Abstract
IN the June issue of Mechanical Engineering, Mr. W. H. Richardson gives a sketch of the career of?John Fitch: Patriot, Martyr, Pioneer Steamboat Inventor?. Fitch was born in 1743 and died by his own hand in 1798, having during the last fifteen years of his life devoted himself with fluctuating fortune to the promotion of steamboat enterprises. He was the first in the world to form a steamboat company and to place a steamboat in service for carrying passengers. His work was done at a time when there were no engineering shops in America and when the export of machinery from England to the United States was prohibited, and there can be little question that had he had the assistance of Watt and Murdock and their fellows, his schemes could have been brought to a successful issue. Above all, however, he was a man of vision, and while realising the great value of steamboats on the great waterways of America, he once wrote of steam navigation, that?The Grand and Principle Object must be on the Atlantick, which would soon overspread the wild forests of America with people and make us the most oppulent Empire on Earth?. The earliest experiments of Fitch were made on the Delaware between 1786 and 1790, and were contemporary with those of Rumsey on the Potomac and of Miller and Symington in Scotland. To-day there is a monument at Trenton, on the?John Fitch Way? beside the Delaware, marking the site of the New Jersey terminus?of the first merchant marine highway in the world".
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John Fitch, Pioneer of Steam Navigation. Nature 130, 161 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130161c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130161c0