Inventor of the first successful steamboat, John Fitch was from a poor farming family in Windsor, Connecticut, and served an apprenticeship as a clockmaker, although he was never fully trained by his master. He married in 1767, but, failing in business ventures and trapped in what he claimed was a loveless marriage, he abandoned his wife and infant son in 1768, not knowing that his wife was pregnant with their second child. Between 1769 and 1775, after establishing himself in Trenton, New Jersey, Fitch tried his hand at a variety of trades, including brass-button making, clock repair, and silversmithing. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War (1775-83), he was a gunsmith and a lieutenant in the local militia. However, he ran into problems with other officers, and his military service ended without distinction. His house was ransacked by the British and Hessians during their occupation of Trenton. For part of the war he was a supplier of alcohol and tobacco to both the British and Revolutionary armies. Beginning in 1780, he became involved in a variety of land schemes as a surveyor and speculator in Kentucky and the Ohio country, during which he made several trips to the West, was captured by Native Americans, and was imprisoned by the British for nine months. By 1785 his schemes had come to naught.

About 1785 Fitch began to think about building a steamboat. Although he could not get either George Washington or the Second Continental Congress interested in the project, he drew up plans and built a model that had a steam engine driving paddles along the side. He submitted the plans and model to the American Philosophical Society and then obtained enough backing from a variety of sources to construct a working steamboat. He demonstrated the boat in Philadelphia on August 22, 1787, in front of a huge crowd that included many members of the Constitutional Convention. By 1790 he had constructed a steamboat with the paddles at the rear, and it ran a packet service in the summer between New Jersey and Philadelphia on the Delaware River. Despite the boat's ability to travel at eight miles per hour and work for about 2,000 miles, the enterprise was a commercial failure. By 1791 Fitch's supporters had withdrawn their backing.

Part of the difficulty for Fitch was that a Virginia builder, James Rumsey, also claimed to be the creator of the steamboat. The two vied for backers while obtaining patents and endorsements from different states. After the passage of the patent law (1790), Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson issued both Rumsey and Fitch patents for their steamboats on the same day (August 26, 1791)--a solomonic act that did little to settle the controversy. In 1788 Rumsey had gone to Great Britain to gain support. Fitch headed for Europe in 1793 but returned empty-handed the next year. Distraught over his failure and lack of recognition, Fitch moved to Kentucky and sought to obtain some lands he had surveyed a decade earlier. On July 2, 1798, he apparently committed suicide.

Bibliography:

1) Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (New York: Norton, 1983)

2) Andrea Sutcliffe, Steam: The Untold Story of America's First Great Invention (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

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