John Stevens (1749-1838)

Sources

Inventor

Background. Unlike many of the inventors of this period—men who were self-educated and started out relatively poor—John Stevens was born in 1749 to a wealthy Perth Amboy, New Jersey, family. He received his education at private schools and King’s College (now Columbia University). During the Revolutionary War he served as a colonel and the treasurer of New Jersey, and after the war spent several years developing his large estate and home on the Hudson River (the site of present-day Hoboken). Stevens seems to have been satisfied with this life of managing his private affairs until about 1788 when he learned of the steamboat inventions of John Fitch and James Rumsey. From that point on Stevens devoted his life (and much of his fortune) to steam-powered transportation.

Steamboat Innovator. Stevens read everything he could find on steam technology and soon was designing boilers and engines of his own. Since the federal government did not yet have a patent system, he motivated friends in Congress to pass the first U.S. patent law in 1790; the next year he was awarded patents on his boiler and engine improvements. Eager to put his ideas into practice, he formed a partnership with his brother-in-law Robert Livingston (later U.S. minister to France), and in 1798, through Livingston’s political connections, they acquired the exclusive rights to steamboat transportation in New York State. In 1803 he patented a multitubular boiler. By 1804 Stevens’s own steamboat, Little Juliana, with twin screw propellers, was operational. He made plans for a bigger boat, the one-hundred-foot Phoenix, which would carry passengers and freight between New York and Albany, but was beaten to it by Robert Fulton, whose Clermont made its historic trip in 1807. More disturbing was the fact that Fulton now had his own partnership with Livingston and had managed to get a monopoly on steamboat transportation on the Hudson River. Squeezed out of the New York market, Stevens sent his Phoenix to Philadelphia in 1808, the first time in history that a steamboat made a successful ocean voyage.

Railroad Pioneer. In 1810 Stevens gave the steamboat business over to his sons and turned his attention to railroads, and in 1812 published a detailed study called Documents Tending to Prove the Superior Advantages of Rail-ways and Steam-carriages over Canal Navigation. Three years later he received from the state of New Jersey the first railroad charter in the United States. In 1825, at the age of seventy-six, in order to prove to skeptics that steam railways were feasible, he designed and built his own steam locomotive, which he demonstrated on a track on his estate. After years of promoting his ideas, he managed to convince the New Jersey and Pennsylvania legislatures to appropriate money for railways; he is in fact considered the founder of the Pennsylvania railroad system.

Visionary. John Stevens was far ahead of his time. In addition to his steamship and railroad accomplishments, he also proposed other visionary concepts that eventually became reality, such as armored ships, a tunnel under the Hudson River, and an elevated railroad for New York City. For brilliant technical ideas as well as practical achievement he ranks with Robert Fulton. After Stevens’s death in 1838, his two sons carried on his legacy by becoming engineers and inventors.

Sources

L. Sprague De Camp and Catherine C. De Camp, The Story of Science in America (New York: Scribners, 1967);

Bernard Jaffe, Men of Science in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958).