In 1804 Stevens produced another propeller steamboat, this one using the ordinary type of reciprocating engine, and being notable for having twin screws of a pattern practically identical with the screws now in use. This boat was able to steam at a rate of four miles an hour on many occasions, and at times almost double this rate, according to some observers. The engines of this boat are still in existence, and on several occasions since 1804 have been placed in hulls corresponding as nearly as possible to the original, and have demonstrated that they could force the boat through the water at six or eight miles an hour. These engines in a modern hull were exhibited at the Columbian Exposition at Chicago, in 1893. They supply irrefutable evidence that the practical steamboat had been invented at least three years before Fulton's historic voyage in 1807. Yet no one questions that it was Fulton's, not Stevens', invention that inaugurated steam navigation.
Just why this was so is a little difficult to comprehend at this time, unless it was that Stevens' boat was such a small affair that it did not attract the attention it deserved, as did Fulton's larger boat. And yet we should not be guided too much by retrospective judgment. The significant fact remains that Stevens himself did not have entire confidence in his boat, or in the principle of his screw propeller, as is shown by the fact that three years later, while Fulton was building the Clermont, Stevens was also constructing a steamboat, not along the lines of his previous inventions, but as a paddle-wheel boat. This leaves little room for doubt that Stevens had not full confidence in the propeller; and when an inventor himself mistrusts his own device, there is little likelihood that anyone else will supply the necessary confidence. This may account for the fact that Stevens found difficulty in securing financial backing for his enterprise; and when such backing was found it was for the construction of the paddle-wheel boat, which was finished a few months after Fulton's boat had solved the problem of steam navigation.
FULTON AND THE CLERMONT
As we shall see in another place, Fulton was no novice in the construction of peculiar boats at this time. He had built experimental boats both at home and abroad, was familiar with the principle of the screw and the paddle-wheel, and had come to have absolute confidence in the possibility of propelling boats at a good rate of speed by the use of steam. When he began his now famous Clermont, in the spring of 1807, it was not as an experimental skiff, but as a boat of one hundred and fifty tons burden—half again the size of the boats in which Columbus had discovered America—to be placed in commission between Albany and New York city. By August, this boat was completed, and the engines in place, and, under her own steam, the new boat was moved from the Jersey shipyard where she was constructed, and tied up at a New York dock. On August 7th, she started on her maiden trip up the Hudson. To the astonishment of practically every one of the persons in the great throng that had gathered along the shores, she left her dock in due course, and with wind and tide against her, steamed up the river at the rate of about five miles an hour. At this speed she covered the entire distance between New York and Albany, settling forever the question of the practicability of steam navigation.
The impression this fire-belching monster made upon the sleepy inhabitants as it passed along the river can be readily imagined. An eye-witness account of this first passage of the Clermont has been given by an inhabitant at the half-way point near Poughkeepsie.
"It was the early autumn in 1807," he wrote, "that a knot of villagers was gathered on the high bluff just opposite Poughkeepsie, on the west bank of the Hudson, attracted by the appearance of a strange, dark-looking craft which was slowly making its way up the river. Some imagined it to be a sea-monster, while 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 black smoke-pipes, rising from the deck, instead of the gracefully tapered masts that commonly stood on the vessels navigating the stream; and, in place of spars and rigging, the curious play of the working-beam and pistons, and the slow turning and splashing of the huge, 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.
"This strange looking craft was the Clermont, on her trial trip to Albany. On her return-trip, the curiosity she excited was scarcely less intense—the whole country talked of nothing but the sea-monster, belching fire and smoke. The fishermen became terrified and rowed 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 among the boatmen."
THE CLERMONT
The replica of Robert Fulton's first steamboat which took part in the Hudson-Fulton celebration in September, 1909. The small picture shows one of the paddle-wheels in detail. The original Clermont, the first commercially successful steamboat, was put in commission for the New York-Albany service in 1807.