Of all the human fears that propel us in these industrial revolutions, few are more forceful than the fear of being left behind. It's perhaps that fear that led to the construction of the first steamboat. Well, it's certainly that fear that led to its destruction. In 1705, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a philosopher and mathematician from Hanover, sent a letter to our old friend, Dani Papan, the guy who introduced his distance to steam power.
By this point, Papina left England and was teaching at the University of Marburg in Germany. In his letter, Leibniz included a sketch of the steam engine, patented and built by Pupina's bitter rival, Thomas Savry. The Savry steam engine had not yet been adapted for widespread use due to the deficiencies still to be corrected by Thomas Newcomen. But Savry, the man who had previously disparaged Pupina's work and blocked Royal Society patronage of his experiments, was now in a position for profit and prestige when it came to the development of steam technology.
And no doubt, it drove Pupina crazy. So over the next two years, his attention swung back toward steam power. In 1707, he published a new book, The New Art of Pumping Water by Using Steam, and he sent letters with sketches back to Leibniz with improvements to the Savry engine and a number of applications for the technology. In other things, steam could be used to power new forms of transportation, both on land and on water.
Pupina actually outlined an idea for an automobile, and, critically for our story today, a steamboat. In fact, that same year, he constructed his own small steam engine and boarded it on a small boat. Paddles and water reel would be powered using the steam engine. The plan was to try it out in Marburg, take it north up the river Folder to the river Weser, and from there it would travel to the North Sea, be put on a ship to London, and finally demonstrate it on the river Thames.
Now this is before Germany was the unified country it is today. Everything from territory to territory required permits and licenses from different authorities along the way. But it would be worth it. The steamboat would upstage Savry and lead to Pupins comeback.
But it would also threaten the livelihood of boatmen across the world, the teams of men who rode small boats up and down rivers for water-based trade. And when German boatmen on the river Weser saw the steamboat, they put an end to Pupins comeback. They seized the vessel and floated it to the shore where they dismantled it and smashed its components into pieces. Pupin arrived in London later that year without his steamboat.
With his friends either passed away by this point or having abandoned him, Pupins struggled to get funding for further research. In 1712, the same year Newcoman finished his steam engine, the steam engine that made Savry and his family rich, Pupin died in poverty. But his ideas lived on. Applying steam power to transportation was a concept way ahead of Pupins time.
But before the end of the century, that vision would be made into reality. And much like with Pupin and Savry, the story of the steamboat was filled with the rivalries of competitive inventors, all vying to be the first to build a steamboat that would earn them a fortune and in the process, change the world. This is the Industrial Revolutions. And after 12, the steamboat.
Throughout the 18th century, the idea of the steamboat continued, mostly in the back of people's minds. Thomas Newcoman had expressed some interest in building one. A physician named John Allen actually received a patent for his steamboat concept, as did one Jonathan Hulls a few years later, when he designed a tow boat that would use a new come engine. But for the most part, it wasn't a practical concept yet.
The new come engine wasn't particularly efficient, and steamboats would only really work on large rivers. But between Canalmania and the Watt steam engine, the limitations the steamboat faced were about to be lifted. In 1760, an American named William Henry made a trip to England. He had served in the French-Indian War, which had pretty much wrapped up by 1759 when the British conquered Quebec.
During his trip to England, Henry experienced a mechanical turn of mind when he learned about James Watt's super-recent developments in steam technology. Almost immediately, Henry recognized the potential for a steam-powered water vessel, and he got to work when he arrived back home in Pennsylvania. By 1763, he had built his own steam engine and attached it to a boat with paddles. He experimented with the boat on the Conestoga River.
But the pounding action of the engine was too much for the weak structure of the boat and its sank. He tried again with an improved model, but it too failed to meet expectations. But Henry had left a legacy that would be picked up by the next generation of Americans. And the 1770s through the 1790s would see a mad rush of overlapping and competing inventors trying to create a successful and profitable steamboat model on both sides of the Atlantic.
Let's begin in France. Beginning in the early 18th century, the new come in the steam engine slowly spread across France. In the 1970s, several individuals, sometimes working together and sometimes working against each other, were trying to apply that technology to water vessels. In 1771, two retired Army artillery officers submitted plans to the French government to build a steam-powered vessel.
Once the plan was approved, they formed a company and built a small boat on the Isle of the Swans in Paris in 1774. The project would be overseen by a Paris industrialist named Jacques Perrier. Jacques Perrier and his brother, Auguste, had a shop in Paris where, among other things, they built and sold new come in steam engines. They were also instrumental in the Paris water pumping scheme that used pipes purchased from John Ironman Wilkinson.
Now at some point in the next couple of months, I'm going to be going into greater details about the first industrial revolution in France. And the name Perrier is going to come up again. But whether these Perriers were related to those Perriers, I'm not quite sure yet. Hopefully I'll be able to tell you by then.
Anyway, fitted with a twin-cylinder atmospheric steam engine from England, the vessel was brought to Medu, but during the night it sank, possibly due to an attack similar to the one on Poppinsboat in Germany. In the midst of this failure, Perrier and the retired officers had a falling out, and Perrier decided to build his own steamboat. Now not a whole lot is known about this one, but it sailed a trial run on the sand in 1775, which resulted in disappointment. Perrier was convinced that the steamboat wouldn't require the power of more than one horse, after all it only took a single horse to pull a barge.
When it failed, he offered a hand over the project to a young aristocrat he knew. The Marquis de Joffrey de Bons. Born in 1751, Joffrey de Bons had served as a page to the Dauphine as a teenager, as he attended school in the Royal Court and prepared for a military career. From an early age, he had shown a strong aptitude for mathematics and mechanical sciences, and he even spent some time in the Perrier brother's shop.
But early in his military service, he got into an argument with a superior officer, and engaged him in a duel, and for that he was thrown in prison. Apparently, while in prison, Joffrey de Bons spent his time studying science, and he thought a lot about how steam power could be applied to navigation. So when he got out, with no military career paths still available to him, he returned to his estate and put his mind to building a steamboat. But when he received the offer from Perrier, he declined.
For one thing, he and Perrier had already been down this road with each other. The Joffrey de Bons had tried explaining to him that one horse pulling a barge on land was different than the propulsion horse power needed for a boat in the water. He estimated the steamboat would need the power of roughly three horses. So Joffrey de Bons decided to build his own steamboat.
He didn't have the money himself and his dad cut him off after the dueling shenanigans, so he went to his sister who agreed to fund the endeavor. With the assistance of a local blacksmith, he built an atmospheric engine which he installed on a 40-foot boat with a six-foot beam on the river Duh. Only moderately successful, Joffrey de Bons decided to try again, at this time picking up where the Perrier brothers and army officers had left off. In Leon, he reformed the original company and built a new 148-foot-long vessel with a 15-foot beam and two large paddlewheels powered by two new common-style steam engines.
They called it the Pirisketh. In July 1783, the Pirisketh made its first run on the river San. A crowd of 10,000 onlookers watched as it sailed up and down the river spewing out black smoke. They had some trouble working it and the engine failed after about 15 minutes, but apparently it was a pretty easy fix and the boat continued the trial to their satisfaction.
More improvements would come in a 1784 version, and things were starting to look up for Joffrey de Bons. But then came some roadblocks. First, the Academy of Sciences, and that's like the French counterpart to England's Royal Society, though they were hostile to his claims of success. He wasn't a member of the society, whereas his rival, Pirrier, was.
Without their recognition, he had no intellectual property rights to the Pirisketh, since France didn't yet have a patent system like the one in Great Britain. Then came the French Revolution, which took a violent turn on aristocrats like Shoffrey de Bons, and he was forced to flee the country. By the time he was able to return in the post-Napoleonic era, his technology was way behind his competitors in the United States and the United Kingdom. He built a new one in 1816, but it wasn't especially successful.
He died broke in 1832 of cholera. Next, let's head north to Great Britain. It was on the fourth and Clyde Canal across Scotland, which you may remember linked to Glasgow to Edinburgh, where a young man inspired by James Watt would test run Great Britain's first ever steamboat. William Symington was born in the Scottish lowlands in 1764.
His father, a mechanic in the nearby mines, saw his sons' intelligence and pushed him to pursue a career in the clergy. That was, after all, a good way to advance in the social hierarchy at the time. He briefly studied ministry, but he was fixated on mechanics. At just 19 years old, Symington conceptualized a steam-powered land carriage, basically a primitive automobile, and he spent the next few years building a working model with his brother.
He demonstrated it to professors at the University of Edinburgh and other scientific mines in the city, including a banker, Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, who had invested considerable time and money into mechanical boats. Symington had been encouraged to demonstrate the model by a guy named Gilbert Miesen, the manager and co-proprietor of the mines where his father worked. Miesen strongly recommended to the faculty they not lose sight of such a promising genius as Symington. I mean, it's the 1780s and this kid just built a car.
And so, he was accepted there to study mechanics in 1786. And it was during this time Symington communicated with Miller about his boats and recommended the addition of a steam engine to move the paddlewheels. Miller offered to hire him as soon as the studies were completed so they could start building such a vessel. And so, in 1788, Symington began working on a small steamboat for Miller, a twin-hulled pleasure boat that cruised on Lockdell Swinton to Miller's satisfaction.
Next, Miller pushed Symington to go bigger by putting a steam engine on a huge 60-foot boat and making it go faster. The project was completed the next year. They took it out for a test run on the Fourth and Clyde Canal where it moved at the impressive speed of 6 miles per hour. The crowd assembled to watch the demonstration broke into cheers.
But the costs of building the vessel outpaced Miller's ability, or possibly his interest, to invest further. Symington couldn't convince him to pony up the cash. And so, Symington's steamboats lay dormant for the next decade. Instead, he picked up work in the mining industry and he took steps to open his own mine.
And as the watched steam engine patent was set to expire, Symington modified and improved the design, inventing a new horizontal steam engine for which he eventually received a patent, although it would be several decades before the value of that invention was appreciated. Then one day in 1800, while examining a coal field, he heard someone calling for him. When he looked around, he thought it was coming from a passing carriage. He approached the carriage and saw it in the window the Lord Dundas, governor of the Fourth and Clyde Canal.
Dundas informed Symington that he had come up from London to see him. Years earlier, before he was elevated to his bare-edge, Dundas had been in the crowd that saw the impressive test run on the canal. And now, he was interested in getting more steamboats on the canal to replace the barges spoke by horses. And with that, Symington went home and he got to work, picking up where he left off with Miller.
Getting a local ironworks to build a steam engine using his horizontal engine design, Symington sketched out a boat, 56 feet long and 18 feet wide with a wooden hull. The engine would connect to a crank to drive a large paddle wheel in the center of the hull to avoid damage on the banks of the canal. To secure Dundas' approval, Symington named the vessel after his daughter, the Charlotte Dundas. Dundas was impressed, so much so that he introduced Symington to our old friend, the Duke of Bridgewater, who was also quite impressed and commissioned eight steamboats for his own canal.
Now, designing the boat was one thing, building it and making it work was quite another. From the beginning, Symington was plagued by problems, components of the vessel were constantly coming in over budget, giving the cranks to work properly was difficult, and bureaucratic busy bodies were constantly voicing their concerns about Symington to Dundas. And timing was becoming a concern. By 1802, the project still wasn't done.
The canal committee overseeing the project convinced Dundas to bring in a contractor by the name of John Allen to finish construction. Note, this is not the John Allen I mentioned earlier in this episode. The team finally unveiled the vessel in January 1803. With Lord Dundas and a few of his friends and relatives on board, they sailed at about 40 or 50 miles up the canal.
Symington continued to tinker, and another test run was held in March, where it actually towed a couple of barges about 20 miles on the canal. Things were looking up for Symington, but then seemingly out of nowhere the project was killed. With Dundas objecting, the proprietors of the canal voted to ban steamboats on it, fearing that they would injure the banks of the canal. And then the Duke of Bridgewater died, and without an air, nobody was left to pay Symington to construct those boats for his canal either.
The Charlotte Dundas, meanwhile, was converted to an unpowered dredger before being left to rot. In 1856, a photograph of the vessel's remains showed it to be little more than a skeleton of a steamboat. Symington had invested thousands of pounds of his own money to build steamboats for Great Britain's canals, all for nothing. It took him years, mostly spent in coal mine management, to recoup his losses.
He tried getting back into the game around 1816 with a few new steamboat designs, but by this point it was too late. He spent most of his time in litigation, suing others for infringing on his 1801 horizontal steam engine patent. One of those lawsuits was against a guy named Henry Bell, a fellow Scott who had gone through all kinds of trade apprentice ships in his career. Among other things he had learned milling, stone masonry, carpentry, and shipbuilding, and those pursuits made him travel all over southern Scotland.
It was in 1808 while he was living in a small town on the first of Clyde and running in that he started working on a steamboat, the P.S. Comet. By 1812 he was taking passengers up and down the Clyde, before it shipwrecked in 1820. He quickly built Comet 2, which sailed passengers around the islands of western Scotland before it too sank in 1825, killing 62 of the 80 passengers on board.
As you know quite well by this point in the podcast, Great Britain has been the focal point of the first industrial revolution. Mills, factories, farms, mines, ironworks, and canals all transformed the world, and the process started with the British. But the first examples of powered transportation, the steamboats, were perfected by their cousins across the pond. For the same reason why the United States had a keen interest in building canals, it also had a keen interest in building steamboats.
It was a huge country that was primarily agricultural, and needed to move a lot of agricultural products, especially tobacco and cotton, out of the interior of the country to ship to Marcus in Europe. So it shouldn't be too surprising that William Henry was far from the last American to dabble in building steamboats. A frequent visitor to Henry's home was a guy by the name of John Fish. A Connecticut native, he served in the American Revolution and, after the war, surveyed land along the Ohio River.
And while working on the Ohio, he decided to pick up where Henry had left off and build his own steamboats. Receiving exclusive rights from the new states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York, and backed by Philadelphia investors, he built a 45-foot vessel and tested it on the Delaware River in 1787, demonstrating it for a group of delegates to the National Constitutional Convention. Now, this was some good foresight on his part, because that convention was going to create a more centralized and federal system of government for the new nation. You see, after the war, but before the Constitution, the United States was operating on a document known as the Articles of Confederation, which gave the national government virtually zero authority whatsoever, including the authority to grant patents.
And while Fish had exclusive rights in some states, he was running head-to-head with another American steamboat builder, a Virginian by the name of James Rumsy. Not much is known about Rumsy's early life, but we know that in 1784 he was running in Virginia, and that General George Washington stayed there. During Washington's visit, Rumsy showed him a working model of a mechanical boat he built. Washington helped him secure a patent for the boat in Virginia, and he appointed him superintendent of the Potomac River Project, which would help make the Potomac navigable, eventually the steamboats.
After some trial and error improving his mechanical boats, Rumsy decided to connect a hydraulic pump piston directly to the piston of a new coming engine. The pump took in water from the keel and ejected it at the stern of the boat, creating jet propulsion. Now, this was in 1787, the same year as the Constitutional Convention, and the same year as the Fish Trial. But with the new federal government having a new patent law, an inevitable patent fight broke out between the two.
Rumsy argued that his 1784 mechanical boat patent in Virginia applied to his new models that used steam engines. Fish, meanwhile, made the rather bold and untrue claim that he invented the Water Tube Royaler, a key component in the steam engines. The new patent law for the new federal government was so vague that trying to assess who actually merited the steamboat patents took a while, and even today it's not clear who should have actually prevailed. Rumsy took his claims to the press, publishing pamphlets heralding him as the steamboat inventor, and Fish quickly published a rebuttal, and it seems the war took a toll on both men.
Rumsy died in 1792, purportedly of overstraining his brain, whatever that means, and Fish died six years later. Having failed to build a financially successful steamboat, he became severely addicted to alcohol and opioids, on which he overdosed. And in the wake of their patent war, another American would pick up, where they left off with their innovations. Robert Fulton was born in 1765, in the township of Little Britain in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, on the Maryland border.
It has since been renamed Fulton Township. His parents owned a small fledgling farm, which they sold when he was just a year old. Relocating to nearby Lancaster, his father died two years later, leaving him to be raised by his mother. As a child, Fulton attended a small Quaker school.
His teachers considered him a dunce, with little appreciation for books. But he was probably one of those kids, much like Albert Einstein, whose mind was understimulated in school. He preferred to spend his time drawing, and he showed most interest in learning about new machines from the various tradesmen in Lancaster. As the American Revolution raged throughout his teenage years, Fulton settled on a profession.
He wanted to become an artist and portrait painter. So at the age of 17, as the war was wrapping up, he moved to the de facto National Capital City in Philadelphia, where he spent the next six years painting. Then, he began corresponding with a friend of his late father in London, Benjamin West, the father of American art. West not only painted great masterpieces of British and North American history, but he also trained several pupils in the profession.
Somehow, West managed to maintain friendships with the likes of both Benjamin Franklin and King George III throughout the war. And with contacts in the United States, Great Britain, and France, West no doubt helped arrange for Fulton's travels to Europe beginning in late 1786. Fulton started in London, where West took him under his wing, before traveling to the country, painting landscape portraits. But he soon got swept up in Canal, mania, making proposals for new canals and coming up with ideas like a canal digging machine and double inclined planes to replace canalocks.
He eventually moved to Manchester, where he made several new friends, including a 23-year-old up-and-comer who recently became the managing partner of a local textile mill. His name was Robert Owen. Don't worry, we're going to spend an entire episode on Owen down the road. One of the patrons Fulton attracted while in Lancashire was the Duke of Bridgewater.
Apparently, Fulton had some knack for mechanical engineering. He got to thinking, how can we speed up trade on these canals? And soon, the Duke hired him to build a steam-powered propeller boat. Now, that particular scheme was sort of laughable.
Fulton failed at the task pretty miserably. But it set him down a new path. To learn how to build a steamboat, Fulton had to meet none other than James Watt, who showed him how the steam engine worked. Fulton studied it enthusiastically.
During this time, Fulton became one of the pro canal pamphlet writers I told you about in Chapter 11. And in 1797, he decided to travel to the continent and bring canal mania to France. For the next seven years, Fulton lived in Paris where he studied engineering, chemistry, and mathematics, as well as the French and German languages. He met James Rumsy there, and he raised money for experiments in steam navigation by painting the first panorama ever exhibited in Paris, as well as illustrations to accompany a poem by his friend, and possibly lover, Joel Barlow.
Fulton also spent his time designing and inventing. Among other things, he came up with improvements for canals and aqueducts, boats, guns, torpedoes, and one of the world's first practical submarines, the Nautilus. While none of these things actually made him money, they all helped raise his public profile. Also while in Paris, he met the American minister to France, Robert R.
Livingston, one of the five drafters of the Declaration of Independence. One of the key things Livingston did in his role in France was negotiate the Louisiana Purchase, effectively doubling the size of American health territory and giving the United States the entire Mississippi River Basin. Now no doubt Livingston understood just how important steamboats were going to be to the expanded United States, and he was already connected with some failed steamboat experiments back in his home state of New York. Fulton and Livingston agreed to build a new one there in Paris, which they would test run on the sand in the spring of 1803, just as the Louisiana Purchase was finalized.
The morning the boat was scheduled to sail, a messenger rushed into Fulton's chamber, pale and out of breath, to wake up the American. Oh, sir, the boat had broken in pieces and gone to the bottom, he cried. Fulton frantically got dressed, and he hurried to the spot where it sank. Over the next 24 hours, they fished it out of the sand.
The weight of the machinery had broken the boat in half. The machinery was slightly damaged, but surprisingly, the boat was still salvageable. They rebuilt it, and in August that same year, they sailed the boat out on the sand to a huge crowd of Parisian onlookers. Now, while their boat was far from perfect, it was the most successful trial run of steamboats in French history.
Fulton and Livingston agreed it was time to bring the steamboat revolution in earnest to America, and so in 1806, Robert Fulton headed back to the United States. He set up shop in New York and purchased the steam engine from Bolton and Watt. He had to pull a few diplomatic strings with his English friends for the government to allow Bolton and Watt to export it. Seeing as he had just left him polyonic France, you'd imagine that would have been rather tricky.
Watson helped that, while in France, Fulton secretly worked as a military contractor to the British Navy, for which he designed a torpedo, sending his plan to Admiral Horatio Nelson just weeks before the Battle of Trafalgar. Working out of an east-river shipyard with his Watt steam engine in hand, Fulton built the Claremont, a 160-ton steamboat. Named after the country seat of his partner Livingston, the Claremont was 130 feet long by 18 feet wide, and it proved the viability of steam power to move large vessels. On Monday, September 10, 1807, with a vast crowd watching on the shores of the Hudson River, Bolton prepared to set sail on the Claremont.
It took a while to inspect to the massive vessel before taking off, and as the crowd got restless, they started making jokes at his expense. Mostly to the tune of, it will never get over one mile per hour, that giant boat. As it got started, the slow pace of the boat's two paddlewheels confirmed the crowd's suspicions. Huge amounts of black smoke and sparks from the furnaces were seen.
Geers and insults were hurled at him from the shore, and Fulton's friends worried about what would become of his reputation. But that was just the boat getting warmed up. The Claremont picked up steam, literally, and the crowd started to go silent as it got up to the remarkable speed of five miles per hour, a rate unthinkable for a vessel back size at that time. Throughout the autumn of 1807, the Claremont sailed up and down the Hudson, going as far north as Albany, shocking onlookers as it went by.
Over the next eight years, Fulton designed more and more steamboats to sail America's rivers, including the New Orleans, which they built in Pittsburgh and took down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River down to the city of New Orleans, kickstarting the long era of steamboating on the Mississippi, and rapidly advancing trade within the American interior. It was a legacy that influenced such quintessentially American figures as Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain. He also designed and built the Demologos, the world's first steam-driven warship. Now it wasn't a super-practical vessel at the time, it included some design flaws, and the American Navy was extremely underfunded in its early days.
They couldn't even afford the guns for the Demologos. Steam-powered warships wouldn't start taking off until the 1830s, when the US Navy introduced the USS Fulton. And so it was the most unlikely of the steamboat builders. The duns turned to painter, turned inventor, who finally succeeded and got rich.
And Fulton was appointed to the Erie Canal Commission in 1811. He served on it until 1815, when he was walking home on the frozen Hudson with his friend, Aides Emmett. The ice broke under Emmett, who fell in, and the 49-year-old Fulton jumped into the rescue him, soaking himself in the icy water. Over the course of the next month, he contracted either pneumonia or tuberculosis, or possibly both, and died that February.
By the 1820s, though, there were hundreds of steamboats transporting goods and people in the US, UK, France, the Netherlands, and Germany. Trade of finished goods, raw materials, coal, machine technology, and more was made possible. Realization spreads across Europe at this point, but also in the new United States. Thanks to Fulton, America grew rapidly with the steamboats, and in the decades to come, steam ships, too.
Sailing the coasts and eventually to other continents, steam-powered vessels overtook the world, cutting down significantly on shipping times and the costs of trade. The process of globalization was taking another great leap forward. Today, thanks to that leap, we regularly consume products from across the world, whether it's Japanese electronics or German cars, or Irish beer. And they're all produced in those beer moths that are so illustrative of, and inseparable from, the industrialized world.
Bectories. Next time on the Industrial Revolutions. I want to make a special shout-out this week to Hannah Johnson-Shorskowski and Travis Carley for their support. Thank you for helping me make the Industrial Revolutions possible.
And thank you to everyone who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign so far. If you still need to make your contribution, remember, this Tuesday is the deadline. After that point, the Kickstarter is no more. The link to donate is in the episode notes for this episode, and on the homepage at industrial revolutionspod.com.
Thank you.