Steamboat
Hull:
wood Mach:
steam engine, water jet Built:
James Rumsey, Shepherdstown, W. Va.; 1785.
One of the first Americans involved in the development and application of steam navigation was James Rumsey, an affable but secretive hotelkeeper from Bath, Virginia (now West Virginia). In 1785, one of his guests happened to be General George Washington, to whom he showed his model of a pole boat that used the river current to travel upstream. Later that year, Rumsey hit upon the idea of harnessing steam power for his engine, and he eventually dropped the pole boat idea for a boat driven by a water jet. Although technologically ahead of its time, the idea of jet propulsion had more support than the paddle systems devised by Rumsey's rival John Fitch. Benjamin Franklin had proposed the idea to the American Philosophical Society, and the machinery was relatively simple.
Rumsey's engine consisted of a single piston rod connecting two cylinders. The upper cylinder was part of the engine while the bottom cylinder acted as a pump, drawing water into the boat through valves in the keel on the up stroke and forcing water out through a tube in the stern on the down stroke. Rumsey tried his vessel for the first time on March 14, 1786. "The boat went against the current of the Potomac, but many parts of the machinery [were] imperfect, and some parts rendered useless by the heat of the steam." By the next year, Rumsey was in direct competition with Fitch for state monopolies and on December 3, 1787, he made a second demonstration during which his vessel was said to have gone at a rate of three miles per hour against the current; eight days later, his speed was estimated at four miles per hour. The vessel made no more trials, but Rumsey started the Rumseian Society and in 1788, he went to England bearing letters of introduction from Franklin and others. Patent negotiations with engine makers Matthew Boulton and James Watt collapsed. Construction of a vessel patriotically called Columbia Maid, but which Rumsey referred to as The Rumseian Experiment, was suspended for two years while the inventor staved off creditors. He had resumed work on the engine when, on December 18, 1790, he died just before he was to address the Society of Arts.
Flexner, Steamboats Come True.
