The application of steam power to water travel is often associated with Robert Fulton and his launch of the Clermont on the Hudson River in the early 19th century. In reality, his achievement was the culmination of efforts that began in Europe in the early 18th century and found one of its earliest successful applications by the unheralded American inventor John Fitch in the late 1780s.
John Fitch was born the fifth of sixth children in 1743 in Hartford, Connecticut. He began his education at age four and developed an insatiable appetite for reading books on mathematics, geography, and astronomy. His father was a harsh disciplinarian and forced him to do farm labor, an activity for which he developed a deep aversion, and he ran away to sea at age seventeen. He hated the life of a sailor and subsequently became an apprentice to a clockmaker, although he ended the agreement with his master when he was required to do farm work as part of his responsibilities.
Fitch returned to Connecticut and began his own clock repair business. He married Lucy Roberts in 1766 and took up making buttons from discarded brass kettles. Lucy’s temper tantrums led to quarreling, and Fitch abandoned his family, work, and his home state and resettled in New Jersey. He opened up a clock repair, brass, and silversmith business. Unfortunately, British troops destroyed his shop during the American Revolution. He then helped to provision the colonial army at Valley Forge with beer and tobacco. He also repaired arms for American troops but failed in his bid to gain a permanent commission in the American army. After several failures in business enterprises, Fitch left New Jersey and purchased land in Virginia, becoming a tobacco merchant. Fitch also obtained land warrants and a surveyor’s commission and made two trips to Kentucky to survey land. His second venture occurred in the spring of 1782 during the last sputtering of the American Revolution in the backcountry Delaware Indians loyal to the British captured Fitch and his survey team. Several members of his party were scalped and killed, but he and the others were moved north and turned over to the British army in Detroit. They remained prisoners until exchanged at Christmas of that year. His survey work eventually paid off and resulted in his creation of ‘‘A Map of the Northwest Parts of the United States of America,’’ the first cartographic representation of the new nation drawn, engraved, and printed by the same person. The map returned a significant profit and earned Fitch some notoriety.
Fitch’s surveying travels piqued his interest in developing ways to traverse the rugged American frontier. He was denied petitions to become an official surveyor in Pennsylvania and gain a position in the U. S. Mint, two additional events in a long series of disappointments that would color his life. However, if one takes Fitch at his word, he had a moment of inspiration on Sunday walk in April 1785, similar to James Watt’s ‘‘eureka moment’’ regarding the steam engine. What captured Fitch’s fancy was the movement of a horse-drawn carriage. He pondered what it might entail to remove the horse and propel the carriage by some other means. It is unclear whether or not Fitch had seen the operation of a Watt steam engine but he immediately envisioned such a possibility for transportation, not along inland roads but rather on water using the principle and power of condensed vapor unleashed in the device.
Fitch traveled to Philadelphia, the technical capital of America, in order to gain financial backing. However, his harsh life and earlier disappointments had molded him into a brusque, gruff person who turned off many potential investors, including individual members of the Congress, a Spanish ambassador, and even the American Philosophical Society, which boasted Benjamin Franklin as a member. Fitch remained persistent, and his efforts eventually convinced a handful of investors to put up a modest amount of money for his project. This sum provided Fitch with enough cash to construct his first boat. With the assistance of Henry Voight, a German-born machinist, the initial vessel measured forty-five feet in length and weighed seven tons. The craft moved forward by the motion of six paddles on each side, one set dipping into the water while the other set finished that motion and prepared to dip into the water once again, replicating the efforts of human paddlers. Fitch fashioned his craft after recalling his earlier survey and mapping expeditions when he observed Indians paddling their war canoes in such a manner. Of course, Fitch’s creation employed the power of an eighteen-inch cylinder steam engine and moved at the rate of four miles per hour, a speed that was only one mile an hour slower than Fulton’s more famous New York to Albany sail nearly two decades later. Fitch demonstrated his boat’s capability in Philadelphia on August 22, 1787 in front of a public gathering that included members of the Constitutional Convention. His efforts so impressed the Governor of Pennsylvania that he presented Fitch with a silk flag in honor of the achievement. As was the case with other inventors, Fitch had to fight for his patent rights. He successfully blunted a stiff challenge from James Rumsey of Maryland who had experimented with steam power for river transportation and operated a craft on the Potomac at four miles per hour.
Fitch followed this first successful venture with a larger boat destined for a Delaware River run. He named this vessel the Thornton after his major investor William Thornton. His boat raced upstream against the wind and handily outpaced all competing sailboats and human powered oar craft. By 1790 he operated the Thornton on the Delaware River carrying passengers and freight between Burlington, New Jersey and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a distance of twenty miles. Schedules for the Thornton’s trips soon appeared in the local newspapers such as the Pennsylvania Packet, advertising fees and stops in between at Bristol, Bordentown, and Trenton. The craft carried up to thirty passengers at a speed of nearly eight miles per hour. During its six months of operation, the Thornton traveled some 2,000 miles, transported more than 1,000 persons, and experienced few and minor mechanical or operational problems. New York Magazine raved about the performance of
Fitch’s craft, stating that it outshone sailing vessels in remaining on a direct course even against a ‘‘contrary wind.’’
Fitch, however, was under agreement to produce a second boat. The Perseverance was scheduled to be ready in November 1790. However, a storm blew it away from its dock and it became grounded on an island. Fitch’s efforts to repair the craft did not happen quickly enough, and his investors lost their sole rights to operate steamboats on the river. Although he did construct four boats in the period from 1785 to 1796, the number of passengers did not increase substantially and the public remained skeptical about the prospects of steam powered river transportation. Stagecoaches remained faster and less expensive means for long distance travel, even though such rides were noticeably more uncomfortable. In the end, poor ridership, lack of entrepreneurial skills, and the delay of his repairs to the Perseverance drove Fitch out of business.
Fitch even journeyed to France in 1793 to seek that nation’s support for his proposed projects. That country was in the throes of revolution, and interest in investment in such a questionable project was nonexistent. This venture cost Fitch so much money that he had to journey to Britain and hire himself out as a sailor to work his way back to America. In 1796 he briefly dabbled with new designs such as the screw propeller and took Robert Fulton on rides on a New York lake. In the end, it was just too soon for investors, the general public, or a foreign country to embrace such forward-thinking innovation. Furthermore, his difficult personality also discouraged people from serious consideration of his ideas.
After this series of disappointments, Fitch retired and moved to Bardstown, Kentucky where he owned property from his surveying days. Squatters had seized much of his 1,600 acres of land, and he took steps to reclaim his property. This effort apparently took the last measure of Fitch’s energy. He spiraled into a deep state of despair. He lived with a tavern owner and began to consume alcohol heavily, apparently with the intention of drinking himself to death. His landlord received acres of land in return for pints of whiskey. Under a doctor’s care for what would now be a diagnosis of depression, Fitch took a large number of opium pills and passed away in his sleep in July 1798.
John Fitch was a visionary who had laid the groundwork for future steamboat development that Oliver Evans and Robert Fulton perfected in the early 19th century. In 1792 Fitch predicted to one of his shareholders that, whether or not he personally achieved success, steam powered vessels would in the not too distant future cross the Atlantic Ocean and become the standard means of river transportation. While John Fitch’s name today is not widely associated with the Steamboat, it is apparent that his technical insight, grit, and determination were the foundation upon which later developments rested. Despite building four working steamboats, he never received his due recognition and certainly not the financial reward of his successors. A generation later, the January 1836 issue of Mechanics Magazine lauded Fitch’s accomplishments and lamented his lack of recognition, stating that misfortune had robbed John Fitch of his claim to the ‘‘most noble and useful invention.’’2
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