John Fitch (1743 - 1798)

Born 21 Jan 1743 in Windsor, Connecticut, British Colonial America

Ancestors

Descendants

Died 2 Jul 1798 at age 55 in Bardstown, Nelson County, Kentucky

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Biography

John Fitch is a DAR Patriot Ancestor, A039980.

First Lieutenant John Fitch served with 1st Regiment, Hunterdon County Militia, New Jersey Militia during the American Revolution.

John Fitch is Notable.

John Fitch was an American inventor, clockmaker, entrepreneur, and engineer. He was most famous for operating the first steamboat service in the United States.

Industrial Revolution. Episode 9: Paddle Steamer (1787) - John Fitch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KYina6GejU&t=115s

Fitch built a forty-five foot boat that was propelled by twelve steam-powered oars. He successfully demonstrated the boat on the Delaware River in August 1787, and received his first U.S. patent in 1791. In the decade after 1785, Fitch built steamboats propelled by ranked paddles, paddle wheels, and screw propellers. By 1788, Fitch had launched a steamboat carrying passengers between Philadelphia and New Jersey, and one making regular runs across the Delaware River. But early financial losses, uncertain investors, and a skeptical public prevented commercial success. Nonetheless, Fitch had demonstrated the feasibility of steam navigation, a technology central to American progress in the nineteenth century.[1]

Fitch built that steamboat, but his invention brought him nothing but misery. A victim of the vagaries of the early U.S. patent system, he spent years trying to convince federal and state lawmakers and prominent scientists that his invention merited protection. And he was also plagued by the assertions of Virginian James Rumsey who also claimed to be the marker inventor of the first steamboat.[2]

Fitch was born to Joseph Fitch and Sarah Shaler in Windsor, Connecticut, on 21 January 1743, on a farm that is part of present-day South Windsor, Connecticut. He received little formal schooling and eventually apprenticed himself to a clockmaker. During his apprenticeship, Fitch was not allowed to learn or even observe watchmaking (he later taught himself how to repair clocks and watches).

He married Lucy Roberts 29 December 1767. Following this apprenticeship in Hartford, he opened an unsuccessful brass foundry in East Windsor, Connecticut, and then a brass and silversmith business in Trenton, New Jersey, which succeeded for eight years but was destroyed by British troops during the American Revolution.

He served briefly during the Revolution, mostly as a gunsmith working for the New Jersey militia. He left his unit after a dispute over a promotion but continued his work repairing and refitting arms in Trenton. In the fall of 1777, Fitch provided beer and tobacco to the Continental Army in Philadelphia. During the following winter and spring, he provided beer, rum and other supplies to troops at Valley Forge.

In 1780, he began work as a surveyor in Kentucky where he recorded a land claim of 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) for himself. In the spring of 1782, while surveying in the Northwest Territory, he was captured by Indians and turned over to the British, who eventually released him.

By 1785, Fitch was done with surveying and settled in Warminster, Pennsylvania, where he began working on his ideas for a steam-powered boat

Fitch had seen a drawing of an early British Newcomen atmospheric engine in an encyclopedia, but Newcomen engines were huge structures designed to pump water out of mines. He had somehow heard about the more efficient steam engine developed by James Watt in Scotland in the late 1770's, but there was not a single Watt engine in America at that time, nor would there be for many years . As a result, Fitch attempted to design his own version of a steam engine. He moved to Philadelphia and engaged the clockmaker and inventor Henry Voigt to help him build a working model and place it on a boat.

With no money and few prospects, Fitch, now forty-one, pondered the possibilities of marker steam-powered travel. He built a working steamboat model, then began a year-long odyssey to seek financial, legal, political, and scientific support for his venture. Because there was as yet no federal patent system, Fitch made an extensive road trip in 1786 to obtain patents from state legislatures and promote his idea to the nation's scientific community. In Philadelphia, the influential American Philosophical Society gave Fitch a lukewarm reception, probably because marker Benjamin Franklin,who had different ideas about powering boats, was unenthusiastic. The Virginia Assembly also rejected Fitch's device, despite James Madison's support, in favor of Rumsey's boat, which was endorsed by George Washington. Fitch finally prevailed in New Jersey, where he was granted the exclusive right to build and operate steamboats on the state's waters for fourteen years.

The first successful trial run of his steamboat Perseverance was made on the Delaware River on 22 August 1787.[3]

Fitch promptly established a company, assembled investors, and took on as a partner, Henry Voight, a Philadelphia clockmaker and "a superior mechanical genius." In July 1786, he successfully tested a new model and built a full-sized vessel. On August 22, 1787, Fitch unveiled his strange contraption to the curious Philadelphians assembled on the banks of the Delaware River. They watched the boat move upriver against the current at a stately speed of three miles an hour. Among the spectators that day were delegates to the Constitutional Convention, who reportedly adjourned their deliberations to watch Fitch's demonstration. Not long after, the delegates adopted the Constitution's patent clause-promoting "progress in science and useful arts"-unanimously and without debate.

After Fitch's triumph, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, and Virginia issued patents for his steamboat. In July 1788, he launched a second, larger vessel, sixty feet long and powered by a steam-driven paddle wheel that made passenger voyages from Philadelphia to Burlington, New Jersey. Fitch then obtained financing for a third boat, which performed well enough that in 1790 Fitch's company offered the first steamboat passenger service on the Delaware between Philadelphia, the New Jersey towns of Bordentown, Burlington, and Trenton, and Wilmington, Delaware. Few people used the service, however, so the company soon failed.

Fitch and Rumsey both received federal patents for a steamboat in 1791. Flabbergasted and angry that the patent board, headed by Virginian Thomas Jefferson, refused to acknowledge that he had created and publicly demonstrated his boat first, Fitch in 1793 sailed to France and England in an unsuccessful quest for foreign backing. After returning to America in 1794 he built a screw-propeller steamboat that he demonstrated on Collect Pond in New York City. But no one was interested. In 1796, Fitch traveled to Kentucky hoping for a better reception. Instead, he found squatters on his western land claims.

Fitch had also received a patent in 1791 from France, and in 1793, having given up hope of building a steamboat in America, he left for France, where an American investor, Aaron Vail, had promised to help him build a boat there. But Fitch arrived just as the Reign of Terror was beginning, and his plans had to be abandoned. He made his way to London to make an attempt there, but that also failed. He returned to the United States in 1794 and made a few more tries to build a steamboat.

Failing this, he moved to Bardstown, Kentucky in 1797, where he hoped to sell some of the lands he had acquired there in the early 1780's, and use the proceeds to build a steamboat for use on the Ohio or Mississippi River. He arrived to find settlers occupying his properties, resulting in legal disputes that occupied him until his death on 2 July 1798 in Bardstown.

While living in Kentucky, Fitch continued to work on steam engine ideas. He built two models. One was lost in a fire in Bardstown, but the other was found in the attic of his daughter's house in Ohio in 1849. That model still exists at the Ohio Historical Society Museum in Columbus. In the 1950's, a curator from the Smithsonian Museum examined it and concluded that it was "the prototype of a practical land-operating steam engine," meant to operate on tracks – in other words, a steam locomotive.

A life of continual failure, frustration and litigation wore Fitch down. He began drinking heavily once he returned to Bardstown in 1797. In the end, Fitch took his own life by ingesting an overdose of opium pills. He died on 2 July 1798 and was buried in Bardstown.

Original Document[4]

John Fitch's Petition and Remonstrance against James Rumsey, September 26, 1789.

"To the honorable the Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania."

The Petition and Remonstrance of John Fitch, of the City of Philadelphia.

Respectfully sheweth,

THAT Your petitioner hath seen the printed bill for granting to James Rumsey certain inventions; some of the clauses of which bill your petitioner apprehends will interfere with his rights; but before your petitioner proceeds to point them out, he begs leave, in the most sincere manner, to thank the honorable house, for their having struck out of the said bill, such parts as appeared to them to oppose the grant heretofore made to your petitioner.

The parts in the printed bill to which your petitioner principally objects are as follow:

First, The clause respecting "Rumsey's Boilers". This clause is couched in such general terms, that it will prevent your petitioner from making use of any pipe or tube for water passing through the fire; a mode which your petitioner introduced into the plan he presented to Congress in August, 1785, and hath since in part used; and which clause being artfully governed by the last providing clause in the bill, would effectually deprive your petitioner of receiving any benefit from the said providing clause; because it limits the time of discovery to the year 1784, a period well known by Mr. Rumsey's agents, to be prior to your petitioner's confessed pretensions, and must have been inserted by them for the express purpose of circumventing your petitioner's rights; while, at the same time, it gives to the said Mr. Rumsey every invention or improvement, which he hath either made or adopted since that time; and therefore, carries upon the face of it an undue preference to Mr. Rumsey, in opposition to every citizen of the United States; for not an atom of proof is before the house of even Mr. Rumsey's having invented the boiling of water in pipes, so early as the year 1784; but on the contrary, Mr. Joseph Barnes, agent for the said Mr. Rumsey, positively swears, that his boiler was invented in the winter of 1785–6, which was several months subsequent to the invention of your petitioner, as laid before Congress, and the Philosophical Society. Therefore to confine all other persons to the year 1784, and to give a retrospective extent of two years, to a man whose very representative and partner swears to a point which proves he was not entitled to it until the winter of 1785–6, is a grant and indulgence which the honorable house surely could never have intended; but must have been led into by the hasty manner in which this business was urged forward by the friends of the bill.–And further, the said clauses give and grant to Mr. Rumsey, every improvement on the said boiler which he may have made since the year 1784, and prohibits to all other persons any improvements which they may have made upon the boiling of water in tubes or pipes; even though their inventions should actually have originated prior to Mr. Rumsey's, as is absolutely the case with your petitioner's. This he will fully prove to the satisfaction of the representatives of Pennsylvania, if he may be permitted, by his council, to shew the same; when your petitioner will point out the impropriety of the general tenor of the bill, and the particular injury he will sustain by its passing in its present form: and though your petitioner does not boast of great connections to support his just rights, yet he flatters himself that there resides among the representatives of Pennsylvania, an earnest disposition to do ample justice to the most insignificant citizen; and that they will protect and defend him from either insult or injury, whilst looking up to them for the preservation of his rights.–The wrong which would be done by this bill, limited to the year 1784, may extend far and wide: nay, the recent invention mentioned in Mr. Ofwald's paper of Wednesday last, respecting an improvement of Doctor Barker's mill, upon principles different from Mr. Rumsey's, would be swallowed up by the vortex of the last providing clause; and of the real existence of such an invention by a Mr. Tho. Chifin, your petitioner is fully convinced by an examination at the Prothonotary's office, by which invention, a stream of water is conveyed down a perpendicular fixed tube, standing in the center of a trunk that is connected, and moves, with the horizontal arms of the mill, by which means the friction in Mr. Rumsey's mode, appears to be totally avoided, and yet, as the bill stands, Mr. Rumsey's agents have only to go to the office, adopt the plan of Mr. Chifin, and enter it as Mr. Rumsey's own, within the time limited by the bill; for it seems that time is to be extended to "Months " as appears by the bill.

Secondly, Because the clause respecting Mr. Rumsey's "Double Piston Machine, " by introducing the words "Air Vessels, " may directly interfere with your petitioner's rights and inventions (and which Mr. Rumsey never pretended to have invented) your petitioner having published in his pamphlet his intention of using "Air Vessels, " to his boat. And because this clause intrudingly and cunningly introduces the Steam Boat into the bill for latent purposes; which boat was expressly intended, by the honorable house, to be wholly struck out; and because this clause makes the honorable house speak a language, and assert as fact, that of which they have no fort of proof before them, viz. "That the fourth described machine " was originally invented for the use of his Steam Boat, thus making the honorable House Sponsors and Godfathers to an invention with which they are totally unacquainted; and because this clause artfully covers an intention of monopolizing the plan of pushing water thro' tubes in all cases, even to the preventing your petitioner from making use of them in his boat; which general grant the house must certainly never have intended, as your petitioner, by Doctor Franklin's publication in 1785, hath, in common with all other persons, an undoubted right to use this mode; which was evinced in his dispute, with Arthur Donaldson, and the consequent passing of your petitioner's law; even the Doctor acknowledges to have taken the thought from Monsieur Bernoulli, who wrote above 50 years ago: whereas should the last providing clause, respecting the limitation to the year 1784, take effect, the Doctor's free gift to the public, would be monopolized by Mr. Rumsey, and he permitted to enjoy an exclusive right to a mode, which your petitioner is able to prove, he had no fort of pretentions to, prior to your petitioner's dispute with Mr. Donaldson.

In short, your petitioner hath such numerous objections to the bill in its present form, that he prays he may be heard by council, at the bar of the house, and that they will not suffer so important a bill to be hurried through, without allowing time for a full and fair investigation thereof, and that your petitioner's property may be openly defended. And because the last providing clause, respecting "Sixty days notice " of matter of matters to be given in evidence, is dangerous to private rights, big with public mischief, and contravenes the whole principle of the patent bill, published by Congress; which, when it is passed into a law, will absolutely bind this state. This bill confines the said notice to special matters, which respect the specifications to be entered in their office, and does not extend to all sorts of evidence, as in the present instance; which in many cases, might prove of the most fatal consequence, to causes pending in the courts of justice, if this law should unhapily be introduced as a precedent–for there are a thousand cases, where it would be ruinous to a man if he was obliged to inform his antagonist of all the evidence intended to be produced against him, months before the trial.

This request of having time allowed, your petitioner conceives, cannot be reasonably objected to, by Mr. Rumsey's friends; because they appeared, at one time, to have expected that the honorable house would reject their whole bill, and accordingly made application to Congress, as may be seen by their petition recited in the votes of Friday last.

Your petitioner conceives himself in duty bound to apologize to the honorable house, for the trouble he hath so repeatedly given; but he hopes they will be so indulgent as to recollect, that he hath not made a single movement in this business, except when compelled to defend his just rights; and your petitioner begs leave, at the same time, to make a solemn appeal to the secret feelings of each individual member, whether he hath attempted, by any measures, directly, or indirectly, to influence their judgment; on the contrary, your petitioner resting upon the faith of the state, and the honor of its Representatives, hath honestly spurned at every idea of gaining a single voice, by any other mean than an open conviction of the justice of his cause, and hath left his rights to stand unprotected by party; he wishes, for the honor of citizens, and the dignity of their Representatives, that his opponents had observed the same delicacy, and that they had dared to submit the issue of the dispute, to the merits of their claims!

Philadelphia, September 26, 1789.

JOHN FITCH.

Sources

• https://www.invent.org/inductees/john-fitch

• https://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-394

• https://thisdayofhistory.com/2024/08/25/august-26-1791-john-fitch-patents-a-gamechanger/

BURIAL: Bardstown Courthouse Square in Bardstown, Nelson County, Kentucky

Find A Grave: Memorial #11086121 John Fitch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fitch_(inventor)

Books:

Lloyd's Steamboat Directory

Disasters on the Western Waters: Containing the History of the First Application of Steam, as a Motive Power

The Lives of John Fitch and Robert Fulton...History of the Early Steamboat Navigation on Western Waters

Full Accounts of All the Steamboat Disasters

A Complete List of Steamboats and All Other Vessels Now Afloat on the Western Rivers and Lakes, Maps of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers

Lists of Plantations on the Mississippi River, One Hundred Engravings and Forty Six Maps

• "United States Rosters of Revolutionary War Soldiers and Sailors, 1775-1783," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CS3Q-CSP2-D?cc=2546162&wc=WD6Q-RMS%3A1588792210 : 24 January 2018), New Jersey > image 435 of 876; Citing various published State Rosters, United States

• https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Fitch

• https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-technology/technology-biographies/john-fitch

• Stryker, William S. Official Register of the Officers and Men of New Jersey in the Revolutionary War Printed by Authority of the Legislature, Trenton, NJ, Wm. T. Nicholson & Co., Printers, 1872., p. 437.

For More Information:

• Prager, Frank D. The Autobiography of John Fitch. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: American Philosophical Society, 1976.

• Sutcliffe, Andrea. Steam: The Untold Story of America's First Great Invention. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.

• Web Sites:

"John Fitch: First Steamboat." PBS. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/fitch_hi.html. (accessed on July 7, 2005).