John Stevens

American engineer

• Born: 1749
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: March 6, 1838
• Place of death: Hoboken, New Jersey

A pioneer of steamboat design and of the American railroad, Stevens invented the first steamship that sailed on the ocean and the first working American steam locomotive. Because of his advocacy of railroads over canals, he is called the “father of American railroads.”

Primary fields: Mechanical engineering; naval engineering

Primary inventions: Steam-powered locomotive; steamship

Early Life

John Stevens was born in were chosen in 1749. He was the son of the Honorable John Stevens, a wealthy landowner, shipowner, and merchant, who served as a New Jersey delegate to the Continental Congress, and Elizabeth Alexander, daughter of James Alexander, surveyor general of New York and New Jersey. The Stevens family had homes in both Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where the young John Stevens was raised, and in New York City. Stevens was educated largely by tutors, and later attended Kings College (later renamed Columbia University) in New York. Stevens graduated from Kings with a B.A. in 1768 and prepared for a career as a lawyer. He was admitted to the bar in 1771. Instead of practicing law, Stevens went to work with his father.

During the American Revolution, Stevens was granted a commission in the Continental Army, and it was in this period that he began his interest in inventing. In 1776, Stevens became treasurer of New Jersey, eventually rising to the rank of colonel, and for the rest of his life he was popularly known as Colonel Stevens. On October 17, 1782, he married Rachel Cox, daughter of Colonel John R. Cox, the deputy quartermaster general to General George Washington. After the revolution, Stevens and his wife moved first to the Stevens family home in New York City, and then on March 16, 1784, he bought a 689-acre piece of land that had been confiscated from a British Loyalist across from New York City, in what is now Hoboken, New Jersey. The Stevenses built a villa in Hoboken that was completed in 1787. They eventually had eleven children. In 1787, Stevens supported the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, writing a number of articles to this purpose, and in a pamphlet (signed “A Farmer of New Jersey”) he even critiqued some of John Adams’s constitutional ideas. Beginning in 1788, Stevens focused his creative mind on the subject that would captivate him for the rest of his life—steam power.

Life’s Work

Stevens’s attention was first drawn to the subject of steam power when, in the latter part of 1787, he viewed one of America’s earliest steam ships operating on the Delaware River. He followed the ship to its berth and then studied its design. This was a ship built by John Fitch, with whom Stevens would soon be in competition.

Stevens turned his imagination to the problem of steam engine design after reading a series of pamphlets that appeared in 1788. The pamphlets were written by two American inventors who both claimed to have invented the steamboat. The first was James Rumsey, an inventor from Bath, Virginia, who began work on a steam-powered ship in 1785. Rumsey’s first trial run in April, 1786, was disappointing. In December, 1787, he made his first successful trial run on the Potomac River. The other inventor was John Fitch, who also began his work on a steam-powered ship in 1785, and in August of 1787 Fitch successfully ran his steamship on the Delaware River. After reading these publications, with their conflicting claims of precedence for the creation of the steamboat, Stevens wrote to Rumsey with suggestions to improve the design of his engine and to increase its speed.

As a man of business, Stevens needed to commute between New York and New Jersey, and he appreciated the potential commercial benefits of this new steam technology. Such innovations could greatly increase the speed of commerce and industry. Stevens believed he could improve upon the designs of Rumsey and Fitch. With some innovative ideas of his own, Stevens decided to go into the steamship business himself. Stevens, along with Rumsey and Fitch, and a few others seeking federal protection of their steamboat designs, were granted federal patents under the new U.S. patent law on August 26, 1791.

Stevens’s first partners were his brother-in-law, Robert R. Livingston (chancellor of New York State and later negotiator of the Louisiana Purchase), and Nicholas I. Roosevelt (inventor and ancestor of Presidents Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt). Livingston provided political influence and financial backing, and Roosevelt provided assistance in the building and design areas. Eventually, both Livingston and Roosevelt teamed up with Robert Fulton, a later competitor of Stevens. Stevens’s sons eventually joined their father in the family business.

Beginning in 1798, Stevens made trial runs of various engine and propulsion designs. Among the design innovations that he and his colleagues tested were low- and high-pressure steam engines and single- and twin-screw propellers. In 1804, Stevens launched the Little Juliana, with a high-pressure tube boiler and a twin-screw propeller. In 1809, he ran the first steamship to sail on the ocean, the Phoenix, at a speed of 5.5 miles per hour. In this same year, he began steamship service between Philadelphia and Trenton, New Jersey. In 1811, he launched the Juliana, which was the world’s first steam ferryboat, sailing between Hoboken and New York City. In 1812, he launched the Philadelphia, a 136.5-foot-long steamship with a speed of twelve miles per hour.

With an eye to facilitating the speed of business and travel on land as well as on water, in 1802 Stevens planned and later became the president of the Bergen Turnpike Company. He even proposed building bridges and tunnels connecting New Jersey with New York. In 1812, Stevens authored a very important document that has been called the “birth certificate of American railroads.” His piece, titled “Documents Tending to Prove the Superior Advantages of Railways and Steam Carriages over Canal Navigation,” applied the idea of steam technology to the railroad.

Stevens was a vocal proponent of railroads. In later years, he was recognized as a man ahead of his time in his advocacy of the benefits of rail transportation. Stevens proposed building railroads throughout the burgeoning United States, and in 1815 he obtained the first railroad charter in the country. This railroad was not built, but in 1825 Stevens built the first steam-powered locomotive in the United States, running up to twelve miles per hour. The locomotive, which Stevens called a “steam waggon,” ran on a circular track on his estate in Hoboken. A replica of this engine is now on display at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg, Pennsylvania.

Stevens was the first to suggest building a railroad between Philadelphia and Columbia, Pennsylvania. Eventually, a railroad was built between those cities, the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad, which was taken over by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1857. In 1830, Stevens and his sons obtained a charter for the first railroad in New Jersey, the Camden and Amboy Railroad, one of earliest railroads in the country. It successfully carried passengers and cargo throughout the state. Stevens’s son Robert Livingston Stevens became its president.

Impact

Stevens has been recognized as an inventor ahead of his age. He saw the possibilities of bridges and tunnels spanning rivers many years before these things became a reality, and he saw the potential of steam power to unite the economic resources of the American republic. Even as he advocated for railroads, he continued working on steamboats. Stevens’s ferryboat service between Hoboken and New York helped spur the development of Hoboken. Passengers were transported to his Elysian Fields parkland on his Hoboken estate, where on June 19, 1846, the first recorded baseball game was conducted. The ferryboat service continued to remain in family hands into the early twentieth century.

Stevens lived to see the vindication of his arguments for the “superior advantages” of the railroad. His advocacy of railroads over canals encouraged the development of railroads throughout the United States. By the time Stevens died in 1838, the Camden and Amboy Railroad was just one of a growing number of railroads that were successfully operating in the United States. Stevens’s son Robert invented the modern metal T-rail, the “hook-headed” spike, and the cowcatcher. He also designed the boiler for the Camden and Amboy’s first locomotive, named Stevens (later known as the John Bull), which came from the shop of English railroad builder Robert Stephenson.

Prior to Stevens’s death, he had hoped that a portion of his property could be used for a school of science. When his son Edwin died in 1868, he left an endowment and a city block to open the Stevens Institute of Technology, opened in 1870. The institute remains to this day a testament to the impact of John Stevens on American technology and engineering.

Bibliography

Dizikes, John. Sportsmen and Gamesmen. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Includes a chapter on John Stevens and the Stevens family in the light of the work of Stevens’s son, John Cox Stevens, a founder of the New York Yacht Club, and whose yacht, America, won the America’s Cup in 1851.

Finch, J. K. Early Columbia Engineers: An Appreciation of John Stevens, James Renwick, Horatio Allen, and Alfred W. Craven. New York: Columbia University Press, 1929. A study of Stevens as an engineer, written from the perspective of his alma mater, Kings College, later Columbia University. This brief study places Stevens in the context of intellectual development in New York City. Illustrations.

Shagena, Jack L. Who Really Invented the Steamboat? Fulton’s “Clermont” Coup. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2004. An engaging and thorough study of Stevens’s role in the development of the steamboat. Useful for putting Stevens’s work on the steamboat and railroad into the context of his day. Illustrations, bibliography, index.

Turner, Archibald Douglas. John Stevens, an American Record. New York: Century, 1928. The most complete and detailed biography of Stevens, with a great deal of information on Stevens’s life, family, inventions, and patents. Illustrations, bibliography, index.