John Fitch (inventor) - Steam-powered Boat

Steam-powered Boat

By 1785, Fitch was done with surveying and settled in Southampton, Pennsylvania where he began working on his ideas for a steam-powered boat. Unable to raise funds from the Continental Congress, he persuaded various state legislatures to award him a 14-year monopoly for steamboat traffic on their inland waterways. With these monopolies he was able to secure funding from businessmen and professional citizens in Philadelphia.

Fitch had seen a drawing of an early British Newcomen steam engine in an encyclopedia, but Newcomen engines were huge structures designed to pump water out of mines. He had somehow heard about the smaller and more efficient steam engine developed by James Watt in Scotland in the late 1770s, but there was not a single Watt engine in America at that time, nor would there be for many years (Fulton's exported model in his 1807 steamboat, Clermont, would be one of the first) because Britain would not allow the export of new technology to its former colony. Therefore, Fitch attempted to design his own version of a steam engine. He moved to Philadelphia and engaged the clockmaker and inventor Henry Voigt, to help him build a working model and place it on a boat.

The first successful trial run of his steamboat "Perseverance" was made on the Delaware River on August 22, 1787, in the presence of delegates from the Constitutional Convention. It was propelled by a bank of oars on either side of the boat. During the next few years, Fitch and Voigt worked to develop better designs, and in June 1790 launched a 60-foot (18 m) boat powered by a steam engine driving several stern mounted oars. These oars paddled in a manner similar to the motion of a swimming duck's feet. With this boat he carried up to thirty paying passengers on numerous round-trip voyages between Philadelphia and Burlington, New Jersey during the summer of 1790. Estimates of miles traveled that summer range from 1,300 to 3,000 miles, and Fitch claimed that the boat often went for 500 miles without mechanical problems. Estimated speeds were of a minimum 6 miles per hour under unfavorable conditions, to a maximum of 7 or 8 miles per hour.

Fitch was granted a patent on August 26, 1791, after a battle with James Rumsey, who had also invented a steam-powered boat. Unfortunately, the newly-created Patent Commission did not award the broad monopoly patent that Fitch had asked for, but a patent of the modern kind, for the new design of Fitch's steamboat. It also awarded steam-engine-related patents dated that same day to Rumsey, Nathan Read, and John Stevens. The loss of a monopoly due to these same-day patent awards led many of Fitch's investors to leave his company. While his boats were mechanically successful, Fitch no longer had the financial resources to carry on.

Fitch's idea would be turned profitable by Robert Fulton two decades later. Though Fulton was able to obtain a monopoly in the state of New York, because of the powerful influence of his partner Robert Livingston, he was unable to gain a US patent largely because the originality of Fulton's designs could not be demonstrated; it didn't help that because an original member of Fitch's company, William Thornton, had become head of the newly created Patent Office and made the application process even more difficult for Fulton. Fitch had also received a patent in 1791 from France, and in 1793, having given up hope of building a steamboat in the United States, left for France, where an American investor, Aaron Vail, had promised to help him build a boat there. As his luck would have it, Fitch arrived just as the Reign of Terror was beginning, and his plans had to be abandoned. He made his way to London to make an attempt there, but that also failed. He returned to the United States in 1794 and made a few more tries to build a steamboat. Failing once again, he moved to Bardstown, Kentucky, in 1797, where he hoped to sell some of the lands he had acquired there in the early 1780s and use the proceeds to build a steamboat for use on the Ohio or Mississippi River. He arrived to find settlers occupying his properties, with the result that legal disputes occupied him until his death in 1798.