Steamboats

Steamboats are boats powered by steam engines that move a mechanism for propulsion. In the early days of steamboats, the mechanism for propulsion was a paddle wheel. Steamboats became widely used in the United States in the nineteenth century, helping to develop the country's internal economy. By the end of the century, railroads had surpassed steamboats as the primary mode for commercial transportation inland.

Steamboat technology was first developed in Europe. As early as 1690, French inventor Denis Papin used a steam engine to drive a paddle wheel boat. The Englishman Jonathan Hull patented a steamboat in 1737, but his design was too large to be useful. In 1783 the Frenchman Claude de Jouffroy d'Abbans designed and built a 150-foot (46-meter) steamboat that navigated a river near Lyons, France, for over a year. In Great Britain, Scottish inventor William Symington designed a steamboat that operated on a canal for a month.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Americans began to experiment with steamboats, which would be useful on the country's great rivers, such as the Hudson and the Mississippi. John Fitch demonstrated one in 1787 and developed others, but lost investors when further progress failed. By 1804 Oliver Evans had designed a high-pressure steamboat engine using a copper boiler, technology that worked but occasionally exploded, with tragic results. Samuel Morey came close to building a commercially successful steamboat, but he declined to accept investment from Robert Livingston because he wanted to control the project himself.

Gibbons v. Ogden

In 1824 in the case of Gibbons v. Ogden, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the steamboat navigation monopoly that Robert Livingston had received from New York violated the federal government's power over interstate commerce. This ruling allowed the federal government to open steamboat navigation to all commercial companies. Over the next few decades, thousands of steamboats entered service in the United States, transporting people, shipping goods in commerce, and providing entertainment, such as gambling.

Livingston was a wealthy man and the American ambassador to France, who had monopolies for steam navigation on the Hudson River (granted by the New York legislature) and on the lower Mississippi River (granted by the Louisiana Territory). Livingston financed steamboat design by American inventor Robert Fulton. Fulton made a successful steamboat in France. In 1807 he launched the Clermont for a thirty-hour voyage from New York City to Albany and back on the Hudson River. Four years later Fulton sent the New Orleans from Pittsburgh down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to its namesake city in Louisiana Territory.

The use of steamboats grew greatly in America in the middle of the nineteenth century. By 1840 there were more than two hundred operating on the Mississippi River. This number increased to a thousand by 1860. At the middle of the century, annual shipping to New Orleans exceeded shipping to New York City, accounting for more than half of the entire nation's total exports.

After steamships could operate on rivers, inventors designed ways for them to operate on oceans. Vessels that sailed the oceans had to store more coal for the engines than river steamboats. They also needed to have screw propellers instead of paddle wheels because of the rough seas in the ocean.