A Lost Chapter in the History of the Steamboat

by John H. B. Latrobe

Unwilling to abandon the idea of steam navigation, even after so complete a failure, the Chancellor devised still another plan, which was executed under Roosevelt’s direction at the works on the Passaic, of the details of which I have no account. In this Roosevelt had no interest. It proved a failure. From all that I can gather, from the documents in my possession, the efforts here described were made in 1798, 1799 and 1800, almost uninterruptedly, and were controlled by the Chancellor, who was, evidently, the moneyed man of the concern, and whose dictum, as we have said, was regarded as conclusive by his associates. So promising did the matter seem after Roosevelt had commenced the engine for the boat, that, in March, 1798, the Legislature of New York, granted the Chancellor, “the exclusive right of navigating all boats that might be propelled by steam on all the waters within the territory, or jurisdiction, of the State for the term of twenty years, provided he should, within a twelvemonth, build such a boat, the mean of whose progress should not be less than four miles an hour.” The month of March, 1799, elapsed, however, without the condition of the grant having been complied with. At a later date, a similar grant was made to Livingston and Fulton.

In the latter part of the year 1800, Mr. Jefferson appointed the Chancellor minister to France, where he remained until 1804, having in the meanwhile negotiated the treaty which ceded Louisiana to the United States, and where he made the acquaintance of Robert Fulton. In 1804, the Chancellor made the tour of Europe, and returned the following year to the United States.

In Colden’s Life of Fulton, there is an account, in the Chancellor’s own words, of the commencement of his acquaintance with Fulton. I quote: “Robert R. Livingston, Esquire, when minister in France, met with Mr. Fulton, and they formed that friendship and connection with each other to which a similarity of pursuits generally gives birth. He communicated to Mr. Fulton the importance of steamboats to their own country; informed him of what had been attempted in America, and of his resolution to resume the pursuit on his return, and advised him to turn his attention to the subject.”

We have already seen that Mr. Fulton’s plan, after making calculations as to the efficiency of paddles and ducks’ feet, was to use endless chains with resisting boards upon them as propellors. With these he made a course of experiments on a little rivulet that runs through the village of Plombiéres, in France, in 1802; and “addressed several letters to Mr. Livingston and Mr. Barlow, giving them a minute account of his experiments and assurances of the certainty of success which they afforded him.”

That the Chancellor had informed Fulton of what had been attempted in America, is admitted by Colden; and this, too, prior doubtless, to the experiments at Plombiéres. That Roosevelt’s pertinacity in regard to wheels over the sides was communicated with other information is not to be doubted; that the Chancellor should have told him, as he told Roosevelt, in the letter of October 28th, 1798, “that they were not to be thought of,” it is most reasonable to suppose; and that Fulton agreed with the Chancellor is proved by the “assurance of certain success” which he entertained, of endless chains and floats, or resisting boards.

Between the spring of 1802 and the fall of that year, Mr. Fulton changed his mind; for he and Livingston were building a boat, propelled by Roosevelt’s vertical wheels, in January, 1803. The Chancellor, by this time, had become convinced that vertical wheels were things “to be thought of.” That it was Roosevelt’s plan that was adopted after all their own plans had failed—the plan derived, with the details of its execution, from Roosevelt himself,—does not seem to admit of any reasonable doubt.

Biography is too often eulogy. The name of Fulton is irrevocably, and justly, the representative name in connection with steam navigation throughout all lands. For a while, and in the memory of the writer, the name of Livingston was connected with it in men’s mouths. But Livingston’s connection with the subject is fast being forgotten. Fulton’s never will be forgotten, not because he was the inventor of the steamboat however, not because he first suggested the combination that made success certain; but because, in his hands, it became a commercial success. He was the first who demonstrated its practical utility, when, in 1807, he made the first voyage in the Clermont from New York to Albany and back. Still he was indebted to others, in the first instance, for the elements of his success.

I have said that biography is too often eulogy. The biographer becomes jealous of the reputation of his hero. Colden was not exempt from the weakness common to his class; and instead of giving to Roosevelt the credit of having first put the idea of vertical wheels over the sides into a practical shape, by his detailed description of their mechanism, he says that the want of success of a French inventor, who had horizontal screws on either side of a boat, “it is probable,” induced Mr. Fulton again to resort to the wheels, which, in the original paper that he communicated to Lord Stanhope, in 1793, he proposed to use as propellors. Even had this been so, without any question having arisen as to the facts, Roosevelt’s model of a boat at Esopus, with its hickory and whalebone springs, would have been ten years ahead of the Frenchman.

But there are some matters connected with the letter to Lord Stanhope, which are not without interest in this connection.

We have seen that Roosevelt, in January, 1815, applied to the Legislature of New Jersey, for protection as an inventor of the vertical wheels over the sides, for which he had obtained letters patent from the United States in the preceding month of December, 1814, being the original document shewn to me by Delacy. Somewhere about this time, Mr. Fulton appeared as a witness before the Legislature in connection with this same subject of steam navigation; and Colden’s life contains a letter from Mr. Emmet, the celebrated lawyer, in which he states, that, in order to shew Mr. Fulton’s prior claim to invention, in the application of “water wheels to steamboats,” he examined him to prove a copy of the letter in question. Nothing was said, it would seem, of its being a copy, when this was first presented: but Governor Ogden noticed that the letter was written on American paper; and, subsequently, Mr. Fulton explained that the first copy having been considerably worn out and obscured, he had copied it over again and attached it to the old drawings. This was made the subject of uncomfortable criticism by the opposite counsel; and Mr. Emmet, in his letter, expresses great indignation at what he states was a malicious attempt to injure the honor of the dead, and regrets that he omitted to notice, in his reply, the insinuations which Mr., afterwards Judge, Hopkinson permitted himself to make. The occurrence was unquestionably an unfortunate one, whatever the real facts may have been; and respect for the memory of Mr. Fulton leads me to hope that Mr. Emmet was correct in his version of the transaction. His letter, however, is important in another aspect: it shews that the merit of the invention, at the time, was considered to be the application of vertical wheels over the sides, and that this was claimed for Fulton on the strength of the letter to Lord Stanhope and the accompanying drawings of 1793, notwithstanding the endless chains and floats already referred to as illustrating the convictions of 1793.