets * The Columbian Maid * Lord High Admirals of the Delaware * Jefferson's Choice * The End of Perseverance * Leeches and Sharks * War and Peace * A Mail-order Steamboat * Thornton's Revenge
Recipe
"An absorbing and enlightening tale of 'Yankee ingenuity' at the very dawn of the steam age."
--John Steele Gordon, author of A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable
"What a ride! It's all there: duplicity, steamy intrigue and scandal, with cameo roles played by Napoleon, Jefferson, Washington, Thomas Paine, and James Watt. My personal hero, the tormented American steamboat inventor, John Fitch, rises above this glorious fray like cream upon milk. His is a story whose incompleteness has dogged us over the years. Indeed, we are, at last, shown the full tapestry of the steamboat invention in one fast-moving book. Hard history and good fun. You'll love it."
--John H. Lienhard, author of The Engines of Our Ingenuity and Inventing Modern