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2. Steam on Water

Steam power drove both the Industrial Revolution and the progressive nineteenth century. Of all the thousands of inventions that have created the pervasive material modernity of the past two hundred years, the steam engine was the first cause, the prime mover and sine qua non. Unlike muscle power, it never tired or slept or refused to obey. Unlike waterpower, its immediate predecessor, it ran in all seasons and weathers, always the same. Unlike the wind, it responded tractably to human will and imagination: turning on and off, modulating smoothly from the finest delicacy to greatest force, ever under responsive control. ‘It is impossible to contemplate, without a feeling of exultation, this wonder of modern art,’ the Quarterly Review of London declared in 1830. After first transforming mining, manufacturing and transportation, from those bases the steam engine eventually reached into the smallest aspects of everyday life. Seen from the distant perspective of two centuries later, the great Steam Age looks like an unbroken, triumphal march.

Seen closer at hand, the application of steam power to any given field was a messy process overflowing with false starts and repeated, redundant discoveries. The most baffling aspect of inventing a steamboat, it turned out, did not involve the engine, fuel, boiler or hull. Instead it came down to the propelling mechanism, the essential driving link between the steam engine and the water. The challenge of how to contrive a harnessing device that would let an engine power a boat forward, even against winds and tides, had no obvious, inevitable solution. Many lone tinkerers in Europe and America tried to solve the puzzle and subsided in defeat. One such inventor worked out key practical breakthroughs and even built and ran an influential steamboat; but he was overwhelmed by unrelated forces beyond his ken, became discouraged, and died broke and unappreciated. Another pioneer took the work of this inventor and others without giving credit, later lied about it, and finally perjured and embarrassed himself; but he also thereby acquired great fame and fortune, and to this day retains a thumping historical reputation as the true father of steam navigation. The story has its ironies.

The steam engine and steamboat both emerged from a visible chain of invention: a series of innovators, aware of earlier work in the field and consciously building on it, adding and subtracting and thus moving the whole process forward by small increments until the machine ran right. The final, laborious success when ultimately achieved was descended from many parents, leading to bitter quarrels and lawsuits over who should get the credit and rewards.

For thousands of years, unconnected individuals had puzzled over how to control and use the power of steam. Nothing important happened until Thomas Newcomen started a chain of invention in 1712. An ironmonger in southwestern England, Newcomen made tools for the tin miners of Cornwall. As mines were dug deeper, they were flooded with groundwater, overwhelming any manual or horse-driven pumps. Newcomen invented a steam-powered mine drainer: a large horizontal beam, pivoting at the middle, linked to a water pump at one end and a vertical piston and cylinder at the other. Steam entered the cylinder at the bottom and drove the piston upward; at the top of the stroke, cold water sprayed into the cylinder below the piston condensed the vapour back into liquid form, creating a partial vacuum which pulled the piston back down to repeat the cycle. The engine worked – but was bulky, expensive, and inefficient. ‘It takes an iron mine to build a Newcomen engine,’ the saying went, ‘and a coal mine to keep it going.’

Skip ahead to a classic moment in the history of modernity. In the winter of 1763-64, a Scottish instrument maker at Glasgow University was asked to repair a model of a Newcomen engine. James Watt, then twenty-eight years old, mended the model and started pondering the general problem of steam power, especially the obvious waste and inefficiency of the Newcomen design. He tried making the boiler surface larger, and placing the fire in the middle of the water supply, and even using wooden pipes and boilers (because they would conduct and lose less heat than metal components). One Sunday early in 1765, while walking across Glasgow green, Watt finally got it: create a separate condenser so the cylinder could remain at essentially the same temperature throughout the cycle, saving time and fuel because no steam would be lost to condensation from entering a cold cylinder. ‘I can think of nothing else but this machine,’ Watt informed a friend. ‘Write me…if any part of what you have to tell me concerns the fire-engine.’

For the next crucial step, moving from inspiration to application, Watt needed help. Beset all his life by poor health and severe headaches, timid by nature and easily discouraged, Watt dealt uncertainly with the world outside his workshop. ‘Jamie is a queer lad,’ noted the wife of an associate. Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham manufacturer, offered to become ‘a midwife to ease you of your burthen’, as he put it to Watt, ‘and to introduce your brat into the world.’ Boulton had more experience than Watt in the metal industry, ready access to money, and many useful contacts. Watt joined Boulton as partners in Birmingham. With a patent obtained in 1769, and later extended, they essentially controlled steamengine technology for the next three decades. Watt and Boulton formed the first and most important of the many talent-meshing teams of engineer and entrepreneur that later propelled the Industrial Revolution.

With Boulton in the background, prodding and executing, Watt made further improvements, notably a double-acting cylinder whereby steam alternately drove the piston in both directions, yielding two power strokes in each cycle. He also devised linkages and gearings to convert the piston’s in-and-out reciprocating action to a rotary motion that could power the machinery of mills and factories. ‘The people in London, Manchester, and Birmingham, are Steam Mill Mad,’ Boulton advised Watt, ‘and therefore let us be wise and take the advantage.’

Amid his great success, Watt never stopped fretting about competitors and potential patent infringers. To protect himself and his inventions from the onrushing progress of modernity, he grew defensive and started resisting improvements. He quashed innovations in his own shop (especially efforts to raise boiler pressures and efficiencies beyond a modest four pounds per square inch), refused to license others to use his refinements, and hounded anybody else who dared to build a steam engine. The exploding genie of constant, rapid technological change – which his steam engine had midwifed – finally turned and overwhelmed him. ‘I do not think that we are safe a day to an end in this enterprizing age,’ he warned Boulton in 1782. ‘One’s thoughts seem to be stolen before one speaks them.…It is with the utmost difficulty I can hatch anything new.’ Beset by this immobilizing difficulty, losing his fragile nerve, he stopped trying. But his engine and its revolutionary impacts steamed ahead, gathering speed.

From the 1780s on, various lone inventors in France, Great Britain and the United States tried to create a steamboat. For the propelling device, some of these pioneers used an application of the familiar waterpower wheel, which converted a stream of water into rotary motion to run a mill or factory: instead of water moving the wheel, the process was reversed so the engine-driven paddle wheel moved the surrounding water and thus the boat. But a paddle wheel was only one of several unsatisfactory early alternatives. Other propelling mechanisms given trials included a set of vertical oars that imitated manual rowing action (by the American John Fitch, in 1786), a jet of water forcefully expelled at the stern (by another American, James Rumsey, in 1787), and palmipedes, or duck-footed paddles (by the Earl of Stanhope, in London in 1790). None of these early attempts worked very well or led to any ongoing commercial success. Their inventors tinkered in general isolation from each other, without knowing about or profiting from what their predecessors had done. Steamboats as yet lacked a chain of invention.

William Symington started such a chain through his own inventions and by their later impact on others. He was another Scotsman, born in 1764 in Lanarkshire, south of Glasgow. Educated for the ministry, he was instead caught up in the inventive currents then starting to swirl around southern Scotland. ‘My natural turn for mechanical philosophy led me to change my object,’ he recalled, ‘and to direct my studies to the exercise of the profession of a civil engineer.’ He made some improvements in the steam engine – earning the suspicion of James Watt – and crafted a model of a steam carriage for road travel. This model brought him to the attention of Patrick Miller, a retired Edinburgh banker who had devised a manually powered paddleboat.

In 1788 Miller hired Symington to build and install a steam engine in this vessel. Symington used his own design, an engine with two cylinders of four-inch diameter and eighteen-inch stroke. A second version with a larger engine had a successful trial a year later, carrying seven passengers at five miles an hour. But this success drew potential legal action by the ever-vigilant Watt for alleged patent infringement. After Miller lost interest in the experiments and withdrew his financial support, Symington dropped his steamboat efforts for a decade and made a living by building mining machinery.

The expiration of Watt’s patent in 1800 released a flood of pent-up inventive energy. Thomas, Lord Dundas of Kerse, a large shareholder in the Forth and Clyde Canal, remembered Symington’s experiments of the late 1780s. The canal, completed in 1790, stretched thirty-five miles from the River Forth near Edinburgh to the River Clyde near Glasgow, providing a water link across Scotland between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. The canal’s average width of about fifty-six feet left little room for a sailing vessel to tack back and forth, so most of the barge traffic was drawn by horses along a tow path. Lord Dundas provided Symington initial seed money for a canal steamer.

In June 1801, Symington’s first new prototype ran successfully for two or three miles on the River Carron to Grangemouth. ‘The nice and effectual manner in which the machinery is applied,’ a Glasgow newspaper commented, ‘is an additional proof of the merit of Mr Symington, the engineer, and the whole plan is highly honourable to Lord Dundas.’ That autumn Symington patented his novel arrangement of a connecting rod and crank between the engine and paddle wheel shaft.

A second prototype, larger and more powerful, was named the Charlotte Dundas after the sponsor’s wife and daughter, who shared the name. The vessel was a broad-beamed towboat, fifty-six feet long by eighteen feet wide, powered by a one-cylinder engine driving a paddle wheel in a recess at the stern. The engine was built at a local foundry, the Carron Works, with a piston twenty-two inches in diameter and a four-foot stroke: an enormous increase over Symington’s first steamboat engine of 1788. His solution to the besetting early problem of paddle wheels – the dilemma that drove other pioneers to water jets and palmipedes – was to elevate the wheel quite high above the water. When a wheel was submerged to its midpoint, half in and half out of the water, much of its driving motion was wasted. A paddle entered the water in a horizontal position, slapping downward, and did no useful propelling work until it had run through almost forty-five degrees of its rotation. Only at the bottom of the cycle was it actually propelling the boat forward. On the back stroke, the process was reversed, as for the final forty-five degrees the paddle pushed largely upward until it cleared the surface. About half its energy simply thrashed the water up and down to no purpose. To avoid this waste, Symington placed the eight-bladed wheel of the Charlotte Dundas so high in the hull that only three of the paddles reached the water at once, at the bottom of the cycle, all of them working together to move the boat forward.

As Symington later told the story, in March 1802 the Charlotte Dundas took on board Lord Dundas, his son Captain George H. L. Dundas of the Royal Navy, and others, and towed two loaded vessels of seventy tons each a distance of nineteen and a half miles along the canal in six hours, against a strong head wind. ‘This experiment not only satisfied me, but every person who witnessed it, of the utility of steam navigation, ’ Symington later wrote. But the canal proprietors worried that the steamboat’s agitation and wake would harm the banks of the canal, and so rejected the plan. Lord Dundas then arranged for Symington to meet the Duke of Bridgewater, the leading canal entrepreneur in England. The duke at once ordered eight of Symington’s vessels – but he soon died, cancelling the deal. This double rejection after apparent successes left Symington too disheartened to persist. ‘This so affected me,’ he recalled, ‘that probably I did not use the energy I otherwise might have done to introduce my invention to public notice.’

This version of events has become the standard historical account, but it is wrong in certain particulars. Drawing from memory some twenty-five years later, Symington compressed two separate trials into a single event. On 4 January 1803, the Charlotte Dundas, with the two Dundases and others on board, towed a 100-ton boat from Stockingfield to Port Dundas at three miles an hour ‘amidst a very large concourse of people’, according to a newspaper report, ‘who were exceedingly well pleased with the performance.’ On 28 March 1803, the steamboat also towed two loaded vessels, a combined 130 tons, from Lock 20 on the canal to Port Dundas, eighteen and a half miles in nine hours and fifteen minutes – a speed about 40 per cent slower than Symington later remembered. For this trial he had incorporated suggestions by Captain George Dundas for how to manage the tow lines around sharp bends in the canal. The Glasgow Herald and Advertiser praised ‘the very appropriate mode in which the machinery is constructed, and the simple yet effectual manner its power is applied in giving motion to the vessel’. The newspaper also credited Lord Dundas for his generous financial support and perseverance in the ‘costly experiments’.

A few days later, the Herald and Advertiser published a testy letter from a Forth and Clyde Canal proprietor which fleshes out Symington’s later explanation of why his steamboat was banned from the canal. The letter writer pointed out that a vessel passing through one of the canal’s thirty-nine locks used a lockful of water, so a towboat plus barge consumed twice as much water (and the canal had recently been closed by low water); that the Charlotte Dundas, contrary to another report, would save no money over tow horses given her initial expense, the cost of coal, her crew, and general wear and tear; and that Symington’s earlier steamboat of 1801 could not run with any ice in the canal, and this problem had perhaps not yet been solved. After all these objections, the proprietor added, ‘It will be observed too, that the motion of the boat raises such an agitation in the water, as to injure the banks.’ In conclusion – and this probably clinched the matter – the writer regretted that Lord Dundas had been given all the public credit for funding Symington’s efforts. ‘It should have been added, that the Proprietors of the Forth and Clyde Navigation have already paid about £1700. for these experiments of this ingenious mechanic, without reaping any benefit from them, and without even getting any credit for their liberality.’

Given this bristling mixture of unmet criticisms and wounded, unappreciated generosity, and (one may assume) competitive resistance by the local owners of horses and stables, it is not surprising that Symington got no farther with the canal proprietors. Hoping for other wisps of interest in the Charlotte Dundas from somebody else, he laid her up near the canal at Bainsford. There she lingered on for almost sixty years, rotting and rusting away, a waning curiosity of the early steam age. Like James Watt, Symington was a gifted inventor saddled with a fainthearted personality, too easily deflected from his purposes. His singular misfortune was that – unlike Watt – he never found his Matthew Boulton.

Robert Fulton, the American painter and inventor, knew all the precedents in steam navigation. During twenty years spent abroad, in England and France, he studied the efforts of other steamboat pioneers and tried out his own improvements. In contrast with most of the other innovators, he was blessed with an overpowering confidence and persistence which, along with good looks and a gift for friendship, brought him the continuing support of rich, powerful patrons. Ultimately he returned to America to build and run the first commercially successful steamboat. Today most Americans consider him the principal originator of steam power on water. The process by which he achieved this reputation – and thus the reputation itself – demands a renewed examination.

For most of his two decades abroad, Fulton was preoccupied with other inventions than a steamboat. Living in France from 1797 to 1804, he devoted himself to an elaborate, quixotic, finally unworkable scheme for submarines and explosive mines, intended to revolutionize naval warfare. His intermittent interest in steamboats was revived when Robert R. Livingston arrived in Paris late in 1801 as the US minister to France. A man of enormous wealth and political influence in New York, Livingston hoped to develop a steamboat service for the Hudson River back home. Fulton had found his final, most significant patron.

During the summer of 1802, Fulton conducted a series of trials with a model boat powered by a clock spring. After considering all the propelling devices used by his predecessors, he settled on an endless chain with paddles or buckets attached to it. Resembling the tread of a modern tank or bulldozer, the chain was draped over two wheels across the side of the model, dipping into and seizing the water at the bottom of its cycle. Livingston, drawing from his own previous sallies at steamboat invention, preferred paddle wheels; but after Fulton reported on his trials with the model, arguing his case quite vehemently, Livingston was converted to the endless chain. In October 1802 the two men signed an agreement to build a large steamboat in New York, designed for the Hudson River traffic to Albany.

Now came a surprising, puzzling twist in the story. At some point that autumn, after insisting so aggressively on the superiority of his endless chain, Fulton decided to adopt paddle wheels as his propelling device. His biographers have guessed that Fulton switched to avoid infringing a French patent, granted earlier that year to an inventor named Desblancs, for a similar steamboat with an endless chain. But Fulton had learned of this patent in June, and as late as September he was nonetheless still urging his own version of an endless chain. Something else must have persuaded him to change this crucial aspect of his design.

A possible explanation was later provided by William Symington. As he told the story in the 1820s, Fulton had come to Scotland to see one of Symington’s vessels, explaining that he intended to return to America to build a steamboat, and that his project could lead to a rewarding business for Symington as the inventor. Flattered and intrigued, Symington ordered steam up in his paddle wheeler and took Fulton and others for a ride. From Lock 18 on the Forth and Clyde Canal, they went four miles west and back in one hour and twenty minutes, at an average speed of six miles an hour – ‘to the great astonishment of Mr. Fulton and the other gentlemen present’, according to Symington. Fulton asked questions, took notes, and made sketches of the steamboat. After this single encounter, Symington recalled, he never saw or heard from Fulton again.

The dating of Fulton’s visit presents problems. Symington placed it in July 1801 or July 1802. In 1801, however, France and England were at war, severely limiting travel between the two countries. Fulton would have had great difficulty in making his way from France to Scotland; at the time he was also still quite focused on his submarine and mines, to the exclusion of other interests. The Peace of Amiens in March 1802 allowed a brief lull in hostilities, easing travel restrictions. By then Fulton, with Livingston’s beckoning patronage, had turned his attention nearly full-time to inventing a steamboat. He spent the summer of 1802 at a resort in the Vosges Mountains of northeast France, too far from the English Channel for a convenient trip to Scotland. That autumn he was back in Paris, intent on his steamboat. The most probable date of Fulton’s encounter with Symington is thus the autumn of 1802, when the Charlotte Dundas was almost ready for her first major trial of January 1803. The journey from Paris took three days to London, then about sixty hours by mail coach to Glasgow. He could have made the round-trip in two weeks.

With travel again flowing between France and England, Paris was full of British tourists from whom Fulton or the widely acquainted Livingston might have heard about Symington’s boat. A trip to England was clearly on Fulton’s mind that autumn. His friend Joel Barlow, also interested in promoting a joint steamboat scheme, had recently urged Fulton to go to England ‘silent and steady… quiet and quick’ to obtain a steam engine. His formal agreement with Livingston in October also bound Fulton to go ‘immediately’ to England for the same purpose. Fulton left no surviving record of such a trip at that time. But he could have gone secretly – silent and steady, quiet and quick – on steamboat business, especially to examine the Charlotte Dundas, the most promising such experiment in the world at that time. In late September, he was conspicuously absent from a dinner party given in Paris by the painter Benjamin West. Fulton was a close friend to West, his main mentor in painting. Joel Barlow and his wife, with whom Fulton lived in a ménage à trois, did attend the dinner. If Fulton had been in Paris, he surely would have joined the party. Perhaps he was then quietly off to Scotland.

This mystery turns on hard questions about Fulton’s character. Could he have made a clandestine trip to Scotland, borrowed from Symington’s work, and later hidden the entire episode? His subsequent history of lies and deceit suggests that he might have. In 1806, for example, he claimed in writing that he had held an American steamboat patent for fourteen years, and that some $280,000 had been subscribed to build twenty of his vessels for service on the Mississippi River – none of which was even remotely true. Later, when embroiled in patent controversies, he forged a ‘copy’ of a drawing he had supposedly made in June 1802 of a Hudson River steamboat with paddle wheels, at a time when he was actually still committed to an endless chain for propulsion. He also forged a letter, which he dated to 1793, about his supposed interest in paddle wheels at that time. In 1815, shortly before his death, he was caught committing perjury with this letter. All these manipulations were intentional, self-serving lies on Fulton’s part.

Symington’s later recollections, by contrast, erred in some details, but the essence of his account of the Charlotte Dundas is verifiably true. His version of the Fulton story was also corroborated by Symington’s engine man, Robert Weir. In 1824, after the matter had become controversial, Weir signed a sworn affidavit that he had fired up the boiler of the Charlotte Dundas on the occasion of Fulton’s visit and had heard Fulton identify himself by name and nationality. After their brisk eight-mile demonstration, according to Weir, Symington had lamented the difficulty of running his steamboat through the narrow Forth and Clyde Canal, and Fulton had replied that the broad rivers of America would present no such problem. The details and certainty of Weir’s affidavit seem authentic.

Fulton’s own explanation of how he converted to paddle wheels, later given under duress, must be weighed carefully. In 1811 he asked Joel Barlow to endorse his version of certain events for a potential patent lawsuit. ‘I want your deposition as follows,’ he instructed: that in the autumn of 1802, while living at Barlow’s home in Paris, he had conducted experiments with various propelling devices, which by Christmastime had convinced him to adopt paddle wheels. ‘You will have this copied on foolscap,’ Fulton told Barlow, ‘and sware to it.’ Barlow apparently complied. It was at about this time that Fulton also forged other documents to bolster his claims of steamboat originality.