Livingston had some doubts about Fulton’s boat design, thinking the slender craft might prove unable to withstand the constant pounding of the engine’s piston, and he balked outright at Fulton’s fifty-fifty-split proposal, telling him that “the demand you make of half the profits” was “much too great a compensation for the labour and time it will cost you.”
Apparently worried that, as Livingston warned, he could not be issued a U.S. patent for his so-called endless-chain propulsion system because such a device was already in use, Fulton abandoned the endless chain and substituted vertical paddle wheels to propel the proposed boat. They of course were not a new idea either. Paddle wheels turned by oxen were used by the Romans to propel boats before the first century A.D., and warships propelled by paddle wheels turned by manpower were used by the Chinese in the seventh century A.D. Roosevelt, too, had proposed vertical paddle wheels. Nevertheless, Fulton felt he could patent his paddle wheel and establish exclusive rights to the device he would design. “Although the wheels are not a new application,” he reasoned, “yet if I combine them in such a way that a large proportion of the power of the engine acts to propel the boat in the same way as if the purchase [of the wheel] was upon the ground the combination will be better than anything that has been done up to the present and it is in fact a new discovery.”4
After some sparring over the details of a partnership arrangement between them, Livingston, evidently seeing Fulton as his best hope for realizing his steamboat dream, at last agreed to the fifty-fifty split on profits. He did so on the condition that Fulton also invest money in the enterprise. On October 10, 1802, the two men signed an agreement to form a company that would seek a U.S. patent for “a new Mechanical combination of a boat to navigate by the power of a Steam Engine” and that would run between New York and Albany at eight miles an hour in still water and carry at least sixty passengers, allowing two hundred pounds per passenger. Livingston and Fulton each subscribed to fifty shares in the company. Fulton would go to England and build a prototype of the same specifications, using an engine to be borrowed from Boulton and Watt.
While Livingston was anteing up the capital over the next couple of months, Fulton tried to persuade Boulton and Watt to let him borrow one of their engines. His request was firmly rejected, and in the spring of 1803 he went to French machinist Jacques Perier to ask him to build the engine. Fulton had worked with Perier four years earlier, in 1799, when his bright idea of the moment was a rope-making machine, an idea that failed a year later when he ran out of money and financial backers. Perier had also collaborated with Fulton on the construction of the submarine Fulton had conceived, another scheme that failed. Perier had not only visited the Boulton and Watt foundry and machine shop in Birmingham and observed its operations but had also acquired a Watt engine and installed it in a Paris waterworks. Now he agreed to build the engine that Fulton — and Livingston — needed for their experimental boat. Etienne Calla, the man who had built the three-foot model, would put together the boiler and some parts of the engine.
This time Fulton would use vertical paddle wheels for propulsion, one mounted on each side of the boat, instead of the rotating chain he had used on the model. As for the hull, he boned up on the studies made by others, including renowned French mathematician Charles Bossut and English researcher Charles Mahon, Earl Stanhope, to determine the most efficient shape, the one likely to effect the least resistance as the craft moved through the water. Fulton further had the advantage of having seen drawings of the steamboat model designed by a French inventor named Desblancs — which had been on exhibit at the Paris Conservatory of Arts and Trades and of which Joel Barlow had made a sketch that he had sent to Fulton at Plombières. Fulton might also have seen the plans for Claude Jouffroy’s boat, which were in Jacques Perier’s possession, and he knew about John Fitch’s experimental boats, plans for which Fitch had left in Paris. And of course he knew about the creations of Livingston, Stevens and Roosevelt, as well as about the attempts of others.
After much contemplation, Fulton, a painstakingly careful worker, finally decided on a flat-bottomed, keelless hull with a tapered bow and stern. The boat would be steered with a rudder and tiller. Its two paddle wheels would each have ten spokes with rectangular boards attached at their farthest ends to serve as paddles. The engine, held in place and supported by a special framework, would be positioned amidships, mounted on the boat’s bottom planks, which would be reinforced beneath the piston and the boiler. The engine and its components would take up about half of the space in the hold.
His intention, he said, was to employ the craft upon America’s long rivers, making of them thoroughfares of transportation where roads were nonexistent and where conditions were such as to make the hauling of boats by men or beasts laborious, hazardous and expensive or, in some places, impossible. He evidently had the Mississippi River in mind — not, as Livingston did, the Hudson.
By May of 1803 the hull, fifty-six and a half feet long and ten and a half feet in the beam and lying tied up in the Seine near Perier’s plant, was ready to receive Perier’s engine, which along with the boat’s other machinery was installed sometime that month. The craft, in public view, made quite a spectacle. One Paris journalist described it as having “two large wheels mounted on an axle, like a cart” and behind the wheels rose “a kind of large stove with a pipe.” The creation born in Fulton’s imaginative mind had at last become a reality, floating as a curiosity on the Seine, nearing completion and the crucial test voyage that would follow.
Then tragedy struck. Fulton was awakened one night to be told that the boat had been damaged and had sunk to the bottom of the river, possibly the work of saboteurs — Seine boatmen bent on destroying what they saw as a threat to their livelihood. Another possible cause, though, was that the heavy machinery had simply broken through a hull inadequate to support it. Fulton quickly roused himself and hurried to the riverfront, enlisting help to recover the machinery from the water. Working through the night and deep into the next day, Fulton and his helpers managed to raise the engine, boiler and condenser and salvage as much else as they could. The boat itself, however, was a ruin, and a new one would have to be built.
By the end of July the new hull was finished, built not with Livingston’s money but with funds Fulton raised on his own, probably from Joel Barlow. This time the boat was seventy-four and a half feet long and approximately eight feet in the beam, substantially slimmer than the one that had been destroyed. When all was in readiness, Fulton issued an invitation for a public demonstration of the boat’s operation, asking France’s prestigious and influential National Institute to send a delegation to witness the demonstration, which was to take place on Tuesday, August 9, 1803, at 6 P.M. The boat was scheduled to make a run in the Seine between the Barriere des Bons Hommes and the Chaillot waterworks, a distance of about a mile.
At the appointed time, a large crowd of curious onlookers gathered on the banks of the river to behold the spectacle to be put on by the strangelooking, fire-breathing, floating contraption that would attempt to navigate the Seine. The event was recorded in the Journal des Debats:
At six o’clock in the evening, helped by only three persons, he [Fulton] put the boat in motion with two other boats in tow behind it, and for an hour and a half he afforded the strange spectacle of a boat moved by wheels like a cart, these wheels being provided with paddles or flat plates, and being moved by a fire engine.
As we followed it along the quay, the speed against the current of the Seine seemed to be about that of a rapid pedestrian, that is about 2,400 toises (2.90 miles) an hour; while going down stream it was more rapid. It ascended and descended four times from Les Bons Hommes as far as the Chaillot engine; it was maneuvered with facility, turned to the right and left, came to anchor, started again, and passed by the swimming school.
One of the [towed] boats took to the quay a number of savants and representatives of the Institute, among whom were Citizens Bossut, Carnot, Prony, Peri
er, Volney, etc . Doubtless they will make a report that will give this discovery all the celebrity it deserves; for this mechanism applied to our rivers, the Seine, the Loire, and the Rhone, would bring the most advantageous consequences to our internal navigation. The tows of barges which now require four months to come from Nantes to Paris would arrive promptly in from ten to fifteen days. The author of this brilliant invention is M. Fulton, an American and a celebrated engineer.5
The two boats that Fulton’s craft had towed, in which Fulton had provided French government officials and other VIPs a ride to let them participate in the big, historic event, had no doubt slowed his steamboat and had partly accounted for its failure to reach the sixteen-mile-an-hour speed he had predicted. But Fulton was far from being discouraged by the boat’s performance. He would simply have to use a more powerful engine next time — and he would give up the idea of towing other craft.
There was a good reason for Fulton and Livingston to move promptly from their prototype, once it had passed its test, as it had, to the actual steampowered boat that would ply the Hudson on a regular schedule, as Livingston had long envisioned. Livingston had used his and his family’s powerful political influence to obtain from the New York State legislature the right to be sole operators of steamboats on the Hudson — a privilege Livingston and Fulton hoped to also gain on other American rivers. The Hudson monopoly had been first granted to Livingston in March 1798, its primary justification being to protect the Livingston boat from potential competition by imitators who would copy the designs of the craft in which Livingston had invested so much of his time and money.
The legislature granted Livingston a monopoly that would, under the terms specified by the legislation, last twenty years, but did so with conditions that the steamboat Livingston proposed must meet. It must : (1) have a capacity of not less than twenty tons; (2) attain a speed of not less than four miles an hour; and (3) be in operation within a year — that is, by March 1799. The boat that Nicholas Roosevelt had built for Livingston, and Stevens, during its test in October 1798, failed to meet the speed requirement and was eventually abandoned. Livingston managed to have the New York legislature extend its deadline — twice — and the latest deadline was April 1807. He must have a steamboat operating successfully by then in order to keep his monopoly rights.
It was not until April 1804 that Fulton made the move from Paris to pursue the construction of a boat that would meet the New York legislature’s conditions. He informed Livingston that he was leaving for England to oversee the manufacture of the Boulton and Watt steam engine that was intended to power a boat that would be built in the United States. He got Livingston to enlist fellow diplomat James Monroe’s help in obtaining from the British government the export license needed to ship the proposed engine to America. In so doing, Livingston emphasized to Monroe the importance of the engine to commerce on the Mississippi, over which, thanks in part to their efforts, the United States had so recently acquired complete control through the Louisiana Purchase.
Fulton left for London on April 29, 1804. He did not get to the United States till two and a half years later. Evidently unknown to Livingston, Fulton had been asked by British officials, through an American agent, to come to England to build and stage a demonstration of his submarine, or plunging boat, as it was called, and his mines, which were called torpedoes. Since hostilities between England and France had resumed and a French invasion of England had become a new possibility, the British war office had decided to give Fulton’s infernal machines a try in hopes they could be used to combat the menace of the expanding French fleet.
Fulton had leaped at that new chance for fortune and fame. The British government ended up paying him not exactly the fortune he sought but enough to make him richer than he had ever been. His weapons of war, though, failed the test of practicability, and the British government in 1806 at last abandoned its hope of using them to fight France.
Fulton did succeed in obtaining permission for Matthew Boulton (who had taken over the company following Watt’s retirement) to build him the needed machinery to his specifications, including the steam engine, the condenser and an air pump, all for the price of 548 pounds, or about $2,740. He also got a London firm to make him a two-ton copper boiler, for 477 pounds, about $2,385. Everything was completed by March 1805, whereupon Fulton was granted a permit to export the parts to America.
With all necessary business taken care of and with no further gains to be realized from his war weapons in England, Fulton finally made preparations to return to the United States. He bought passage aboard a ship and sailed from Falmouth in October 1806. After seven turbulent weeks at sea he arrived safely in New York on December 13, 1806. He had been gone twenty years and was now forty-one years old. With Livingston’s deadline of April 1807 just four short months away, Fulton wrote to Livingston shortly after his arrival to tell him that he was ready to move ahead with their steamboat. But then he went to Philadelphia to be with the Barlows, who were living there at the time, and from Philadelphia the three of them went to Washington City, as the nation’s capital was then called, and stayed a month, entertaining and being entertained and joining in the celebration that welcomed Meriwether Lewis back from his epic journey across the North American continent.
When he returned to Philadelphia, Fulton dawdled awhile longer, then at last went to New York to get started on the building of the boat. It was the middle of March 1807 when he reported that construction had started at the Charles Browne shipyard at Corlear’s Hook, on the East River in lower Manhattan. Not long after that, he took the steam engine and other machinery parts out of storage in the U.S. Customs warehouse, where they had been since November 1806. Near the end of March he reported, “I have now Ship Builders, Blacksmiths and Carpenters occupied at New York in building and executing the machinery of my Steam Boat.” He said the boat’s construction would take four more months to complete, well past the legislature’s deadline. Livingston responded by having the legislature extend the deadline once again, for another two years.
By the middle of July the hull was far enough along for the two paddle wheels to be mounted on its sides and for Fulton to plan a test for the boat at the end of July. The craft was one hundred and forty-six feet long, thirteen feet in the beam, flat-bottomed and straight-sided, but with a curved bow. Two masts, one fore and one aft, would allow the boat to be rigged with square sails that could be used if the engine failed. The cost of the boat’s construction had risen sharply, doubling to $10,000 the $5,000 that Fulton had originally estimated he and Livingston each would have to contribute.
The boat’s first test was held on Sunday, August 9, 1807, exactly four years since the trial run of Fulton’s experimental craft on the Seine. Following the new test, Fulton gave Livingston a brief written report : “I ran about one mile up the East River against a tide of about one mile an hour ... according to my best observations, I went 3 miles an hour.... Much has been proved by this experiment.” He told Livingston that he would overhaul the engine and make some adjustments to allow the vessel to make more speed. He predicted that it would achieve the required four miles an hour and said that he was planning to take it on its maiden voyage from New York to Albany on Monday, August 17, 1807.
Even while preparing for the voyage up the Hudson, though, Fulton was thinking ahead. “Whatever may be the fate of steamboats on the Hudson,” he told Livingston in the final sentences of his report, “everything is completely proved for the Mississippi.”6 About that same time, he gave an interview to a reporter for the American Citizen, who, further revealing Fulton’s ambitions, commented in print that Fulton’s “Ingenius Steamboat, invented with a view to the navigation of the Mississippi from New Orleans upward ... [would] certainly make an exceedingly valuable acquisition to the commerce of the Western States.”7
To make sure the boat would be ready for the August 17 run, Fulton put it through another trial on Sunday, August 16. He seemed to prefer Sundays for demonstrations, p
resumably because Sundays provided bigger crowds and he wanted to show off his creation to as many people as possible. He moved the boat, under steam, from the East River, around the Battery, at the lower tip of Manhattan, then steamed up a short distance on the North River, as the lower Hudson used to be called, and tied the boat up at a dock near Greenwich Village. With him on the short voyage were a number of Livingston’s friends and relatives, including United States senator Samuel Latham Mitchell, who when he was a member of the New York legislature had introduced the first bill to grant Livingston a steamboat monopoly on the Hudson.
Monday, August 17, dawned bright and warm, promising a hot summer day, and the tide tables said that high tide, reaching up the river from the lower and upper New York bays, would be at eight o’clock that morning and the tide would flood again just before two that afternoon. With a small crew and about forty passengers, mostly Livingston relatives and friends, aboard with him, and a throng of onlookers lining the docks and riverbank, many of them hooting and jeering the ungainly-looking craft, Fulton shouted orders to his captain, Davis Hunt, and his engineer, George Jackson, and at about one o’clock in the afternoon Fulton’s boat, as yet unnamed, cast off its lines and slipped away from the wharf, its grist-mill-looking wheels churning through the water, moving the boat against the current and the ebbing tide, its white-pine fuel sending up columns of smoke and fiery sparks from the craft’s tall stacks.
The Great American Steamboat Race Page 8