296 : The Atlantic 



any practical success, but it at least succeeded in convincing the canal 

 bargemen that it was a threat to their occupation. They destroyed 

 Papin's steamer. 



Patents for steamers or steam tugs in England were sought by John 

 Allen in 1712 and by Jonathan Hulls in 1736, but no ships seem to 

 have been developed under these patents. In 1783 a French steamer, 

 designed by the Marquis d'Abbans, ran for a few minutes on the 

 Saone River, and one year later an American inventor named Rum- 

 sey, on the Potomac, made a steam engine operate a water pump 

 which in turn moved a vessel by jet propulsion. Rumsey gave up 

 in America but before ten years had elapsed he had succeeded in 

 England in moving another vessel at the rate of four miles an hour 

 on the Thames. 



John Fitch, an adventurous and inventive American, devised and 

 built the first steamboat that ever carried freight and paying passen- 

 gers. In 1788 he designed and built a steam engine and mounted it in 

 a boat that looked very much like a straight-sided barge. The steam 

 engine operated a whole series of paddles that dipped into the water 

 on either side of the barge and thus propelled the ship. This strange 

 craft actually traveled on the Delaware River between Philadelphia 

 and Trenton. Two years later Fitch built another steamship that was 

 driven by a stern paddle wheel. This vessel operated for a season 

 between Trenton, Philadelphia and Wilmington and is said to have 

 traveled as fast as eight miles an hour on the river. It carried passen- 

 gers, but not enough of them and when the trade failed Fitch's back- 

 ers deserted him. Fitch went to France in search of the support which 

 he had failed to find in America, but France was busy with her own 

 problems. By 1796 Fitch was back in New York operating on Col- 

 lect Pond a "Yawl Boat" in which a steam engine drove paddle 

 wheels and also a screw propeller. Again, though Fitch succeeded in 

 driving his boat, he did not succeed in getting support. In 1817 a com- 

 mittee of the New York Legislature said of Fulton's steamboat that it 

 was "in substance the invention patented by John Fitch in 1791." As 

 not infrequendy happens, the pubhc recognition and the official poHt- 

 ical opinion came too late for Fitch had committed suicide in Bards- 

 town, Kentucky in 1798. 



One of the people who saw Fitch's steamboat of 1787 in operation 

 was Colonel John Stevens. By 1802 he had developed a good and 

 practical steamer. This vessel was remarkable in that it was driven by 

 a screw propeller whereas most of the vessels both before and after 

 this time employed some kind of paddle wheel. In 1804 he had 



