There is a story, not now accepted as true, of one Blasco de Garay, who in 1543 experimented at Barcelona, Spain, with a boat propelled by steam. It was not for another 100 years, however, that steam was practically applied. But as early as 1690 it is known that Thomas Savery and Denis Papin proposed the use of steam as an aid to navigation. Papin even built a model boat in which a crude steam engine was installed. A man named Newcomen seems to have been the builder of the engines used in these and other early experiments. One engine built by this experimenter was used in 1736 in a boat built by Jonathan Hulls in England.
That great American, Benjamin Franklin, whose genius touched such a diversity of subjects, saw, as early as 1775, that paddle-wheels were inefficient machines, and called attention to the fact, suggesting that an engine be devised to draw a column of water in at the bow, to project it forcibly astern in order to give the ship headway. This method was tried but before much success had been attained, all engines being of such low power, the screw propeller had been perfected and the water-jet system was dropped, although in 1782 James Rumsey built a boat of this type on the Potomac. In France a steamboat built by the Marquis de Jouffroy is said to have been operated in 1783. This boat was 150 feet long and ran with some degree of success for about a year and a half. Jouffroy has sometimes been given credit for the invention of the steamboat. In 1788 a small vessel of strange design was driven at four or five miles an hour by William Symington in Scotland. This boat was built at the expense of a Scotch banker named Patrick Miller. Two years before this John Fitch, a New Englander, built a fairly successful steamboat that was propelled by steam-driven oars. Symington’s experiments were continued and another boat that made seven miles an hour was running in 1789. Still more successful was another of Symington’s boats, the Charlotte Dundas, when, in 1802, she towed two loaded vessels, totalling nearly one hundred and fifty tons at three and one-half miles an hour for a score of miles in the Forth and Clyde Canal. The project was abandoned, however, because of the effect of the agitated water on the banks of the canal. The Dundas was, of course, driven by a paddle-wheel. Symington continued his efforts but was unfortunately handicapped financially, and when Lord Bridgewater, his next backer, died, he withdrew from the field, reduced to poverty.
THE CHARLOTTE DUNDAS
Before the Clermont was built, this boat had operated successfully on the Forth and Clyde Canal in Scotland. The objection to her was that she stirred the water up so that she injured the banks of the canal.
But all of these were merely preparatory to the first steamboat that is to be accepted as a thoroughly practical affair. In 1807, after several years of travel in Europe where he inspected all the steam engines of which he could learn, and where he experimented with a steamboat of his own design on the Seine, Robert Fulton built the Clermont in New York. Her engine, or at least the major part of it, was built in England and shipped to New York where it was installed in the first definitely successful steamboat ever built. The Clermont was 133 feet long and 18 feet wide, and made the run from New York to Albany, a distance of about one hundred and fifty miles, in thirty-two hours.
But the Clermont had a greater task in the breaking down of prejudice than ever she had in propelling herself through the smooth waters of the Hudson on her round trips between New York and Albany.
The first steamer to make an ocean voyage was a boat named the Phœnix, built in 1809. She was driven under her own power from Hoboken, New Jersey, on the Hudson River, opposite New York City, to Philadelphia.
So rapid was the increase in the number of steamboats that by 1814 a contributor to the columns of the Gentlemen’s Magazine wrote that “most of the principal rivers in North America are navigated by steamboats. One of them passes 2,000 miles on the great river Mississippi in twenty-one days, at the rate of five miles an hour against the descending current,” which, if true, tells a dramatic story of the rapid development of this new apparatus.
During the next decade a number of boats and small ships were built, in the hulls of which steam engines were placed, and on the masts of which the ever-present sails were spread to guard against what were, evidently, the inevitable breakdowns. But another step in the development of steamships was to be made. Up to 1818 steam-driven ships had been used only on inland or on coastal waters. But in that year a 380-ton full-rigged ship was built in New York City and was equipped with paddle-wheels operated by a steam engine of seventy-two horse power. (Some say this engine developed ninety horse power but the measurement of the power of engines was then at best an inaccurate science.)