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,