Steam: The Untold Story of America's First Great Invention (review)

Inventors long have fascinated historians, especially historians of technology and industrial progress. From Samuel Smiles's Lives of the Engineers (1862) through modern classics from David McCullough (The Great Bridge [1972] and The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal [1977]), stories about quirky individuals obsessed with technical problems find a ready audience. The present work by Andrea Sutcliffe certainly belongs on the shelf of stories about quirky, obsessive individuals; but as history of technology, this work will disappoint serious scholars. From its misleading title (steam was hardly an American invention even if the steamboat was) to its irrelevant, unsung-heroes-fade-away conclusion, this book—like the early steamboats it describes—never quite delivers.

The story Sutcliffe seeks to tell begins with the rivalry between John Rumsey and John Fitch, two quasi-engineers of the 1780s who were interested in finding a way to drive boats against the currents of America's major rivers. Rumsey was famous for first trying to use the current itself to spin the mechanism of propulsion in a kind of water-walking conveyance; Fitch may well have designed the first true steamboat, but his inability to deliver a working prototype, his irascible personality, and his obsession with securing legal privileges and royalties (rather than earning profits) all conspired to deprive him of the fame and fortune he believed he deserved. Steam begins with the competition between these two and their occasional intersections with famous men (and potential patrons) such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. Soon enough the tale picks up a larger cast of characters: Oliver Evans, John Stevens, Robert Fulton, Joel Barlow, Robert Livingston, William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Gibbons and Ogden (of the famous Supreme Court case), and even, in a parting cameo, Henry Miller Shreve.

What brings these men together is a web of lies, charges, counterclaims, misrepresentations, and dirty tricks that seems to make no sense except as manifestations of inherently nasty and dishonest personalities. Here is where the book does not succeed as history. Thanks to impressive research, the facts march across page after page as these oddball competitors stalk each other in pursuit of the fabulous riches they believe await the first man to secure an iron-clad monopoly on steam navigation. But Sutcliffe, who works as a writer more than a scholar, does not place their behavior in any sensible interpretive context. Details abound, but they contribute to no real argument. Movers and shakers (Washington, Franklin, et al.) seem always trying to brush these guys off—with good reason, as Fitch especially seems to have been a terrible pest. Weird domestic triangles mark the private lives of both Fitch and Fulton, but what could possibly link sexual sharing with steamboat invention?

A significant historical theme could be built (but is not) out of the fact that every one of these inventors spent more time seeking legal protection and preference than he spent in the workshop trying to invent, which implies a great deal about science, patronage, and entrepreneurship at the turn of the century. Another organizing frame might have come from what these quirky biographies say about the motivations of the actors. But actions in this tale come on almost randomly (note card after note card), sometimes logical, occasionally inexplicable, often spiteful. Despite an impressive bibliography, Sutcliffe makes no reference to classic historical studies that would help set the context: Robert G. Albion's work on New York Port or Louis C. Hunter's work on steamboats and steam power in America. Instead, we get a story of one damn thing after another, culminating in the minor injustice of Robert Fulton getting credit in the history books for inventing the American steamboat, while the likes of Gibbons and Ogden horn in on the monopoly pretensions of all the inventors.

Sutcliffe's volume reminds me of Simon Winchester's The Map that Changed the World...