CHAPTER IX
THE BEGINNINGS OF STEAM NAVIGATION
IT will help us to appreciate the work of the men who first experimented with steam-driven ships if we recall the fact that James Watt, working at Soho, near Birmingham, England, invented the engine which used steam on both sides of the piston in 1782, and that it was for many years after that date an enormously heavy and cumbersome machine. From this fact we see the state of the mechanic arts in England at the end of the eighteenth century, when practical experiments in steam navigation were first begun. That the state of those arts was still lower in the United States would be naturally inferred from the story of Bond's efforts to restrain progress by reëxporting the machinery that had been imported at Philadelphia. As a matter of fact, when one American inventor began to make experiments in steam navigation, he was obliged first of all to train men in the work of building engines; he was unable to find, anywhere in the country, men with the necessary skill.
One of the most curious of the early experiments was that made by James Rumsey, who was a bath tender at a pleasure resort in Virginia. He first planned to mount an old-style, single-acting engine in a boat, connect it with a pump, draw in water through a pipe at the bow, and then force it out astern. When this plan was explained to Washington, he wrote a testimonial, saying, "the discovery is of great importance." A boat built on this plan was eventually driven at a speed of four miles an hour. Rumsey also experimented with a screw propeller, but he was poor, and could not carry the experiment to a conclusion. Finally he went to England to get capital (a fact to be remembered), and there he died before he could accomplish anything of real moment.
Another interesting experimenter was John Fitch, of Pennsylvania, a man who was handy in the use of tools, and who was also a surveyor and map-maker. On December 2, 1785, he presented to the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia a model, with drawings, of a steamboat. The New Jersey legislature then gave him the exclusive right to navigate the waters of the State with steamboats, and a company was organized to develop the invention. The first engine built had a 3-inch cylinder. It was mounted in a skiff and was connected at one time with a screw propeller, at another with an endless chain dragging alongside, and with a "screw and paddles," but neither device would drive the boat at a practical speed. Then Fitch conceived the idea of driving with paddles somewhat after the fashion of canoe men. This plan worked so well that a boat forty feet long was built and furnished with an engine having a 12-inch cylinder. In spite of the fact that the cylinder of this engine had wooden ends that leaked, and a piston that did not fit the bore, the boat was driven at a speed of four knots an hour.
In 1788 Fitch built a boat sixty feet long with a larger engine, and in October she carried thirty passengers to Burlington, New Jersey, a distance of twenty miles, in three hours and ten minutes. The speed of this boat being unsatisfactory, still another was built, and in May, 1790, she covered a measured mile in seven and a half minutes, or at the rate of eight miles an hour. She was then put on the river as a packet plying between Philadelphia and Trenton, and made more than thirty trips of which records remain. She was operated by paddles at the stern.
Though Fitch's plan was not the best conceivable, it is now admitted that his boat was a mechanical success. He built a workable boat, but, unhappily, he was far ahead of his day in his hopes and work. The people were not yet ready for steam navigation, and the company failed to pay dividends. Meantime another boat that he had built to run on the Mississippi was wrecked, and that loss ended the enterprise. Fitch finally went to the banks of the Ohio, where he continued his efforts without success.
"The day will come," he wrote, "when some more powerful man will get fame and fortune from my invention, but nobody will believe that poor John Fitch can do anything worthy of attention." Then he killed himself.
In 1786, Oliver Evans, a Philadelphia millwright, asked the legislature of the State to give him the exclusive right to build steam gristmills and road-wagons,—automobiles, in other words,—but his plans were not treated seriously. In 1801, however, he built a steam plaster mill, and in 1804 he demonstrated, in a way that yet astonishes the reader, the entire feasibility of steam navigation.
Having obtained a contract for dredging some of the slips along the Philadelphia water front, he built a scow, 30 ✕ 12 feet large, to carry the dredge. The scow was put together at his shop, which was located a mile from the Schuylkill. When done, he mounted a steam engine, (5 ✕ 19 inches large), on its deck, placed temporary wooden axles with temporary wooden wheels underneath, connected the axles and engine shaft, and then steamed away to the river. There he removed the wheels and put a paddle wheel at the stern for use afloat. Then he launched his scow, steamed down the Schuylkill and up to the slips he was to dredge. The engine was thereafter used in the work of dredging. Although that was in 1804, the people were not yet ready for steam navigation. The only practical result of the work of Evans was the adoption of the high-pressure engine, so called. His engine had no condenser. It exhausted its steam into the open air, and this style of engine was found to be best adapted for use on the steamboats of the Western rivers, later on.
In the meantime Robert Fulton, who was to succeed, had been at work. Fulton was a Pennsylvania artist who had shown so much talent that he went to England to study under Benjamin West. In the meantime, however, he had been greatly interested in mechanics, and had dreamed of steamboats. In London his thoughts turned more and more to mechanics, and in 1793 he abandoned art to take up his life-work.