The Off-Key Bard
History

This Day in History — America's First Steamboat Patents Are Granted

On this day in 1791

On August 26, 1791, a deadlocked Patent Board gave both Fitch and Rumsey steamboat patents. Both died broke. Fulton got the credit sixteen years later.

The Off-Key Bard stands along the riverbank as two inventors pursue the same revolutionary idea in very different ways — and watches the Patent Board run out of patience trying to decide between them.

"Before steamships crossed oceans and filled America's rivers, someone first had to answer a basic question: Could steam reliably push a boat through the water?"

On this day in 1791, the United States Patent Board issued steamboat patents to John Fitch and James Rumsey simultaneously — not because the board had reached a confident decision, but because it had given up trying to make one. After two years of bitter dispute between the inventors, their lawyers, and their backers, the board's solution was to grant patents to all steamboat claimants according to their individual specifications, letting the market sort out what the law could not. Rumsey, Fitch, John Stevens, and Nathan Read all received steam-related patents dated August 26, 1791.

The two central figures had been fighting since at least 1785, when their rival claims first began attracting public attention. At the center of the feud stood the most famous American alive: George Washington, who had privately witnessed James Rumsey's early boat designs in September 1784 at Bath, Virginia, and given Rumsey a signed testimonial — and then found himself in an awkward position when John Fitch showed up requesting his endorsement as well. Washington had pledged not to disclose the principles of Rumsey's design. He declined to give Fitch a letter of introduction. Both men would later invoke Washington's name in their public claims.

John Fitch

Fitch was a Connecticut-born clockmaker, silversmith, and surveyor who had served as a gunsmith during the Revolutionary War and spent time as a captive of Native Americans before turning his full attention to steamboats in the early 1780s. His propulsion concept used a steam engine to drive a bank of mechanical oars — paddles that moved in a canoe-like stroke, alternating sides in a continuous rhythm.

On August 22, 1787, Fitch demonstrated a working steamboat on the Delaware River at Philadelphia, before an audience that included delegates attending the Constitutional Convention. The demonstration succeeded. His was the first steam-powered vessel to operate successfully in the United States.

By the summer of 1790, Fitch had refined his design considerably. His 60-foot boat carried paying passengers on regular runs between Philadelphia and Burlington, New Jersey, traveling at six to eight miles per hour. He estimated the boat covered somewhere between 1,300 and 3,000 miles that summer without serious mechanical problems — the first regularly scheduled steamboat service in American history.

James Rumsey

Rumsey was an innkeeper turned mechanical tinkerer who had conceived an entirely different approach. Rather than mechanical paddles, his system used a steam-driven pump to draw water in through the bow of the boat and force it out through the stern — an early form of jet propulsion, generating thrust through reaction. In December 1787, he demonstrated the boat on the Potomac River at Shepherdstown, before witnesses, achieving speeds of about three to four miles per hour against the current.

Jefferson had encountered Rumsey in Paris while serving as Ambassador to France and corresponded with him about his inventions. Rumsey formed the Rumsean Society, attracted investors in both America and Britain, and sailed to London to develop a more advanced version of his design.

What the Patents Produced

Neither man survived to build anything lasting.

When the Patent Board declined to award Fitch the broad monopoly he had sought and instead issued modern-style patents to multiple inventors on the same day, his investors lost confidence and abandoned the company. He had proved steam navigation viable, demonstrated regular passenger service, and built multiple successive boats — and ended up with a patent that gave him no competitive advantage at all. Fitch ultimately committed suicide in 1798 in Bardstown, Kentucky.

Rumsey moved to London after the patent decision, disappointed that American law could not protect his priority. He died there in December 1792, mid-sentence during a lecture to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, while demonstrating a model of his improved steamboat engine. He was 49.

Robert Fulton's Clermont made its famous run on the Hudson River in 1807 — sixteen years after the Fitch and Rumsey patents, and seventeen years after Fitch had operated the first paying passenger steam service in American history. Fulton got the credit. He also got the business right.

"Two rivals dreamed beside the stream,
And gave their boats the strength of steam…
Though others gained the greater name,
Their engines helped ignite the flame."

History reminds us: technological revolutions rarely belong to a single inventor. They grow from competing ideas, failed experiments, deadlocked patent boards, and people willing to try something before anyone knows whether it will work — or whether the law will protect them when it does.

Sources

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