Steamboats

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Steamboats

Inventors. Robert Fulton gets well-deserved credit for building an economically useful combination of steam engine and hull design, but he was certainly not the first person to build a steamboat, nor even the first American to do so. The Englishman Jonathan Hull patented a steamboat in 1737, and Americans James Rumsey, John Stevens, and James Fitch all ran working steamboats on American rivers before Fulton launched The Steamboat (later called the Clermont ) in 1807. In 1805 Oliver Evans, of automatic flour-milling fame, launched his own version of a steam wagon-steamboat called the Orukter Amphibolos. In July of that year Evans’s contraption, a seventeen-ton steam engine on wheels, trundled around downtown Philadelphia and then plunged into the Schuylkill River, where its paddle wheels took over and pushed the vessel sixteen miles to a dock on the Delaware. Evans would later design an important new steamboat engine, but it was Fulton’s successful ascension of the Hudson from New York to Albany and back in August 1807 that proved the practicability of steam travel. Fulton had many advantages over his competitors, including technical virtuosity; he had previously invented a submarine, a marble-cutting machine, and several types of bridges. But Fulton also had the backing of one of the richest men in America, Robert Livingston, who not only possessed great wealth but also happened to hold two monopolies on steam navigation, one granted by the New York state legislature for the state’s rivers and one granted by the Louisiana Territory for the lower Mississippi valley.

Monopoly. Fulton’s success on the Hudson generated a wave or public enthusiasm for steamboat building and travel. The steamboat seemed especially suited for the developing frontier along the great interior river system formed by the Ohio, the Mississippi, and their tributaries. In 1811, four years after the successful run of the Clermont, Fulton launched the New Orleans from a Pittsburgh shipyard and sent her downriver on the first successful steamboat run to its namesake city. Soon Fulton had a regular shuttle running between New Orleans and the cotton port of Natchez. The Fulton-Livingston monopoly, however, was short-lived. Competitors began to build their own boats, which, unlike roads, canals, or railroads, did not require years of expensive construction; once American shipyards gained some experience, they could construct medium-size vessels for $20, 000 and even the grandest models for around $60, 000. The monopoly could not keep other boats off the rivers, which after all were public highways. And in an age devoted to increasing economic opportunity for all, the Fulton-Livingston monopoly rankled the public as well as other steamboat companies. Constantly under attack in the courts, the monopoly finally fell in the landmark Supreme Court decision in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824).

Heavy Dew. The end of the Fulton monopoly ushered in a new era of rapid growth in the steamboat industry. By the 1850s steamboats dominated river transportation, especially in the West where there were only 17 steamboats in 1817, but 727 by 1855. Numbers, however, tell only half the story. Western rivers also presented a challenge to steamboat designers. Except for the Mississippi, most Western rivers were shallow, and in seasons of drought, water levels could fluctuate as much as 40 feet in a few weeks. As a result Western steamboat pilots had to relearn the rivers constantly, and the deep-draft design of eastern vessels simply would not work out west. In response to these problems Western builders came up with the Mississippi steamer, a long, wide vessel of shallow draft and light construction with an on-deck engine. According to historian George Rogers Taylor, by the late 1830s at least 20 of these new steamboats on the Ohio could navigate in only 20 inches of water. Contemporaries claimed they could “run on a heavy dew.”

EXPLOSION OF THE MOSELLE

Late in the afternoon of 25 April 1838 the 150-ton steamboat Moselle pulled away from the Cincinnati wharf and headed east on the Ohio River to pick up a few passengers at a small landing before heading back downstream on her way to Saint Louis. During the stop the engineer kept the safety valve loaded down and the boiler fires at full blast, preserving steam pressure but violating accepted safety procedures. As the Moselle backed away from the landing, three of her four boilers exploded with a deafening roar, spewing steam, boiler parts, and fragments of bodies all over the waterfront. What was left of the Moselle drifted out into the current and began to sink; within fifteen minutes only the smokestacks and a segment of the upper decks still showed above the surface. Rescuers could only save about half of the passengers, and many who were not killed by the initial blast drowned in midstream. All told, about half of the 280 people on the Moselle died, the biggest steamboat catastrophe to that time.

Between 1816 and 1848 steamboat explosions in the United States cost almost 1, 800 lives and destroyed 230 boats, most due to poor boiler design and inexperienced engineers. When two other steamboats blew up within weeks of the Moselle, the Oronoko in the West and the Pulaski in the East, Congress finally passed regulatory legislation for “the better security of the lives of the passengers.” The 1838 bill proved largely ineffective, however, and it would take another series of disasters in the late 1840s to bring about effective safety legislation in 1852.

Source: Louis C. Hunter, Steamboat on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949).

Obstacle Course. Mark Twain made the tobacco-chewing, ever-cussing, always-wary riverboat pilot a larger-than-life figure in American culture, but he did not exaggerate the dangers such men encountered. Huge snags, sandbars, and constantly shifting channels made the Mississippi River a two-thousand-mile obstacle course, described by Charles Dickens in 1842 as “an enormous ditch … choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and forest trees.” Every spring high water scoured and collapsed the banks of the Ohio and the Mississippi, sending huge trees crashing into the swirling waters; John James Audubon noted sycamores fourteen feet in diameter on the Ohio shore in the 1830s. At one time the Red River was blocked by a two-hundred-mile-long raft of trees. With no levees or concrete channels, in big flood periods the ever-curving lower Mississippi was especially prone to cutting across one of its meanders to make a new channel for itself. Steamboat pilots had to rely on experience, instincts, and word-of-mouth to guide their way through the treacherous and shifting channels, and they did not always make it. One narrow defile on the Ohio carried the nickname The Graveyard because of the number of wrecks that occurred in its snag-choked channel.

Floating Palaces. The dangers of the river contrasted sharply with the luxurious accommodations available onboard the finer steamboats, which featured grand saloons running the three-hundred-foot length of the boat; elegant, heavy wood furniture; soaring gilded ceilings; and (on the fanciest boats) mirror-lined walls even in the engine rooms. Those who could afford them traveled in private cabins on the upper decks while poorer passengers slept on the freight decks, using cotton bales or grain sacks for beds. For the well-off, fine food, drinking, and gambling broke the monotony of the two-week journeys up the Mississippi and Ohio. So too did the famous steamboat races.

Steamboat Races. Organized races between rival steamers became the stuff of legend on the Mississippi, but far more common were the impromptu battles between captains who tried to beat each other to the next landing to pick up more business. These chance encounters often erupted into races that lasted for days, with excited passengers egging the captains on to put on more fuel and speed. The connection between racing and steamboat boiler explosions has always been difficult to make precisely, but it was certainly true that many engineers and captains tied down safety valves on steam engines and stoked their boilers with the most flammable resinous woods to maximize speed. Federal safety legislation in 1838 and 1852 largely ended this sort of activity, but races continued to occur well after the Civil War.