Fitch, meanwhile, was suffering personally. Chronically short of cash, hounded by debtors, his clothing in tatters, and having exhausted the generosity of his friends, he was becoming a sorry sight. And the problem refused to be solved.
Then, just as everything looked hopeless, Fitch persuaded his fellow directors to finance the making of a new-style steam condenser for the engine. It worked like a dream.
He wrote later: "On the 16th of April (1790), got our work completed, and tried our Boat again; and altho the wind blew very fresh at the north east, we reigned Lord High Admirals of the Delaware, and no boat in the River could hold its way with us, but all fell astern."
The summer of 1790 put total success tantalisingly within John Fitch's eager grasp.
Her mechanical oars churning away at the stern, his steamboat ploughed her course between Philadelphia, Trenton, Burlington, Chester and Wilmington, covering perhaps as much as 3,000 passenger-carrying miles between mid-June and mid-September and beating the sailboats on the river "three to one."
A letter in the New York Magazine said it all: "Fitch's steamboat really performs to a charm. It is a pleasure, while one is on board of her in a contrary wind, to observe her superiority over the river shallops, sloops, ships, &c., who, to gain anything, must make a zigzag course, while this, our new invented vessel, proceeds in a direct line.
"Fitch is certainly one of the most ingenious creatures alive, and will certainly make his fortune. I am told he is now in contemplation to build a steam vessel on a larger scale, which may be capable of carrying freights and passengers to the West Indies, and even to Europe."
But now, sadly, it all started to unravel for Fitch and his fellow adventurers. In order to fulfill an undertaking he had made with the state of Virginia, he needed to complete and demonstrate a second steamboat by November 9th.
Work on the Perseverance was well advanced when a storm tore her free from her moorings and left her high and dry on an island. By the time repairs were made it was too late, and Fitch's company lost the chance of exclusive rights to operate steamboats on the Western rivers.
Fitch's dream of operating a fleet of fifty-ton steamboats on the Mississippi also failed, his struggle with Rumsey flared again and his appeals for help to Thomas Jefferson fell on deaf ears.The directors of his company deserted him, and the Perseverance was abandoned to rot away. He sailed for France in 1793, hoping to interest that country in his invention.He could not have picked a worse moment - the revolution was at its height and all business was suspended. He went to England, and the following year worked his passage back to the United States.
In 1796, he converted a small yawl to steam power, the engine driving a screw or propeller, and reportedly took Robert Fulton for trips around a lake called the Collect in New York.
FITCH'S propeller-driven steamboat of 1796. The propeller can be clearly seen. Robert Fulton, later to be known as the father of the American steamboat, reportedly took several trips on this vessel and Fitch demonstrated its working principles to him. This, however, is debatable - at the time in question, Fulton was in England
"IT is to be propelled through the water by the force of steam. The steam engine is to be similar to the late improved steam engines in Europe, those alterations excepted.
The cylinder is to be horizontal and the steam to work with equal force at each end thereof. The mode of forming a vacuum is believed to be entirely new; also of letting the water into it and of letting it off against the atmosphere without any friction.
The undertakers are also of opinion that their engine will work with an equal force to those late improved engines, it being a twelve inch cylinder...
Each revolution of the axle tree moves twelve oars five and a half feet.
As six oars come out of the water six more enter the water; which makes a stroke of about eleven feet each revolution. The oars work perpendicularly and make a stroke similar to the paddle of a canoe..."
And so to the last, sad chapter. He went West to claim his Kentucky lands, only to find them overrun by squatters. And although he was eventually successful in having them evicted, the struggle seemed to drain the last ounce of fight out of him.He passed his final years in the house of tavern keeper Alexander M'Conn in Bardstown, Kentucky, trying to drink himself to death. He persuaded M'Conn to provide him with a pint of whisky a day, in exchange for the deeds to 150 acres of land. When this didn't work, he made it two pints a day, handing over the deeds to another 150 acres.
Still he survived, and sometime between June 25th and July 18th, 1798, he decided to take his own life. He had been ill, and his doctor had prescribed an anodyne. But instead of taking the opium pills as directed, he saved them up and swallowed a dozen all at once. He died in his sleep.
