C H A P T E R X X I I I .

STEAM­BOAT AFFAIRS IN THE UNITED STATES AFTER

FULTON'S EXPERIMENTS.

THE experiment of Fulton aroused attention in various parts of the country to the claims of John Fitch and his associates. Dr. William Thornton, in 1810, felt himself bound to vindicate the reputation of his old associate. The Doctor was then the Superintendent of the Patent­Office, and was thoroughly conversant with the subject of steam engines. In 1814, he published a small pamphlet, entitled " a short account of the Origin of Steam­boats, written in 1810, and now committed to the press by W. Thornton, of the City of Washington." He commenced his statement in these words:

" Finding that Mr. Robert Fulton, whose genius and talents I highly respect, has by some been considered the inventor of the steamboat, I think it a duty to the memory of the late John Fitch, to set forth, with as much brevity as possible, the fallacy of this opinion; and to show, moreover, that if Mr. Falton has any elaim whatever, it is exceedingly limited."

Quotations from this pamphlet have been made in appropriate portions of these pages. The following gives the reason of the final failure of the old Steamboat Company. It also controverts the idea that Mr.

Fulton was entitled to any merit for the employment of paddle­wheels at the sides of his boat, and shows that Fulton was indebted to Fitch for the proportions of his vessels:

"Finding that the works on board the first boat were not strong enough, we built another, of twenty five tons burthen, rigged schooner fashion, intended to go to New Orleans, and mount the Mississippi. When the principal parts of the works were prepared, and ready to be put on board, the author of this, thinking that no mistakes could be made by the Company, went to the West Indies, on the 16th of October, 1790, to visit his mother for the last time, and expected to find on his return the boat ascending the Mississippi at the rate of at least four miles an hour; but a spirit of innovation having seined some of the company, and their attempts to simplify the machine having ruined it, their unsuccessful endeavors to make it work subjected them to debts, which obliged them to sacrifice both boats and all the machinery; and on my return, after a two years' absence, I found, to my inexpressible grief, the whole of this very valuable scheme ruined. I had only, then, to wait until the patent taken out from the United States during my absence, for the benefit of the Company, by Messrs. Fitch and Voight, in the year 1791, expired, and to take out a patent for those peculiar improvements which I had invented or suggested. Finding Mr. Fulton about to take out a patent after he had examined every thing in the patent office relative to steamboats and steam engines, and not knowing whether he might recollect, among so many, those I had shown him of my own invention, I thought it proper to take a patent for them previous to a sight of his papers or of any hint of what they contained; and I believe he will do me the justice to say I never saw one of his, nor had a hint of what they were, before my patent from the United States was issued. I find Mr.. Fulton's patent rests principally on proportions, though the second section of the law expressly excludes proportional He uses Watt's and Boulton's steam engines, and wheels at the sides of the boat; but an engine on the principles of Watt's and Boulton's was used by us, the application of which was since patented; and the use of wheels at the sides seas known to us, and I often urged their use in our first boat; but the objection to them on so small a scale was their waste of power by the fall of the buckets or paddles on the water, and their lift of water in rising; both of which objections would diminish as the wheel increased in size; but side wheels could not be claimed as a new invention, for their use in navigation had long been known and published to the world by Dr. John Harris, in his Lexicon Technicum, in 1710ójust one hundred years ago. If Sir. Fulton should claim the actual application of steam to wheels at the sides of a boat, in opposition to the above declarations, I beg leave to offer, as a caveat against any such claim, the fire ship of Edward Thomason, in the tenth volume of the Repertory of Arts, which was laid before the Lords of the admiralty in 1796. This contains wheels at the sides, operated on by a steam engine, and was intended to possess the power of moving given distances, in all directions, according to the intentions of the director; so that, without any person being on board, it would conduct itself into an enemy's port, and by clock work, at a given moment explode the combustibles; which plan, I also presume, might suggest to any person of even less original genius than Mr. Fulton, the mode of letting off torpedoes, which were invented during the war of independence, by the late Major Bushnell, of Connecticut."

It has already been shown that the first model of Fitch at Southampton, Bucks County, had side­wheels, and according to Bache's Advertiser, they were fully tried on the boat. This was modified by the substitution of paddles on the endless chain; the paddle­wheel was considered a failure. Oliver Evans said on this subject, in 1814,

" When John Fitch and his Company were engaged in constructing their boat at Philadelphia, I suggested to Fitch the plan of driving and propelling the said boat by paddle or butter wheels at the sides, but he had an objection to them. * * I mentioned the same to Henry Voight, who said that Dr. Thornton was the person who had proposed flutter wheels at the sides of the boat, but that both himself and John Fitch had objected to them."

The noise of Fulton's experiments seems also to have aroused Henry Voight, the old companion and partner of Fitch, who, during many years had, in his comfortable office as chief coiner of the United States Mint, forgotten his struggles and losses in the steamboat scheme. Applying his inventive genius to work, he produced an improved method of navigating steamboats by three rows of paddles at the sides. The blades were fastened to beams, moved by levers and cranks, so that one set of the paddles was always in the water. This plan was laid before the American Philosophical Society, with a curious drawing, on the 21st of July, 1809, and is to be found in the MS. volume entitled, " Mechanics, Machinery, Engineering, & c."

On the 9th of November, 1815, Fernando Fairfax, of Washington, D. C., published an advertisement in the Aurora, printed at Philadelphia, notifying all persons interested, that authority was vested in him by the holder of the oldest patent­rights for steam navigation in the United States; and that all persons desiring license to navigate by steam must take out license for him, as he held under a member of John Fitch's Company. At that time Fitch's patent of 1791 had expired, and it is probable that the person alluded to was Dr. Thornton. In regard to the original invention, Mr. Fairfax held this language:

"As to Fitch and his Company, I maybe permitted to observe, from evidence I possess of the most authentic kind that their

spirit of enterprise pushed them forward against numerous discouragements of that early time, when the power of steam itself was so little knovvn in this country that there was not a man to

be found in it to make a complete engine and the proposal of navigating by steam was regarded as a Weird project rather to

be frowned on than encouraged by monied men whose aid alone could thoroughly establish its use. If those spirited individuals spent thousands of pounds in demonstrating their scheme without reaping the profit which its establishment would have insured but when others taking up their invention at a later and more fortunate period v ere enabled to realize, they are not the less entitled to the favour of an enlightened community, or to the reward of inventive genius."

The law has changed since the time of Fitch. He claimed for any and all applications of the power of steam to propel boats. The United States patent­laws subsequently passed restrict patentees to their own method of use. Under those regulations, any new application of the means of propulsion might be patented. Thus it happened that Livingston and Bulton had many rivals to contend against. Stevens had constructed steam­boats before Fulton had returned from France.

Rooseveldt had been an early experimenter upon steamboats, but had no patent. Some arrangement was made with him by Fulton and Livingston, whereby he was prevented from taking adverse action against them. Rooseveldt went to the West, and built the first steamboat which ever navigated the Ohio or Mississippi, which was finished in 1811, and called the New Orleans. This boat was of the capacity of one hundred tons. She left Pittsburgh in October, being designed to run as a packet boat between New Orleans and Natchez. This little vessel had a wheel at the stern, and was rigged with two masts and sails. The New Orleans continued to make trips between Natchez and New Orleans until July 14, 1815; when she was wrecked near Baton Rouge by striking a snag.

Meanwhile, others had engaged in this business. The Comet, a boat of twenty­five tons, owned by Daniel D. Smith, and built on D. French's patent, was launched in 1813. In 1814, the Vesuvius, owned by Fulton and others, was built at Pittsburgh. The Enterprize, built according to French's patent, at Brownsville, Pennsylvania, was the fourth boat.

Captain Henry M. Shreeve, having greatly Improved the arrangements of steam­engines, built the fifth boat, the Washington, in 1816. A lawsuit with Fulton and Livingston followed, and the District Court of Louisiana decided against those gentlemenóa judgment which practically set the waters of the West free to every improvement which it was possible to make in steam­boats.