It is fortunate that, in one particular, Livingston”s influence
did not prevail with Fulton, for the American Minister was
distinctly prejudiced against paddle wheels
It is fortunate that, in one particular, Livingston”s influence
did not prevail with Fulton, for the American Minister was
distinctly prejudiced against paddle wheels. Although Livingston
had previously ridden as a passenger on Morey”s sternwheeler at
the rate of five miles an hour, yet he had turned a deaf ear when
his partner in experimentation, Nicholas J. Roosevelt, had
insisted strongly on ‘throwing wheels over the sides.’ At the
beginning, Fulton himself was inclined to agree with Livingston
in this respect; but, probably late in 1803, he began to
investigate more carefully the possibilities of the paddle wheel
as used twice in America by Morey and by four or five
experimenters in Europe. In 1804 an eight-mile trip which Fulton
made on the Charlotte Dundas in an hour and twenty minutes
established his faith in the undeniable superiority of two
fundamental factors of early navigation–paddle wheels and
British
engines. Fulton”s splendid fame rests, and rightly so, on his
perception of the fact that no mere ingenuity of design could
counterbalance weakness, uncertainty, and inefficiency in the
mechanism which was intended to make a steamboat run and keep
running. As early as November, 1803, Fulton had written to
Boulton and Watt of Birmingham that he had ‘not confidence in any
other engines’ than theirs and that he was seeking a means of
getting one of those engines to America. ‘I cannot establish the
boat without the engine,’ he now emphatically wrote to James
Monroe, then Ambassador to the Court of St. James. ‘The question
then is shall we or shall we not have such boats.’
