Steamboat - Early Developments

Early Developments

1543 is the date given for a paddle steamer said to have been devised by Blasco de Garay in Spain, a myth that is now well discredited.

In October 1652 Oliver Cromwell's spy master John Thurloe received a report that a Frenchman in Rotterdam, referred to as 'a subtle mathematician', was having a ship built to his design "which is to go with certain instruments without sail, with incredible strength and swiftness, either with or against the wind." Unfortunately the Frenchman died before the ship was completed.

The French inventor Denis Papin, after inventing the steam digester (a type of pressure cooker) and experimenting with closed cylinders and pistons pushed in by atmospheric pressure, designed and built a steam pump analogous to the pump advertised by Thomas Savery in England during the same period. In his writings, including his correspondence with Gottfried Leibniz, Papin proposed applying this steam pump to the operation of a paddlewheel boat. During a stay in Kassel, Germany, in 1704, he completed a paddlewheel boat, probably pedal-powered. When he left for England in 1707, hoping to sell the British on his idea of steam-powered navigation, he used his paddlewheeler to navigate down the Fulda River as far as Münden. Although Papin was probably the first to have so clear a conception of a steamboat, he found no backers in London.

In 1736, Jonathan Hulls was granted a patent in England for a Newcomen engine-powered steamboat (using a pulley instead of a beam, and a pawl and ratchet to obtain rotary motion), but it was the improvement in steam engines by James Watt that made the concept feasible. William Henry of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, having learned of Watt's engine on a visit to England, made his own engine. In 1763 he put it in a boat. The boat sank, and while Henry made an improved model, he did not appear to have much success, though he may have inspired others.

In France, by 1774 Marquis Claude de Jouffroy and his colleagues had made a 13-metre (42 ft 8 in) working steamboat with rotating paddles, the Palmipède. The ship sailed on the Doubs River in June and July 1776, apparently the first steamship to sail successfully. In 1783 a new paddle steamer, Pyroscaphe, successfully steamed up the river Saône for fifteen minutes before the engine failed, but bureaucracy thwarted further progress.

From 1784 James Rumsey built a pump-driven (water jet) boat and successfully steamed upstream on the Potomac River in 1786; the following year he obtained a patent from the State of Virginia. In Pennsylvania, John Fitch, an acquaintance of Henry, made a model paddle steamer in 1785, and subsequently developed propulsion by floats on a chain, obtained a patent in 1786, then built a steamboat which underwent a successful trial in 1787.

Serrafino Serrati, an Italian physicist, was reported to have sailed a steamship on the River Arno near Florence in 1787. A publication "Elements of Experimental Physics" published in Florence in 1796 claimed that he was the first to sail steam-powered boat successfully. Unfortunately, little is known about the specifics of his machine. A bacteria discovered by fellow Italian national Bartolomeo Bizio was named Serratia marcescens in recognition of Serrati's steamboat.

In 1788, a steamboat built by John Fitch operated in regular commercial service along the Delaware river between Philadelphia PA and Burlington NJ, carrying as many as 30 passengers. This boat could typically make 7 to 8 miles per hour, and traveled more than 2,000 miles (3,200 km) during its short length of service. The Fitch steamboat was not a commercial success, as this travel route was adequately covered by relatively good wagon roads. The following year a second boat made 30 miles (48 km) excursions, and in 1790 a third boat ran a series of trials on the Delaware River before patent disputes dissuaded Fitch from continuing. In 1789, Rumsey obtained backing in England for his water-jet propelled boat Columbia Maid but at his death in 1792 no great progress had been made with it.

Meanwhile, Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, near Dumfries, Scotland, had developed double-hulled boats propelled by manually cranked paddlewheels placed between the hulls, even attempting to interest various European governments in a giant warship version, 246' long. Miller sent King Gustav III of Sweden an actual small-scale, 100-foot-long version called "Experiment"; as thanks, the king despatched a snuff-box containing Swede seeds. The snuff-box, richly illustrated with maritime scenes, is now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. "Sea-spook" is the Swedish naval architect Chapman's comment on it.

Miller engaged engineer William Symington to build his patent steam engine which drove a stern-mounted paddle-wheel in a boat which was successfully tried out on Dalswinton Loch in 1788, and followed by a larger steamboat the next year. Miller then abandoned the project. Ten years later Symington was engaged by Lord Dundas to build a steamboat. In March 1802, his Charlotte Dundas towed two 70-ton barges 30 km (19 mi) along the Forth and Clyde Canal to Glasgow. This vessel, the first tow boat, has been called the "first practical steamboat", and the first to be followed by continuous development of steamboats. Although plans to introduce boats on the Forth and Clyde canal were thwarted by fears of erosion of the banks, development was taken up both in Britain and abroad, including Robert Fulton's North River Steamboat of 1807 and Henry Bell's PS Comet of 1812. The first sea-going steamboat in Europe was Richard Wright's first steamboat "Experiment", an ex-French lugger; she steamed from Leeds to Yarmouth, arriving Yarmouth 19 July 1813. "Tug", the first tugboat, was launched by the Woods Brothers, Port Glasgow, on 5 November 1817; in the summer of 1817 she was the first steamboat to travel round the North of Scotland to the East Coast.