The Great American Steamboat Race

by Benton Rain Patterson

  News of the Lee’s continuing lead was received in New Orleans with jubilation. The Picayune published a special edition, an extra, to keep its readers up to date. “When the extra Picayune was issued,” the newspaper’s reporter wrote, “with the announcement of the position of the steamers at Vicksburg, the excitement, if possible, increased, and cheer on cheer went up for the ‘Bobby Lee,’ till it seemed as though the people were holding a grand jubilee.... The friends of the ‘Natchez’ still hope that she may recover her lost time, and lead at Cairo, but there can be no doubt the chances are now in favor of the ‘Lee.’

  “The next point from which they will be telegraphed is Helena,” the Picayune writer continued warily, “and there is no telling what may occur before that point and Memphis are gained.”18

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  PART TWO. THE ORIGINS

  • 4 •

  The Pioneers

  By the time he reached his fifties, Robert R. Livingston had assembled an impressive resume. He was a member of the five-man committee named to draft the Declaration of Independence (the four other members being John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Thomas Jefferson, who headed the committee). He was elected to the New York Congress in 1776 as a representative from Dutchess County and he served on the committee that wrote a constitution for the new state of New York. The New York Congress appointed him chancellor of the state, to preside over the state’s Chancery Court, and on April 30, 1789, as chancellor of New York, he administered the oath of office to George Washington when Washington was inaugurated as the new nation’s first president. In 1801 Livingston was appointed by President Thomas Jefferson to be the United States minister to France, the position from which he negotiated the Louisiana Purchase.

  Widely considered both brilliant and learned, Livingston was elected the first president of the New York Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts and Manufactures following its organization in 1791. He liked to think of himself as a practical scientist and he devoted two hundred acres of his vast estate on the east side of the Hudson River, Clermont, to agricultural experiments, which included using gypsum in the cultivation of corn, buckwheat and clover. He also conducted experiments to improve the breeds of his cattle and sheep.

  In 1797 Livingston’s active mind lighted on the notion that he could build–or, rather, have built — a boat that would be powered by a steam engine. It wasn’t a new idea, Leonardo da Vinci having been possibly the first to imagine one and an obscure inventor named David Ramsay having received a patent for one in 1618 and another in 1630.1 Nothing came of those ideas, though, except their survival as possibilities in the inventive minds of persons who wished to find a way, as it was put in one patent application, of “making of Shipps to saile without the assistance of Wynde or Tyde.”2

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  Another early steamboat was proposed by an English physician, John Allen, who described and patented it in 1729. Another was devised in 1736 by an English clock repairman named Hulls, whose creation, it was said, looked more like a clock than a boat. In 1760 a Swiss named Genevois came up with an idea for a boat that would be propelled by a watchlike works that would be wound by the force of steam. Throughout the remainder of the eighteenth century a succession of inventors — or men who hoped to become inventors — proposed a variety of steamboat schemes, most of them coming to nought.

  The existence then of workable steam engines was keeping the steamboat dream alive. The Newcomen engine, named for its inventor, English blacksmith Thomas Newcomen, had been developed in the early 1700s, with a boiler positioned directly below a cylinder that contained one large piston. Steam entered the cylinder from the boiler and drove the piston upward, and when the piston reached the top of the cylinder, water was sprayed into the cylinder to dissipate the steam and create a vacuum, causing atmospheric pressure to draw the piston down to the bottom of the cylinder again, and the cycle was then repeated, the piston’s action providing continuous movement that could be applied to a number of uses, especially including pumping water out of mines. The steamboat devised and patented by the clock repairman Hulls in 1736 used a Newcomen engine to drive a paddle wheel. There is no record, however, of the boat’s having been built.

  In 1783 a boat powered by a two-cylinder Newcomen engine and built by a French nobleman, Claude-François-Dorothée Jouffroy d’Abbans, actually proved workable in a short run on the River Saone at Lyons, France. It thus became the first boat to go against the current under its own power, unaided by wind or wave or the muscle of man or beast. For fifteen minutes, billowing smoke and sparks from the fire beneath its boiler, the vessel moved upriver at a speed that was as fast as a man could walk, cheered on by crowds gathered along the riverbanks. Then the boat’s bottom planks, taking a terrific beating from the pounding of the pistons, broke loose, opening the hull to a torrent of river water. What was more, the boiler’s seams burst, sending a cloud of steam into the air and killing the engine. But despite it all, Jouffroy managed to guide the stricken vessel to the river bank, where he leaped safely to shore, satisfied that he had achieved success for his invention. The French government, however, to which he was looking for additional financing to try again, refused to accept his account of his boat’s trial run, and when France exploded in revolution in 1789, Jouffroy fled the country, his experiments ended.

  In 1769 a Scottish instrument maker and inventor, James Watt (for whom the unit of power, the watt, was named), patented a steam engine that made a significant technological advancement over the Newcomen engine. Watt decided that Newcomen’s engine would be much more efficient if the cylinder could be kept hot, instead of being cooled by the water sprayed into it to dissipate the steam, a process that required time to reheat the cylinder so that a new puff of steam would not immediately condense upon entering the cylinder. And so Watt devised a condenser, a container separate from the cylinder but connected to it by a valve that drew the steam out of the cylinder to provide the vacuum that caused the downward stroke of the piston. He later improved that engine by closing the top of the cylinder and introducing steam into it at both ends to create a reciprocating action that allowed the engine to generate power on both the upward and downward movement of the piston. That two-stroke design made for a more efficient, more cheaply run and much more smoothly operating engine. Its superiority soon made the Watt engine the standard of steam-engine design, even as its inventor continued to improve it and adapt it to a variety of uses.

  John Stevens, a New Jersey land developer and inventor who was also Robert Livingston’s brother-in-law, had become deeply interested in the idea of a steamboat. Stevens knew about the steamboat-building efforts of John Fitch, the first man in America to build workable, though faulty, steamboats, which Fitch had been doing since 1785 with limited success. Stevens also knew about the experiments of James Rumsey, another American trying to build a workable steamboat. Stevens shared their passion and their handicap — the lack of sufficient funds to develop a dependable, commercially successful steam-powered boat. Stevens saw his wealthy brother-in-law as just the financial angel he needed to make his dream come true. He talked Livingston into bankrolling the construction of a steamboat in partnership with him.

  Once committed to the project, Livingston quickly became an ardent student of steam power, reading every book he could find on the subject. Even so, his knowledge of engineering did not reach the level of Stevens’s, and his haughtiness prevented him from accepting some of Stevens’s suggestions for the construction of a test boat. In late 1797 Livingston entered a partnership with Stevens and machinist Nicholas J. Roosevelt, who operated a foundry on the Passaic River in what is now Belleville, New Jersey. Roosevelt was the man Livingston and Stevens needed to build not only the boat but the steam engine, the British government having prohibited the export of Watt engines built in Britain, forcing the Americans to build their own.

  The boat design that Livingston gave Roosevelt called for a horizontal wheel moun
ted below the keel to provide propulsion, despite Roosevelt’s objection that the horizontal wheel would be inefficient. Vertical paddle wheels mounted on the sides of the hull, Roosevelt argued, would be much better. Livingston replied that his design was based on “perfectly new principles” and as the man who was paying the bills, he demanded that Roosevelt follow the plan.

  Details of the venture were finally worked out between the three men — Livingston, Stevens and Roosevelt — and construction of the boat began in April 1798. Livingston participated from a distance, frequently issuing instructions to Roosevelt by mail, repeatedly making changes, but visiting the foundry only rarely while the work went on.

  Finally, in August 1798, the building of the boat and the engine was finished and the engine was installed. It was time for a trial run. On the appointed day, however, the boat proved unable to move. Roosevelt blamed Livingston’s horizontal wheel while Livingston blamed Roosevelt’s steam engine. It was back to the drawing board. In October 1798, with adjustments having been made, but the horizontal wheel still in place, a new test run was scheduled. This time the boat managed to move upriver for a short distance at a rate estimated by Roosevelt as “three miles [an hour] in still water” before its heavily pounding engine shook apart both the boat and its machinery.

  Livingston prepared to try again, making more changes to his design, more innovations. He tried an engine that used mercury instead of steam in its cylinder, but it, like all the other new ideas he came up with, failed to work. At last he realized he was no engineer and in February 1800 he teamed up again with Stevens in a new agreement that stated they would build a new boat and share the cost of it. With some reluctance, they again included Roosevelt in the arrangement, allowing him to contribute his foundry’s labor in lieu of cash.

  Livingston’s attention, however, was then diverted to the task given him by President Jefferson in the fall of 1801, when he was sent to France to secure from Napoleon’s government the right of the United States to use New Orleans as a shipping base.

  While in France on that assignment, Livingston met an ambitious young American who captured his interest. He was Robert Fulton, the son of an Irish immigrant, also named Robert Fulton, who with his wife, Mary, had settled on a farm near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where young Robert was born on November 14, 1765, the fourth of the family’s five children. Fulton had grown up in Lancaster, a manufacturing town with shops that produced tools and farm implements as well as weapons that helped General George Washington’s revolutionary army wage war against the British. Fulton became acquainted with the sorts of things that could be wrought from metal and the processes for doing so.

  Fulton also had a considerable talent for painting and drawing and in 1785, at age twenty, he had set himself up in a studio in Philadelphia to make a living as a painter of miniature portraits suitable for enclosure in lockets and brooches. His portrait business did well enough that in May 1786 he was able to buy property for his mother and some of his siblings to live on in western Pennsylvania. It also allowed him to move to grander quarters, and he advertised in 1786 that he had “removed from the northeast corner of Walnut and Second Streets to the west side of Front Street, one door above Pine Street, Philadelphia.”

  That new location placed him within a block of the Delaware River, where in the summer of 1786 John Fitch was experimenting with a forty-fivefoot boat powered by a steam engine with a three-inch cylinder and propelled by two sets of paddles, one mounted on each side of the craft. There is no evidence that Fulton witnessed, much less studied, Fitch’s contraption, but it drew a sizeable crowd to the riverbank, and Fulton, naturally curious, particularly about things mechanical, may well have been one of the most interested observers of Fitch’s experimental steamboat.

  That same year, 1786, Fulton, troubled by a persistent cough, took time off to stay at a spa in West Virginia (then Virginia) in hopes of curing his ailment. While there he met some people to whom he showed his paintings and who were so taken with his work that they advised him to go to England and study under some of the prominent artists there, particularly Benjamin West,

  Robert Fulton, inventor of the first successful steamboat. The son of an Irish immigrant, he was born near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where while growing up he became familiar with the making of machinery and metal devices (Library of Congress).

  an American who had made a name for himself as a portrait painter in England. In the spring of 1787 Fulton, carrying about two hundred dollars and a letter of introduction to Benjamin West, sailed for England, arriving in late spring. Though West and his wife received him cordially, Fulton’s artwork failed to impress West enough for him to take Fulton on as a student, and eventually Fulton despaired of making a living as an artist.

  His big, absorbing interest then became things nautical, particularly canals, canal locks and canal boats, all pertinent concerns of that day. He conceived ideas for improving them, but failed to find sufficient financial backing to put his ideas to work. In 1794 he corresponded with the company that James Watt and Matthew Boulton had formed, inquiring about buying from the company a steam engine that could be used to power a boat. He also came up with ideas for building a submarine, as well as designs for torpedoes and mines. In England he was unable to secure the financing he needed to develop his ideas and in June 1797 he boarded a ship at Dover and sailed across the Channel to Calais and from there traveled to Paris.

  In Paris he obtained lodgings at a Left Bank pension that attracted wellto-do Americans and it was there that Fulton met Ruth Barlow, the charming Bohemian wife of the odd, affluent and socially prominent poet Joel Barlow, from Connecticut. Ruth was in Paris awaiting her husband’s return from Algiers, where as a representative of the United States government he was attempting to gain the release of American seamen held hostage by Barbary pirates. Ruth, a pretty, witty woman in her early forties, became attracted to the thirty-one-year-old Fulton, tall and handsome, with dark, curly hair and an engaging charm and vigor. Upon Barlow’s return from Algiers, Fulton charmed him as well, and the Barlows invited Fulton to move from the pension into an apartment with them, which he did, forming a fast friendship — and with Ruth, more than friendship, with Joel’s approval — that was to last many years. In late October 1800 Barlow bought a huge, handsome mansion for the three of them, at 50 Rue de Vaugirard, across from the Jardin du Luxembourg, in one of Paris’s poshest neighborhoods.

  It is likely that Livingston met Fulton through the Barlows, probably at a dinner party given by them in early 1802 to show off their impressive new home, although there is no known record of the meeting. In any case, while in Paris, Livingston and Fulton became acquainted and in so doing discovered each other’s interest in steam-powered boats. At age fifty-five and impaired by increasing deafness, Livingston quickly developed an admiration for Fulton’s relative youth and vigor, his enthusiasm and his apparent knowledgeability about the mechanics of harnessing steam power to boats. Fulton, Livingston soon began to think, might be just the person he needed to help him create a steamboat that could navigate the Hudson between New York and Albany no matter the wind, weather or current.

  Fulton of course saw in Livingston a Daddy Warbucks whose money could make Fulton’s dream of creating a great invention — one that would make him the fortune he sought — come happily true. Before long, the two men reached an agreement to cooperate in the building of an experimental steam-powered boat. They decided it would be best to buy an engine rather than build one, and Livingston, with his diplomatic connections, got the job of seeking permission from the British government to export — to the United States, since Britain and France were at war — one of the engines manufactured by the firm of Watt and his partner, Boulton. Livingston also assumed the burden of footing the bill for the boat’s construction. Fulton’s task was to come up with a workable propulsion system and hull design — the two major problems plaguing others who were trying, or had tried, to build a practicable steamboat.

  F
ulton’s latest propulsion idea at that time was to create what was very much like a bicycle chain, to which paddle boards would be attached and which would rotate in a long oval, propelling the boat as the paddle boards moved continuously through the water, drawn by the chain. To test the idea he ordered a three-foot-long model built, the propulsion chain for which would be actuated by clock springs. He planned to observe the working of the model, then design a full-size boat based on the proportions of the model. At the time, Fulton, a lover of the good life, was staying — with Ruth Barlow — in the fashionable mountain resort town of Plombières, where the model was to be sent to him and where he would test it in a section of a stream he had prepared for the model’s run. He and Livingston, still in Paris, kept in touch by mail.

  The model arrived in Plombières in late May, and Fulton promptly put it to the test. On the basis of the test, he decided that the full-size boat should be ninety feet long and six feet in the beam. Ever quick with a sharp pencil, he calculated that the full-size craft could travel at a speed of eight miles an hour, carry fifty passengers and make the New York-to-Albany voyage in eighteen hours. He figured that the boat would burn a ton and a half of coal and that the cost of the coal plus the salaries of the crew would bring the expenses to no more than twelve dollars per trip, and assuming a capacity load of fifty passengers, the profit per trip would be $198. Days later he revised his figures and projected that he could make the boat two hundred feet in length and twelve feet in the beam, have it carry one hundred and twenty passengers and attain a speed of sixteen miles an hour, shortening the running time to Albany, he estimated, though unsure of the distance, to twelve hours.

  He wrote to Livingston to inform him of the progress he had made in developing the proposed boat from his experiments with the model and with small deference to Livingston’s position as sole financier, he demanded a report on Livingston’s progress in his part of the project. “Having now finished my experiments,” Fulton wrote, “I will thank you to let me know how you proceed with yours.” Fulton now could clearly see grand possibilities, all of them owing, as he saw it, to his efforts, and he wrote again to Livingston, this time to propose an agreement that would have the two of them split the profits from the boat’s operation fifty-fifty. He gave Livingston his justification for such a deal. “The leading principle,” he wrote with candor, “...is that I estimate my time (for it is my attentions which must carry it all into effect, and my knowledge of the subject) as an equivalent to your money.”3