tion today. Only here and there was to be found anything more mechanically pretentious than a crude mill or forge; tools were largely hand made, in the roughest fashion as occasion required; and "within the thickness of a worn shilling" was the accepted phrase for which our exact science has substituted "machine fit." Of steam engines there were almost none, for such developments as those of Watt and Bolton were by law confined to England. Indeed, the records show only three exported from that country in a quarter century—one for the pump works at Chantilly, France, one for Aaron Burr's Bank under its broad charter as a Water Company, and one, still later, for Fulton's steamboat. In 1796, an American built engine was as much an oddity as the first Ford car.

But John Stevens was undismayed. Self taught in mechanical principles by studying Savery, Newcomen, Watt, he set his heart upon a steamboat of his own. An early sharer of his enthusiasm was his sister's husband, Robert R. Livingston, the noted Chancellor of New York, before whom Washington took his oath as first President, and the accepted head of his widely connected, highly influential family.

These two associated with themselves, as a third partner, Nicholas J. Roosevelt. His share in the work was to be the actual building of the boat, at a spot upon the Passaic River, near the old foundry of Peter Schuyler-a settlement then called Second River but since known as Belleville. There, in fact, the work began, only to come immediately under the burden of differences of opinion.

It was the Chancellor's theory that the engine should drive the boat by pumping water up from under her bottom and out through a pipe in the stern. This, of course, was not a new idea; among others who advocated it was Benjamin Franklin. But both Roosevelt and Stevens considered it would prove inefficient, the former holding that more direct effect would be obtained by putting wheels at the sides of the boat and the latter-ever a step ahead-insisting that a wheel or wheels in the stern would be the ultimate solution.

Livingston's purse-strings were just then far longer than Stevens's-indeed, as far as "ready hard" went, they always were,

for the Colonel could never rest content with but a single progressive activity. Again, it was Livingston, with half a New York Legislature made up of powerful relatives or connections, who had all the influence; he alone could secure from the State the exclusive rights upon the Hudson which would allow him, for a boat propelled by steam or fire, at the rate of four miles per hour," a monopoly of the river.

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"I could wish," wrote Roosevelt to Stevens, "that either your plan or mine could be tried instead." And Stoudenger, the foreman who was to superintend the making and assembling of the mechanical details, remarked: "I will make the drawings and build the boat exactly as the Chancellor wants—but don't blame me if it won't work."

After long argument, the Chancellor prevailed. The crude little craft, finished in 1798, actually did run upon the Passaic. The Spanish Minister and other dignitaries invited to attend the trial trip were first amazed to silence at her actually moving, then stirred to extravagant praise when she made as much as three and a half miles an hour. The Chancellor wrote from Clermont: "I anxiously expect the fruit of our labours in seeing you arrive here at the rate of 5 miles an hour on the day you have set. Mr. De Labeyarre has prepared his battery to give you a salute when you pass Red Hook!"

But the horizontal wheel-and-pump machine was too much for its boat; in a very short time, to the infinite disappointment of all concerned, the pipe connections were torn apart by the racking strain and the seams of the boat itself were started.

Roosevelt's attention wandered off to pumps for the Philadelphia Water Company, and guns for the new frigates, while Livingston soon was absorbed in the duties of international diplomacy and his Ministry to France. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, John Stevens, in the face of several cruelly disappointing failures, still persisted. On the lower lawn at Hoboken he erected a tiny summer house in which he made drawings and long calculations; in the primitive shops of McQueen and others on the New York side he ordered cylinders and shafting on designs of his own. His hope and his purpose may

well stand in his own words:

Could we be so fortunate as to hit upon such a mode of applying the steam engine to the purposes of navigation as would enable us to avail ourselves to the full extent of its powers, the reciprocal exchange of the production and manufactures of one country for those of another would result. The earth would everywhere be stimulated to bring forth with its utmost vigor; civilization and the arts would rapidly spread themselves over the whole face of the globe. Then, and not till then, might it be said with truth that man was really master of this world and that everything in it was subservient to his will.

This language he himself called "rhapsody," yet it does express his never-to-be-abandoned object.

"Wheels in the stern" was his constant maxim-today, we might call it his slogan. The sculls and the water wheels of the ancient, ever resourceful Chinese, gave him one hint; the screw of Archimedes supplied another. Though it doubtless could not be claimed for any one man that he actually invented the screw propeller, certain it is that, in its development, John Stevens was thirty years ahead of everyone else.

The single-screw "smoke jack fly," as his friends were wont derisively to name it, appeared in a boat launched from Hoboken in 1803. One of its first casualties was the explosion of its boiler, necessitating the prompt building of another and a stronger. But its main defect appears to have been recognized by the Colonel as poor steering qualities, that later very familiar tendency "to run in circles."

A year later, the Colonel was taking into his confidence that noted Philadelphia physicist, Dr. Robert Hare, Jr., inventor of the oxygen blowpipe. He wrote to him:

My present method is in various respects preferable.

To the extremity of an axis passing through the stern of the boat is fixed a number of arms or wings like those of a windmill. These arms are made сараble of ready adjustment, so as that the most advantageous obliquity of their angle may be attained after a few trials. It is absolutely necessary to have at least two, revolving in opposite directions, to prevent the tendency to rotation which a single wheel gives to the boat.

The italics appearing in this quotation are added to emphasize how far advanced was the Colonel in the proper principle of what he actually had constructed, the first twin screw steamboat in the world. To look at the rough sketch which he made

upon the margin of this letter to Dr. Hare is to see a surprisingly good representation of the commonplace modern propeller. Moreover, it was not carried upon a shaft through the sternpost, like those of Ericsson and others, so many years after, but supported by struts outside the boat's hull.

Steam pressures of the day were not up to the demands of the propeller. To most experimenters, both here and abroad, anything over ten pounds to the square inch was something to be "viewed with grave concern." When Colonel Stevens sent his eldest son to England, to see Watt and submit the design of a boiler calculated to stand a hundred pounds, the great Briton himself, by then advanced in years, declared the design far too perilous to consider. In point of fact, not enough was known about packings and tight joints, in that early day, to make highpressure steam at all a comfortable shipmate. Under such circumstances, this first real steamboat upon the Hudson River suffered in efficiency but nevertheless made many trips from Hoboken to the Battery. The lineal motion of its piston was transferred through a yoke to two shackle bars, as John Stevens called them, though modern engineers will recognize them more readily as connecting rods,-thence to short shafts cogged into the propeller shafting.

The late Professor James Renwick of Columbia, has left this record behind him:

I recollect a crowd collected at the Battery, back in 1801 or 5. When I asked what was going forward, I was told that "Jack" Stevens was about to cross the Hudson in a steamboat. I went down to the pier and saw the boat. The greasy individual in the stern beside Jack was, I believe, Robert Stevens. I could see the engine and the boiler but I could see nothing, above the water, to show how the boat was driven. Long afterward, John Ward, who was in that crowd, told me of seeing the engine and the propellers set up in McQueen's shop. That was the first twin screw in the world and, forty years after it, as luck would have it, we two were on a committee appointed by the American Institute to decide whether Colonel Stevens had invented it.

The "long afterward" came when the Colonel's sons, in 1844, cleaned up the old engine, restored the propellers and exhibited them anew. The boat then made eight miles an hour, a considerable speed when it is recalled that later craft, such as the

Clermont, never claimed more than five and a half. Indeed, as to that, Fulton himself is on record as believing that this latter was about the "maximum practicable and paying speed."

To proceed upon a larger scale became, in 1805, the Colonel's purpose. In view of the boiler difficulties mentioned, he determined to take what he considered to be really a step backward, to adopt Nicholas Roosevelt's suggestion of paddle-wheels. These, said the Colonel, would, without doubt, eventually be replaced by the stern wheel; for the present, however, they would suffice. Accordingly, he laid down his plans for a vessel one hundred feet long, sixteen feet beam, and six feet four "from keel floor to lower deck beams." Provided he himself supplied the beams, planks, engine and machinery, he found that Nathan Sayre, Joseph Morgan, and their associate shipwrights, would build her for nine hundred dollars.

At this promising point, John Stevens ran into a most formidable obstacle. It is, of course, well known to all that Chancellor Livingston came back from France, bringing with him renewed enthusiasm, a Bolton and Watt engine and Robert Fulton. Equally well known is it that the Livingston influence promptly procured from the New York Legislature a renewal of the grant of the Hudson River for boats "propelled by steam or fire. Before this monopoly had been proved unconstitutional, much bitterness had been engendered, much time had been lost in useless litigation and, in the end, it took no less a person than Chief Justice Marshall to read the law aright and establish federal supervision of interstate commerce. Until that time came, the waters that ran below Castle Point were no longer open to John Stevens.

However, he completed his new boat, naming her, perhaps as hope arisen from the ashes of his plans, the Phoenix. With the Hudson denied him, he proposed sending her down the Jersey coast to the Delaware and, to accomplish a voyage then unheard of for a steam vessel, he put her in the hands of Robert, just then turned twenty-one.

On half a dozen sheets, of note-paper size, Robert has left us the laconic story of that voyage. The Journal of the Steam boat Phanix's passage begins: