In the spring of 1786, Fitch came to Philadelphia determined to build his steamboat. Paddlewheels were never as efficient as the screw propellers that came much later, but given the weak engines of the day, they beat jet propulsion hands down. Rumsey went for jet propulsion, while Fitch used paddles that dipped in and out of the water like the oars of a canoe. Because Rumsey and Fitch were desperate for Franklin’s approval, neither man ever gave paddlewheels a try. He proposed using air- or water-jet propulsion instead. In a paper he published on his return from France in 1785, just as the steamboat inventors were getting started, Franklin theorized that paddlewheels were an inefficient way to propel boats. Franklin, in fact, would have been dismayed to learn that he inadvertently hindered steamboat development. The scientific leaders of the day-Benjamin Franklin and David Rittenhouse in particular-didn’t believe steamboats would ever work well enough to be practical. With nothing to lose but their pride, they refused to work together, and they each refused to quit. These two men spent the next several years fighting each other, their investors, politicians, and the world in general. Washington warned Rumsey about Fitch, and the steamboat wars began with acrimonious pamphlets. Steamboat Pamphlet Wars Between Rumsey and Fitch It may have mattered that Rumsey was a well-dressed, well-mannered southern gentleman, while Fitch was a straight-talking New Englander in threadbare clothes. A year later, he would reject John Fitch’s plea of support for his steamboat idea. Excited by the boat’s potential, Washington publicly supported Rumsey’s plan for a mechanical, pole boat driven by a water wheel. Five days into his trip, he met a Virginia millwright named James Rumsey, who showed him a model of a boat that could move upstream. In September 1784, less than a year after resigning his military commission, Washington crossed the mountains to examine road, river, and canal possibilities for connecting the Potomac River with points west. But without boats that could move upstream as easily as down, those rivers were one-way only. Across the mountains, the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and their tributaries formed a network of natural superhighways. He was certain that trade was the key to binding the two halves, but the roads of the day were hardly more than trails, and carting goods across the Appalachians was difficult, slow, dangerous, and expensive. After the Revolution, George Washington’s chief concern was how to unify a country divided by a hundred-mile-wide mountain range. Steam power was an idea whose time was at hand, the motive force the new nation needed to help secure its economic independence. The inventor of this odd contrivance was a tattered genius named John Fitch, who had started out wanting to build a steam-powered car. A dozen crank-driven oars, mounted six to a side on a large wooden rack, creaked and groaned as they slowly pushed the boat along. Alongside the graceful sloops and schooners on the Delaware, it stood out, an ugly duckling among swans. To call it a steamboat would be correct, but it didn’t look anything like the Mississippi riverboats that came later. The second was the running of the world’s first fairly reliable machine-powered vessel. The first, of course, was the writing of the U.S. In the summer of 1787, two events that would change the course of human history converged in Philadelphia.
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