Steam-ships : The story of their development to the present day by R. A. Fletcher

AMERICAN PIONEERS IN STEAM NAVIGATION Towards the end of the eighteenth century American inventors turned their attention to the problem of navigation by steam, and to one of them, Robert Fulton, the credit of having invented the steamboat has usually been given. Livingston’s “Historical Account of the Application of Steam for the Propelling of Boats” has been accepted as an authority on the subject, but as he was Fulton’s friend and backer, and Fulton married into the Livingston family, there is reason to question the absolute accuracy of the circumstantial story told by this most eloquent special pleader, though there is some excuse for his partiality. A little investigation makes it apparent that Fulton was not the first American to design a successful steamboat, nor even the first to make the running of steamboats a satisfactory speculation. In 1909 a Mr. John Moray of West Virginia presented a petition to Congress in which he asked for the official recognition of James Rumsay as the inventor of the steamboat, and the perpetuation of his memory by the placing of an appropriate bust in the Statuary Hall at the Capitol. According to the petition “The deed-books of Berkeley County, Va., for the year 1782 record the fact that James Rumsay, a native of Maryland, who was a millwright and Revolutionary soldier, purchased a farm, and soon after a pond, for experimental purposes in the line of his calling. On that pond, as the results of many experiments in steam and hydrostatics by James Rumsay, the wonderful discovery of the principle of steam navigation took place. Thoroughly satisfied by continuous experiments that the newly discovered principle would become of immense value in the world, Rumsay contracted with his brother-in-law, Joseph Barnes, for the building of a boat for steam purposes at St. John’s Run, on the Potomac River. The resulting steamboat was publicly exhibited at Shepherdstown, Va., on the Potomac, on December 3 and 11,