The first boat ever to be moved by steam power was designed by a Frenchman Jacques Perier and tested on the Seine in Paris in 1775. But the first really successful steamboat was built by Perier’s fellow countryman, the Marquis Claude de Jouffroyd’Abbans. His craft which was 141 feet long and equipped with straight-paddled side wheels travelled several hundred yards against the current on the Saone at Lyons on July 25, 1783.
Among early American pioneers was James Rumsey who in 1786 drove a boat at four miles an hour on the Potomac River, propelled by a jet of water pumped out at the stern. Between 1786 and 1790 John Fitch experimented in the Delaware River at Philadelphia with different methods of propulsion, including paddle wheels a screw propeller and steam-driven oars.
The first to apply successfully the principle of steam to screw propellers was John Stevens whose boat, equipped with two propellers was John Stevens whose boat, equipped with two propellers, and crossed the Hudson River in 1804. However, his achievements was soon eclipsed by Robert Fulton’s 150-foot long paddle wheeler Clermont which in 1807 covered the 150 miles from New York to Albany in 30 hours at a maximum speed of five miles an hour. With Fulton in command on the Hudson, Stevens looked elsewhere, and in 1808 his new boat, the Phoenix, sailed out of New York harbor to become the first steamboat ever to go to sea.
Both Stevens and Fulton were following in the steps of the Scottish inventor William Symington who in 1802 constructed a steamboat in Scotland, the Charlotte Dundas, which was used as a tug on the forth and Clyde Canal. The Charlotte Dundas was a paddle-wheel steamer used this method of propulsion.
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