John Fitch

American inventor

• Born: January 21, 1743
• Birthplace: South Windsor, Connecticut
• Died: July 2, 1798
• Place of death: Bardstown, Kentucky

Fitch was one of the earliest inventors to produce serviceable steamboats. Although an adept inventor, he was unable to demonstrate the steamboat’s economic value and thus cultivate support for his work. Instead, Robert Fulton is remembered as the inventor in 1807 of the American steamboat, many years after Fitch’s pioneering work, which went unacknowledged by Fulton and others.

Early Life

The younger son of a Connecticut Yankee farmer, John Fitch was taken out of school at age eight and pressed into field chores. Despite a lack of encouragement by his poor and penny-pinching father and stepmother—his mother having died when the boy was less than five years old—Fitch was sufficiently self-motivated to acquire and master a book on elementary arithmetic and another on geography. At age seventeen he ran off to Rocky Hill, Connecticut, and was hired as a sailor, but the unbearable conditions and a storm prompted his early return home.

In Rocky Hill he became apprenticed to two watchmakers, the Cheany brothers, who overworked, bullied, and starved him. Fitch was assigned primarily work in the fields and household chores rather than being taught the clock trade—except for some handicrafts in metals. Buying his way out of his apprenticeship, Fitch started to journey and wander beginning in 1769. From New England, he went to Trenton, New Jersey, where he stayed until 1775, spending part of the time in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He made brass buttons for a tinsman, was apprenticed to a silversmith, cleaned and helped repair clocks, was an itinerant peddler, and engaged in other occupations.

During the Revolutionary War years of 1775-1780, Fitch served intermittently in the militia and as a gunsmith repairing weapons. The years 1780-1781, 1782, and 1783-1784 found him undertaking three Western trips as frontiersman, land surveyor, and land jobber. On his second expedition, he became a captive of American Indians in Kentucky but managed to escape. However, his occasional savings and land acquisitions were depleted through currency devaluation and amendments to land allotment laws.

The year 1785 was to change Fitch’s life. Observing a stagecoach try to negotiate a bumpy road, Fitch got the idea of applying steam power to drive it. However, given the deplorable highway conditions at the time, he soon shifted to steamboats and expressed surprise on being informed that inventors such as Thomas Savery, Thomas Newcomen, and James Watt in England had already conceived the idea of harnessing steam power for performing useful work. That is when Fitch, with practically no formal schooling or training of any kind in engineering, became a steamboat inventor. The series of difficulties, misfortunes, and injustices that Fitch was to experience in the remaining thirteen years of his life were compounded by his personal circumstances.

This towering man with a twitching face had the appearance and manners of a crank, a lack of social graces and political savvy, and poor judgment of his fellow human beings. Among other things, his marriage to Lucy Roberts, by many accounts a woman with a temper who ridiculed and scorned him, was a failure. He deserted her as she was expecting the birth of their second child. Later, Fitch was befriended by a widow and the mistress of his friend and business partner, a German immigrant watchmaker named Henry Voigt who was to assist Fitch closely—and later be his rival—in much of his steamboat work. When Fitch offered to marry Mary Kraft to legitimize her status and that of the child she had borne to Voigt, she refused, even though she occasionally signed as “Mary Fitch.” Eventually, Voigt and his mistress made Fitch the scapegoat of the scandal and turned on him.

With all this going on, Fitch still found the energy to promote his Deist “universal society” for the free discussion of religious, philosophical, social, and political ideas “for the benefit of mankind and the support of civil government.” However, in this universal society, he proposed to stimulate freedom of thought by throwing out any fellow member for “improper conduct,” just like the churches he wished to supplant.

Life’s Work

In 1785, Fitch built a 23-inch model steamboat that he presented to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia as well as to public figures and scholars. He received only indifferent moral support from the Founding Fathers of the American republic, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, to whom Fitch had appealed in person. In fact, Washington and Franklin were backing a suave and polished Virginian and competing steamboat inventor, James Rumsey, who never produced a practical working model. Rumsey and Fitch would have a heated published argument over which of them had first invented the steamboat.

Fitch was equally unsuccessful in getting any funding for his navigation project from the American legislatures. However, between March, 1786, and November, 1787, he obtained fourteen-year exclusive rights for the building and use of all kinds of watercraft driven by “fire or steam” from New Jersey, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and, finally, from the U.S. Congress in 1791. Congress simultaneously granted rights to James Rumsey without recognizing Fitch’s seniority.

Fitch’s first working model in September, 1785, was a small skiff. The craft had a double-acting cylinder 3 inches in diameter made of brass. Steam was injected at both ends of a piston enabling the engine to make a power stroke. The skiff was driven by means of an endless chain and floats and paddle boards, this method being adopted after abortive experiments with spiral paddle wheels.

The second model, the Perseverance, built in 1786, was 45 feet long with a 12-foot beam. The engine now had a single horizontal double-acting 12-inch cylinder. It had six vertical oars on each side attached to an endless chain. The front bank of oars, three on each side, was cranked to dip into and rise from the water to provide propulsion and was followed by the six rear oars in canoe style. The boiler held 500 gallons of water set in 3.5 tons of brickwork.

The third model, called Steamboat and built in 1788, was 60 feet long with an 8-foot beam. It had a new boiler of coiled iron pipes to replace the old pot-shaped one. The brickwork now became unnecessary, lightening the load considerably. This boat could run from Philadelphia to Burlington, New Jersey, a distance of some 20 miles, in about three hours, a record at the time. A later version of the boat, the Experiment, built in 1790 with an improved engine and boiler, had four broad paddles at the stern operated by a series of gears and chain belts. It reached a record 8 miles per hour upstream. Even though the advertised, regularly scheduled service was extended to Trenton, New Jersey, and the boat was used for excursions on Sundays, the thirty paid passengers whom it carried were insufficient to make it a viable enterprise. The opposition of the competing stagecoach and sailboat operators and, especially, the refusal of stockholders to invest more funds in the company contributed to the financial—not technical—failure of the undertaking.

For other reasons, too, the years 1790-1791 turned out to be critical for Fitch. His petition for the position of master-at-arms was turned down by the Senate, and Congress had decided to grant a patent similar to his to rival inventor Rumsey. Accordingly, an angry and frustrated Fitch wished to “end the fight.” He therefore moved back to Kentucky and earned his living as a good silversmith. Yet even as the inventor was filling six notebooks in what was to become his autobiography and which he willed to be unsealed thirty years after his death, he still could not give up his dream of steamboating. He decided to try his luck in Europe.

In 1793, Fitch sailed for France, where he met with his customary misfortunes. His major sponsor—a French public figure named Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville—was guillotined in the French Revolution. Shipwrights to build him a boat were impossible to find. His side trip to England, where he had hoped to purchase a more efficient Boulton and Watt engine, was equally unsuccessful because the British government prohibited the engine’s export. Moreover, Fitch had been denied permission to return to France.

He thus sailed to Boston, where he worked on the waterfront. Eventually, he was to return to Kentucky, revisiting his hometown in Connecticut along the way. After his quarter century absence, however, his wife and son were barely on speaking terms with him.

In New York in 1796, Fitch made an attempt to experiment with a screw-driven boat on Collect Pond. The craft was 18 feet long with a 6-foot beam. He was now using a two-cylinder engine and an iron boiler. The connecting rod drove a crank on the forward end of the propeller shaft. Fitch failed to get backing for this effort; he built another boat in Bardstown, Kentucky, a side-paddle-wheeler, in 1797-1798. Even though a tavernkeeper had agreed to feed him and provide him a pint of whisky daily, as he was in abject poverty and suffered from rheumatism and despair, he committed suicide. Using his death as an excuse, Chancellor Livingston, Robert Fulton’s chief backer, managed to have New York State’s patent monopoly to Fitch transferred to Fulton, ostensibly for the public good.

Significance

Although John Fitch’s steamboats proved to be reliable, he had been careless about building and operating costs and about cultivating influential contacts. Thus, he failed to demonstrate the economic value of steam navigation. For all that, the words of this disheartened inventor harboring an overwhelming sense of injustice turned out to be prophetic. He had predicted that someday a more powerful individual would reap fame and fortune from the very invention whose rewards were denied to him. Indeed, in 1807, some twenty years after Fitch had demonstrated to the delegates of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia his first working model of a steamboat, the world hailed Robert Fulton’s Clermont as the first American steamboat, giving Fitch, on whose patent and ideas Fulton may have infringed, no credit whatever.

Bibliography

Boyd, Thomas. Poor John Fitch, Inventor of the Steamboat. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935. A sympathetic profile of the early inventor. Illustrated.

Deeson, A. F. L. An Illustrated History of Steamships. Bourne End, England: Spurnbooks, 1976. Deeson briefly examines contributions to steam navigation made by Fitch and other early inventors. Illustrated.

Fitch, John. The Autobiography of John Fitch. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976. The inventor’s semiliterate account of his life and unrecognized contribution to steam navigation through 1791. Illustrated.

Shagen, Jack L. Who Really Invented the Steamboat? Fulton’s Clermont Coup, a History of the Steamboat Contributions of William Henry, James Rumsey, John Fitch, Oliver Evans, Nathan Read, Samuel Morey, Robert Fulton, John Stevens, and Others. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2004. Shagen, an engineer, provides a comprehensive history of the steamboat and its many worthy inventors.

Sutcliffe, Andrea. Steam: The Untold Story of America’s First Great Invention. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Sutcliffe focuses on Fitch’s invention of the steamboat almost twenty years before the time of Robert Fulton. Examines the significance of Fitch’s invention and the brutal competition he faced from rival inventors.

Ward, Ralph T. Steamboats: A History of the Early Adventure. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973. Written with attractive line drawings for young readers, with quotations from Fitch and other contemporaries showing how recognition and thus fame and fortune bypassed the steamboat inventor. Illustrated.

Westcott, Thompson. The Life of John Fitch: The Inventor of the Steamboat. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1878. This work focuses on the injustice done by elevating Fulton, described in the book as a mere “imitator and copyist,” to the status of inventor of the steamboat instead of Fitch. Illustrated.