The Clermont prospered in spite of all jealousies.1 During the remainder of the year 1807 she continued to be run as a passenger boat, always crowded with enthusiastic voyagers eager to avail themselves of the wonderful new system of conveyance, who paid scant heed to her slow speed and occasional breakdowns. In the winter of 1807-1808 the boat was rebuilt and in the succeeding spring resumed her popular career. Tales of her existence and exploits on the Hudson were published and commented upon in all the newspapers of the country, and the inhabitants of every section where navigable rivers were the chief arteries of travel displayed an anxiety to acquire a similar means of locomotion. Within a short time the recognized necessity of steam as an indispensable motive power in transportation assumed all the quality of an immemorial axiom. A clamor for steamboats arose, and the people could not understand how they had ever got along without them.

Nevertheless there was a delay of more than sixteen years before the use of steam propulsion became widely prevalent, and the underlying reason for that halt on the way toward further progress is to be found, most singularly, in the circumstances leading to the appearance of the Clermont.

Fulton's first boat, however suddenly and unexpectedly it seemed to the public to drop from the realms of unreality into the knowledge and use of men, was not the creation of a day or a year. It was, on the contraryand perhaps to a greater degree than any other similarly epoch-opening device-the product of many minds and of a long series of strange and devious circumstances.

1 After a number of attempts had been made to disable her the paddle-wheels were enclosed and protected by heavy timbers. The hostility shown toward the vessel by river boatmen was proof of the popular endorsement given to the craft, rather than otherwise.

104. The first form of the bicycle, introduced from Europe, was contemporary with Fulton's steamboats in the East. The contrivance merely sustained the weight of the body, and progress was made by pushing the ground with the feet. It was variously called the Velocipede, Accelerator, Draisena, Hobby Horse and Dandy Carriage. Baltimore was the American center for its manufacture, and a specimen, made of wrought iron and hardwood, cost $30. By 1819 the use of the velocipede had spread as far west as Louisville.

At least sixteen steamboats had been built in America before the launching of the Clermont, fifteen of which had previously been operated under their own power by the eight different men who had designed them. Nor were Americans first in the field. A list in chronological order of some of the early experiments follows:

The first known contemporary evidence showing the application of steam power to water craft as a means of propulsion is to be found in connection with Denis Papin, a French scientist and engineer, who invented and built a steamboat while residing in the principality of Hesse, in Germany, in the year 1707. His demonstration of steam navigation having brought abuse upon him, he

embarked on his vessel in an effort to proceed in it to London. With this object he started down the River Fulda, but at the town of Munden the boatmen of the river attacked him and destroyed his boat. He escaped with his life, and never, so far as is known, repeated his undertaking.

In 1736 an Englishman named Jonathan Hulls took out a patent for a stern-wheeled steamboat, and during the following year published in London a book describing the invention, the frontispiece of which is a picture of his steamboat engaged in towing a sailing vessel. An English investigator' of the subject affirms that Hulls' boat was built and used, but Preble' comes to a contrary conclusion.

M. de Jouffroy, of France, began experimenting in 1778, and in 1781 built a steamboat 140 feet long. In 1783 it ran under its own power with paddle-wheels, and a committee of the French Academy of Science made a favorable report regarding it. Jouffroy demanded a patent, but left France on the outbreak of the Revolution, and on his return found a patent for a similar boat had been awarded to another man.

1786.--John Fitch operated on the Delaware River, at Philadelphia, the first steamboat to move in American waters. It was propelled by an endless chain of paddles.

1787. Fitch ran his second boat on the Delaware in August, with the system of upright paddles at the sides. 1787.-Rumsey, in December, moved a boat by drawing a stream of water in at the bow and ejecting it at the stern.

1788. Fitch finished his third boat and in it made a

1 Russell, in the "Encycloped a Britannica."

2 Rear-Admiral George Henry Preble, U. S. N., published in 1883 "A Chronological History of the Origin and Development of Steam Navigation."

twenty-mile voyage from Philadelphia to Burlington. This same boat afterward ran regularly as a passenger packet on the Delaware in 1790, covering a thousand miles or more. Its best speed was eight miles an hour. In 1788 three Scotchmen named Patrick Millar, James

105.-A Hudson River passenger barge of 1825. Owing to the numerous explosions due to carelessness on early steamboats many people hesitated to use them, and some companies resorted to the expedient of towing travellers on separate vessels, so they would be in less danger of death or injury if the boilers blew up. This and the illustrations to No. 114, inclusive, deal with steamboats and steamboat travel in the East.

Taylor and William Symington jointly built and operated a steamboat on the Lake of Dalswinton. It was moved by a paddle-wheel placed in the center of the boat, and ran at the rate of five miles an hour.

In 1789 the same men equipped a boat sixty feet long with an engine whose cylinders were of 18 inches diameter, and ran it on the Forth and Clyde Canal at the rate

of about seven miles an hour. The contemporary Edinburgh newspapers contained information respecting it.

1790.-William Longstreet of New Jersey, then living in Georgia, built a boat that ran against the current of the Savannah River at the rate of five miles an hour.1

1792.-Elijah Ormsbee of Connecticut, then residing in Rhode Island, invented and constructed a steamboat propelled by side paddles moving back and forth like a duck's feet. In it he went from a point near Cranston to Providence; thence to Pawtucket and back to Providence again. Ormsbee's boat made from three to four miles an hour, and he used it for several weeks. No one being interested in it, the machinery was taken out of the boat and given to David Wilkinson, of Pawtucket, another mechanic who had made Ormsbee's castings for him. Ormsbee constructed most of his own machinery and understood the principle of paddlewheels. His use of side paddles was due to the cheapness of the mechanism for that means of propulsion and his lack of money.

2

1793 or 1794.-Samuel Morey of New Hampshire, then living in Connecticut, who began his experiments in the year 1790, built a paddle-wheel steamboat on the Connecticut River in 1794 and ran the vessel from Hartford to New York City at the rate of five miles an hour. Morey placed his paddle-wheel at the stern of the boat, in the manner afterward adopted for many steamboats on western waters and some rivers of the East. Mann, in his account of Morey's work, indicates a lack of

3

1 Preble's "Chronological History of Steam Navigation," p. 23.

2 Dow's "History of Steam Navigation between Providence and New York."-Files of the Transactions of the Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Industry. Preble: p. 27. 3 Preble: Mann's "Account of Morey's Steamboat" (1864).-The Patent Office records show that Morey took out several patents for steamboats.