Who created the first steamboat

STEAMBOATS

Queens of the River

Nearly everyone is familiar with the written works of Mark Twain and his vivid descriptions of life along the Mississippi River. Imagining the time in which he lived, one image likely comes to mind, the steam-powered paddle boats moving people and cargo along America's largest river and its numerous tributaries. Ever wonder how they worked, who invented them, or why they disappeared from use except as museums of the past?

Prior to using steamboats, river travel included keelboats, flat-bottom haulers not much different from barges. They used river currents to travel downstream but had no means to propel themselves upstream. To achieve an upriver journey, keelboats used crew members with long poles or teams of oxen on shore to push or pull the boat along. The journeys took about six weeks to travel down the Mississippi River, but the return trip required four or five months!

That all changed when steam power enabled boats, traveling at five to eight miles per hour, used large paddlewheels to propel the boat along both with and against the current. Each boat used a large boiler heated by a furnace burning wood or coal. The steam produced by the boiling water built the pressure up to the point it forced its escape, pushing large gears which turned the paddlewheel. The paddlewheel used planks of wood attached to a central wheel with radiating spokes. As the steam turned the wheel, the planks acted as long, horizontal oars to propel the boat along the water. Some boats, sternwheelers, used a large rear wheel with other wheels, sidewheelers, mounting a paddlewheel on either side of the boat.

Invention of the Steam Engine and Steamboats

The birth of the steamboat comes from the collaboration and successive inventions of its day. First, a Scottish inventor named James Watt developed the first steam engine in 1769 as a means of pumping water out of flooded mines. While he never applied his creation to transportation uses, later inventors saw the potential in his patented design.

The first inventor to apply Watt's steam engine to transportation use was John Fitch. In 1787, he adapted the steam engine to power riverboats, demonstrating his creation to the attendees of the Constitutional Convention. He sailed his 45-foot boat on the Delaware River, astounding viewers with its speed. Although he constructed a total of five steamboats, his designs required too much money to build or operate as anything but a novelty for the wealthy.

History owes credit for the mass-creation and adoption of commercial steamboats to Robert Fulton and the assistance of Robert Livingston. Fulton, possessing a lifelong fascination with science and technology, left his job as a Philadelphia painter to pursue his engineering interests in steam locomotion and canal design. After studying in London, he took a job working on the canals in France where he soon met Livingston.

Today, let's go looking for the first steamboat. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

We tell our schoolchildren that Robert Fulton invented the first steamboat. What Fulton did do was locate an efficient new Watt engine in a warehouse. And in 1807 he installed it in a well-designed boat. We had a huge network of inland rivers we badly needed to navigate. Fulton enjoyed immediate commercial success.

He had access to a lot of new technology by 1807, and he put his boat together with an ease that would've been impossible just a few years before. His patent makes no pretense about inventing the steamboat. It acknowledges 30 years of early steamboat development.

The story of one of those boats began in France. Two French artillery officers passed time in camp talking about how they might use steam to power boats. One officer, the Count d'Auxiron, left the army in 1770 to work full time on a boat. By 1772 he'd talked the French government into promising they'd give the first successful builder exclusive license to run the boat for fifteen years.

D'Auxiron installed a huge old Newcomen steam engine in a boat. The engine was so heavy that the boat sank. After three years of lawsuits, d'Auxiron died of apoplexy.

That would've ended it, but, while d'Auxiron was at work, another young aristocrat, the Marquis de Jouffroy, got involved in a duel. He landed in a military prison on the isle of Ste Marguerite. That's the same prison where the famous Man in the Iron Mask was held. During years of enforced contemplation he watched the boats below, and he thought about d'Auxiron.

When he got out in 1775, Jouffroy went to d'Auxiron and his supporters. He decided they were on the wrong track, and he left Paris for Lyon. There he built his own Newcomen-style engine and, in 1783, made a trial run with a 150-foot boat on the Saone river.

Finally, the French Revolution drove Jouffroy out of France. He died poor and embittered. Still, he hadn't failed. For, after Jouffroy, Fulton could only be an aftermath. Fulton is really just America's thin claim to an invention that'd been proven feasible in Europe -- long, long before.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.

(Theme music)
Flexner, J.T., Steamboats Come True. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1978.

L'expérience de Jouffroy d'Abbans en 1783 et la navigation à vapeur dans la région lyonnaise. Musé Historique de Lyon, Hotel Gadagne, 1983. (This is a catalog of Jouffroy materials from the Lyon Historical Museum)

Mollat, M., Les Origines de la Navigation a Vapeur. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970.

This episode is a revised version of Episode 6. My thanks to Philippe Vandermarlier for providing the Lyon Museum catalog. And my thanks to Jouffroy's relative, Christophe Zeilas, for providing me both with additional counsel and the two images above.

The Engines of Our Ingenuity is Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H. Lienhard.

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No. 1085:

THE FIRST AMERICAN STEAM ENGINE

Today, steam comes to America. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

Eighteenth-century scholars talked about technology in a way that 20th-century scholars do not. Technology was part of the natural philosophy curriculum in any good university.

American intellectuals had a strong interest in the technological revolution sweeping England by the mid-1700s. In 1760 young John Adams wrote in his diary that he was struggling to understand the English "fire engines." That's what steam engines were called back before Watt. Jefferson studied them at William and Mary.

Still, historian Carroll Pursell points out that our interest in steam engines had to be largely academic. The real thing simply didn't exist in the Colonies.

The first Newcomen engines were huge brutes -- two stories high. They delivered around ten horsepower. Their first use was keeping water out of British coal and metal mines.

Here in America, we used up surface deposits of coal and iron before we began digging deep mines. At first we had no need for pumping engines. But surface deposits ran out. And scarcer metals, like copper, couldn't be found on the surface.

In 1748 John Schuyler's copper mine near Passaic, New Jersey, was shut down by flooding. So Schuyler paid the English engine-maker Jonathan Hornblower 1000 pounds to ship him a "fire engine" and a crew of mechanics to set it up. The engine arrived five years later, in 1753, along with Hornblower's son, Josiah, and his crew.

When Josiah got the machine up and running two years after that, Schuyler hired him to run the engine and the mine as well. The engine did well enough for five years. Then it was badly damaged in a fire. Josiah got it running again, but only 'til another fire ruined it in 1768. This time it stayed ruined through the American Revolution. An aging Josiah Hornblower made another repair in 1793, and this time the old engine kept pumping well into the 19th century.

Still, America couldn't be built with off-the-shelf English technology. We were starting to build our own engines even before the Revolutionary War. Before Hornblower repaired Schuyler's engine the second time, it'd been surpassed, not only by better English engines, but by early American designs as well. By 1793 it was already something of an antiquarian tourist attraction.

The real value of Schuyler's tenacity was that it pointed the way to others. Colonial intellectuals, like Ben Franklin, went to see it. Steam power had been a school exercise for Jefferson and Adams. It took Schuyler's checkered business venture to turn that dinosaur of an engine into a glimpse of -- America's future.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.

(Theme music)

Pursell, C.W., Jr., Early Stationary Steam Engines in America: A Study in the Migration of a Technology. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1969, Chapter 1, The Colonial Experience.

Note: 11/19/2011: Mr. Al Jarvis writes to point out that the actual location of Schuyler's mine is in North Arlington, NJ, five miles south of Passaic.

This episode is a revised version of Episode 28.

The Engines of Our Ingenuity is Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H. Lienhard. Previous Episode | Search Episodes | Index | Home | Next Episode