CHAPTER VIII.

HISTORY OF ORIGINAL INVENTORS.

"Dear bought the experiment, and hard the strife
Of social man, that rear'd his arts to life."

BEFORE giving a description of Mr. Fulton's inventions in steam navigation, it may not be amiss to show that numerous individuals had endeavoured to accomplish that which only Mr. Fulton's gigantic mind could properly conceive and practically perfect. The different modes of propelling vessels on the seas form a striking and peculiar picture in the eventful history of man: levers in the shape of oars, paddle-wheels, condensed air, horse-power, explosive force of gunpowder, and the fall of water, were proposed; but all have vanished before the triumphant use of steam. Many controversies have existed, and much paper wasted, respecting the nature and construction of the various steamboats; and whilst each inventor has deservedly received the highest praise and applause for his own wonderful invention, it was Fulton, and Ful

ton only, who grasped hold of the reins of the allpowerful STEAM-ENGINE OF WATT, and harnessing it, like a snorting steed, to his leviathan car, he lashed its foaming sides, and giving it liberty, it

"Rode the waters like a thing of life,"

and startled old Neptune from the lowest depths of the ocean, to yield his trident to the boldest commander of the waves.

We now live in a new age, and the day has gone by that an inventor can be ridiculed with impunity. Mind, genius, and talent, have produced the most extraordinary results:

"That teach the temper'd soul, at one vast view,

To glance o'er time and look existence thro'."

The mountains have been levelled, the valleys filled up, and the fiery chariot drives along our plains; and, for business or pleasure, the traveller mounts the "lightning-trains," to convey him from place to place; and whilst the modest, unassuming Morse, by the lightning's flash delivers the messages of nations from pole to pole, the enterprising merchants of the East are crowding the swiftest, boldest steamers of the seas, that madden with the strength they gain, bound the billowy main, and onward sweep, between the rising and the setting sun, to heap their treasures in the Western World,

and establish the truth that England, France, and America, with one accord, proclaim the glory of Fulton.

Many eminent and ingenious men proposed to propel vessels by steam power; and amongst the number were Dr. Papin, a Frenchman, Savery, the Marquis of Worcester, and Dr. John Allen, of London, in 1726. In 1786, Oliver Evans, of Philadelphia, and about the same time Dr. Benjamin Franklin proposed to propel a vessel by the immediate action of the steam upon water, forcing a column of water through a channel, for that purpose, in the keel out at the stern.

In justice to the more successful inventors who left some lasting testimony of their contrivances, it affords us pleasure to represent their inventions as correctly as it was possible for us to obtain the same; and whatever ideas they may have had, they perseveringly endeavoured to exhibit. They proved that steam power could be applied to navigation, but they did not succeed in accomplishing the application to perfection. They evinced, in a manner, great practical knowledge, and their experiments were of such vast importance as to command the respect and honour of their countrymen; but still they did not possess that rare union of genius and science so as to attain and achieve

the great triumph of steamboat navigation. The first patent on record to propel a vessel by steam power, is that of JONATHAN HULLS, who published a pamphlet, in 1737, describing it as a means of towing other vessels out of harbor against tide and winds. This was the first paddle-wheel driven by steam power, and the idea of placing the wheel in the stern occurred to the inventor as being the proper place for it, because that water-fowl, ducks and geese, pushed their web feet behind them.

In 1787, MR. JAMES RUMSEY, of Sheppardstown, Virginia, made a public experiment on the Potomac river. His boat was about eighty feet long, and was propelled by a steam-engine which worked a vertical pump in the middle of the vessel, by which the water was drawn in at the bow, and expelled at the stern through a horizontal trunk in her bottom. The reaction of the effluent water carried her at the rate of four miles an hour when loaded with three tons, in addition to the weight of her engine, of about one-third of a ton. The boiler held no more than five gallons of water, and needed only a pint of water at a time; and the whole machinery did not occupy a space greater than that required for four barrels of flour. It seems that he and Dr. Franklin entertained similar ideas about the same time. Mr. Rumsey went

to England to put a vessel afloat on the Thames, and died there in 1793. A steamboat one hundred feet long was tried on the Loire, at Lyons, by the Marquis de Joffrey. He used paddles revolving on an endless chain. It was unsuccessful.

MR. JOHN FITCH'S steamboat was built in Philadelphia, and made several experimental excursions on the Delaware. The following is Mr. Fitch's own account of it, in December, 1786:

"The cylinder is to be horizontal, and the steam to work with equal force at each end. The mode by which we obtain what I term a vacuum is, it is believed, entirely new, as is also the method of letting the water into it, and throwing it off against the atmosphere without any friction. It is expected that the cylinder, which is of twelve inches diameter, will move a clear force of eleven or twelve cwt. after the frictions are deducted: this force is to be directed against a wheel of eighteen inches diameter. The piston moves about three feet, and each vibration of it gives the axis about forty evolutions. Each evolution of the axis moves twelve oars or paddles five and a half feet: they work perpendicularly, and are represented by the strokes of a paddle of a canoe. As six of the paddles are raised from the water, six more are entered, and the two sets of paddles make their strokes of about eleven feet in each evolution. The crank of the axis acts upon the paddles about one-third of their length from their lower ends, on which part of the oar the whole force of the axis is applied. The engine is placed in the bottom of the boat about onethird from the stern, and both the action and reäction turn the wheel the same way."