"From that time I have pursued the idea to this day, with unremitted assiduity, yet do frankly confess that it has been the most imprudent scheme that ever I engaged in."
Fitch's original idea was to use paddle wheels, which later became standard practice on river boats, and he built a model of brass with wooden wheels which he tested "on a small stream on Joseph Longstreth's meadow, about half a mile from Davisville, in Southampton township."
It worked well, but the drag of the water was too great for the wheel buckets. Fitch had a rethink and came up with the idea of canoe paddles - of which he had seen plenty during his travels in the wilderness.
Like many inventors before and after him, Fitch found that his idea brought him nothing but frustration, grief and misery.
Congress greeted his request for support with hardly-disguised amusement, and he traipsed around the legislatures of all the middle states, receiving plenty of encouragement but no financial help.
Finally, he returned to see Benjamin Franklin, to whom he had spelled out his ideas in the fall of 1785. The great scientist, then in the autumn of his life, opened his desk drawer and offered Fitch five or six dollars.
"I esteem it one of the most imprudent acts of my life, that I had not treated the insult with the indignity which he merited, and stamped the poltry ore under my feet," the irate Fitch wrote of this derisory gesture.
Fitch's big problem was that he was too gullible. After he told Franklin of his plans, the great man lectured the Philosophical Society on the subject as though the idea were his. When he asked another inventor, Arthur Donaldson, to join him as a partner, Donaldson announced his intention to patent the idea himself.
Just in time, Fitch got a 14-year patent from the New Jersey legislature and, with other states following that example, he felt confident enough to go to Philadelphia and set up a company to built an experimental boat.
Assisted by a Dutch watchmaker called Henry Voight, he built his own steam engine and installed it in a model, which performed well at the end of July, 1786. A full-scale boat followed, and this was trialled successfully on August 22nd, 1787, despite the fact that the twelve-inch cylinder was nowhere near large enough to produce adequate power.
Did Fitch invent the jet engine? This cross-sectional, pencil-and-ink drawing by Fitch (above), reportedly made in 1787, appears to show a jet-powered steamboat. The drawing is now in the Library of Congress. Below: The 1788 boat. The mechanical oars are now at the stern.
Another battle now surfaced, involving a rival inventor named James Rumsey of Virginia, who claimed the steamboat was his own invention. Fitch demonstrated to the satisfaction of most people that this was not the case, and meanwhile the company went on to the next stage.
This should have involved a new engine with a multi-tubed boiler and a new cylinder of 18-inch diameter. But the cylinder was defective, so they retained the old one and found a longer, narrower boat to put it in. At the same time, the twelve side paddles were exchanged for three larger ones operating over the stern.
It was tested on a 20-mile trip to Burlington at the end of July, 1788, cheered all the way by massive crowds, and several more successful voyages followed. On October 12th, the vessel carried 30 passengers from Philadelphia to Burlington, sailing against the tide, in three hours 10 minutes, but just as success seemed within Fitch's grasp, fresh problems arose.
Voight pulled out of the enterprise, along with many of the shareholders, and the inventor was forced to search again for help as he tried to develop his idea into a commercially-viable scheme.
