From the Original Drawing in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, Paris.
In January of 1803 Fulton, who had already been attracting some attention in his adopted country by his submarine experiments, decided to offer his steamboat to the French Government and a Commission was appointed to inquire into its merits. [The illustration on this page] is taken from Fulton’s own drawing of his projected steamboat submitted to this Commission appointed by Napoleon, the original of which is now preserved in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, in Paris. In his letter to the Commissioners, Fulton observes that his original object in making this experiment was rather with a view to the employment of steam tow-boats for use upon the rivers of America, “where there are no roads suitable for hauling,” and “the cost of navigation by the aid of steam would be put in comparison with the labour of men and not with that of horses as in France.” In fact, he suggests that if his experiment should prove successful, it would be infinitely less useful to France than to his native country, for he doubts very much if a steamboat, however perfect it might be, would be able to gain anything over horses for merchandise, “but for passengers it is possible to gain something because of the speed.” Ultimately Napoleon’s advisers counselled against the adoption of Fulton’s proposition.
However, by the spring of 1803, the boat was completed and lying on the Seine in readiness for her trial trip. Fulton spent a restless night, and we can well picture the feelings of the man who had wrestled with calculations, worked out theories, made little models, watched their behaviour in still water, spent hours and days discussing the subject with his friend Livingston, thought out every conceivable aspect, allowed for obstacles, and now, at length, after watching the child of his brain gradually take a concrete shape, waiting sleeplessly for the morrow in which he was to have the chance of living the great day of his life. Those of us who remember ever to have looked forward with zest and suppressed excitement to some new event in our lives likely to alter the trend of future years can well sympathise with the emotions of this clever young inventor, when, whilst eating his breakfast, a messenger burst in and dramatically exclaimed to his horror: “Please, sir, the boat has broken in two and gone to the bottom!”
It was suggested in our introduction that it is usually the case that an invention is no sooner born than it is compelled, while yet frail and infantile, to fight for its very existence: and it is curious that this should seem to be demanded not merely as against the opposition of human obstinacy but against sheer bad luck, which comes as a test of a man’s sincerity and of his faith in his own ideas. In the end, historically, this calamity had no ill-effects, for it only spurred the enthusiast to greater and more perfect accomplishment. But physically it cut short Fulton’s life of usefulness. As soon as the heart-breaking news was delivered to him, he rushed off to the Seine and found that the intelligence was all too true. For the next twenty-four hours he laboured assiduously, not stopping for food or rest, ignoring the chilly waters of the river, until his precious craft was raised from its watery bed. Fulton never recovered entirely from these physical trials following so suddenly on his years of mental work and worry, and his lungs were permanently affected for the rest of his life. But what he did recover—and that no doubt was to him more precious than his very life—were the machinery and main fragments of the hull. The gale of the night before had done more than wreck his ship: it had taught him to allow for one difficulty which he had overlooked, and it was well that it had happened thus instead of later on, when loss of life might have prejudiced the coming of the steamboat even longer still.
For Fulton soon realised that he had made his hull insufficiently strong for the weight of the machinery. This is the truth of the incident, and not that jealous enemies had maliciously sunk her, nor that Fulton had himself sent her to the bottom through the lack of appreciation which Napoleon’s Commissioners were exhibiting. This is confirmed by an eyewitness of the event, named Edward Church. But Fulton soon set to work to get his ship built more strongly, and by July of the same year she was ready for her trials. A contemporary account, in describing the strange sight which was witnessed on August 9, 1803, says that at six o’clock in the evening, “aided by only three persons,” the boat was set in motion, “with two other boats attached behind it, and for an hour and a half he [Fulton] produced the curious spectacle of a boat moved by wheels, like a chariot, these wheels being provided with paddles or flat plates, and being moved by a fire-engine.” The same account prophesies great things for the invention and that it will confer great benefits on French internal navigation: for, by this means, whereas it then required four months for barges to be towed from Nantes to Paris, the new method would cause them to do the distance in ten or fifteen days. Very quaintly this account speaks of the existence behind the paddle-wheels of “a kind of large stove with a pipe, as if there were some kind of a small fire-engine intended to operate the wheels of the boat!”
These experiments were made in the vicinity of the Chaillot Quay in the presence of many people, including Périer and some of the leading Parisian savants, and the boat was found to steam at a rate of 3¼ miles per hour. It is therefore both inaccurate and unjust to dismiss, as at least one writer has done, Fulton’s achievements on the Seine in one line by referring to them as unsuccessful and merely experimental. True, this vessel did not show that amount of speed which Fulton had hoped to get out of her, but she was very far from being a failure. Fulton had left nothing to chance, and the misfortune of the weakness of his first hull and the error in the speed actually obtained were the results rather of inexperience than of carelessness. It is difficult to-day, when we are in possession of so much valuable knowledge connected with naval architecture and marine propulsion, to realise that these early experimenters were feeling in the dark for an object they had never seen. At one time Fulton had estimated that a steamboat could be driven at a rate of sixteen to twenty-four miles an hour, but he found that so much power was lost in getting a purchase on the water that he altered his opinion and put forward the speed of five or six miles as the utmost limit which could be obtained by any boat using the best engines then in existence.
Fulton had advanced with almost meticulous caution. He had first collected together all the details that could be got about contemporary experiments; he had sifted the theories of others and made use of the residue. He had often talked with Rumsey while in England, and he had even accompanied Henry Bell to call on Symington, seen a trial trip of the Charlotte Dundas, and incidentally obtained some valuable information. Finally, after seeing what was good and what was bad he had proceeded independently, and, after a stroke of ill-luck, succeeded. He had knowledge of what others had attempted in America, in England and in France, and emphatically he was not the kind of man to deny his indebtedness to what others had done before him. The ship which he evolved was certainly in shape, proportions and general appearance not unlike the model of that earlier craft whose exploits on the Saône we considered on another page. The Marquis de Jouffroy had sent this model to Paris as far back as 1783, the year of his successful enterprise at Lyons, or twenty years before Fulton made his achievement, and it is most improbable that Fulton, who endeavoured to see everything which bore on his pet subject, living several years in Paris, should not have carefully studied this. Furthermore, Fulton’s boat was constructed in the workshop and under the very eyes of that Périer who had been associated with the Marquis in navigating the Seine by steamboat, and from this same Périer, as already stated, the engine was borrowed for Fulton’s boat. Fulton also personally considered the patent which Desblanc, forestalling Jouffroy, had obtained, and the American had described his impressions of Desblanc’s idea in no praiseworthy terms, for he saw that at least two-thirds of the latter’s steam power would be lost. Fulton worked his plans out to the minutest details: Desblanc had left his theory too scantily clothed with facts. He had not found the proportion which his paddles should bear to the bow of his boat, nor the velocity at which they should run in proportion to the velocity at which the boat was intended to go. Very scathing is the American’s denunciation of this haphazard method. “For this invention to be rendered useful,” wrote Fulton, “does not consist in putting oars, paddles, wheels or resisting chains in motion by a steam engine—but it consists in showing in a clear and distinct manner that it is desired to drive a boat precisely any given number of miles an hour—what must be the size of the cylinder and velocity of the piston? All these things being governed by the laws of Nature, the real Invention is to find them.”
Fulton believed that previous failures were due not so much to a defective steam engine, as to the wrong methods employed in applying the steam power thus generated. He criticised Rumsey’s method of propelling a ship by forcing water through the stern (in a manner similar to that which John Allen and Fitch had suggested) as the worst method of all. Ten years before his Seine success Fulton had been in communication with the Earl of Stanhope, who in 1790 had patented a means of propelling a ship in a strange way. This consisted in using a gigantic arrangement resembling a duck’s foot, placed on either side. These feet opened and shut like umbrellas and could send the ship along at three miles an hour. Fulton, then staying at Torquay, wrote to Lord Stanhope and proposed the use of paddle-wheels, but the noble earl would not listen to the suggestion. A similar freak idea was also put into practice in North America in 1792 by one Elijah Ormsbee.
FULTON’S FIRST PLANS FOR STEAM NAVIGATION