Steam: The Untold Story of America’s First Great Invention by Andrea Sutcliffe (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Andrea Sutcliffe. Steam: Tbe Untold Story ofAmerica' s First Great Invention. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2004. 286 pp. ISBN: 1403962618 ( cloth), $ 24.95. Andrea Sutcliffe's Steam, a very readable narrative history of the early development of steamboats in the United States, uses primary and secondary sources to describe the human drama of invention. During the Early Republic period in the United States, this drama encompassed society, politics, patent policy, law, business, and technological innovation. Sutcliffe constructs her narrative around the stories of two men , who each developed the idea for a boat powered by steam that could move upstream against a river current. John Fitch and James Rumsey were not the only two people to imagine this possibility,but unlike many others who dreamed up such a machine Benjamin Franklin among them), Fitch and Rurnsey each managed to build a working prototype. Fitch, the " tattered genius" ( xi) characterized as an uptight New Englander prone to illconceived outbursts, achieved the greater success of the two. His first boat, powered by oars driven by an overhead crank,underwent trials witnessed by the public and members of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in August 1787. In 1790, Fitch ran a scheduled steamboat service between Philadelphia and Trenton using a boat of a more advanced design. Rumsey, a " welldressed , wellmannered southern gentleman" ( xii), demonstrated his boat propelled by water jets On the Potomac River in December 1787. On the strength of his design and his connections to powerful figures including George Washington and Franklin,Rumsey formed a company the following year and traveled to England to secure a patent for his boat. Rumsey was offered a partnership with Boulton & Watt, builders of steani engines in England,to construct steamboats, but Rumsey deemed the terms disadvantageous and backed out of the deal. Troubles with patents, capital, and technological issues eventually overwhelmed both Fitch and Rumsey. The two inventors spent a tremendous amount of energy fighting each other ( and other inventors ) over exclusive rights to build and operate steamboats. Before ratification of the United States Constitution, patents were granted on a stateby state basis, and both Fitch and Rumsey spent considerable time and money traveling to ask legislatures for patents, or argue for the revocation of patents granted to the competition. These disputes spurred the development of a federal system of patents, but the new system was also plagued by problems. When a panel could not decide how to resolve conflicts between four applicants for a federal steamboat patent, they awarded patents,dated the same day,to all of them. Money also posed a problem,as the relatively low capitalization of the companies owned by Fitch and Runisey left little room for technological experimentation . Both inventors were denied access to proven Boulton & Watt steam engines,a crucial component of Robert Fulton' s later successful steamboats. And I i i? id, t> iwit* i. u# ln >]> 14{ 17;:. M[*< 18 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY 88 H * St- . f#. 4 . i 44 L*. 3 9 .... STEAM The Unfold Stof. y ,@ Z, of America' s #)* A1 L , First Grect Invention 4 1* .'/ "/'." :'/, 3/ fs««* ./, / f/' '# ,/* . r = ii. they therefore attempted to make engines without precisely machined parts. As a result, both attempts ended in failure. Rumsey died in England in December 1792, a day before a scheduled trial of his boat. And after many setbacks,Fitch died in Kentucky in 1798. The final three chapters of this book detail efforts by several entrepreneurs to build steamboats after Fitch and Rumsey. The most successful was Robert Fulton, who with the political backing of Robert Livingston, solved the capital, political, and technological problems that plagued the earlier inventors . Fulton inaugurated steamboat service along the Hudson River in August 1807, and the first navigation of the Mississippi River was completed by a Fultonbacked steamboat in winter 1811. The book concludes with Fulton's early death in 1815. Sutcliffe does a good job avoiding the literary flights of fancy in which some authors writing about historical subjects for commercial publishers love to indulge. Her prose alerts the careful reader of any impending speculation, and the text is adequately footnoted, but neither feature impairs its readability. The most irksome feature of the book is its title, which promises a history of steam power in general rather than just steamboats. Sutcliffe does not break much new historical ground, but her rich history of the early development of steamboats in the United States makes an interesting and pleasureable read. Eric Nystrom Johns Hopkins University Joseph R. Reinhart, ed. Two Germans in tbe CivilWar: Tbe Diary ofJobn Daeuble and tbe Letters of Gottfried Rentscbler,6tb Kentucky Volunteer Infantry. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004. 288 pp. ISBN: 1572332794 ( cloth), $ 32. 00. 11 his introduction,editor and translator Joseph Reinhart states sticcitictly why readers shotild be concerned with yet another published primary source account from the Civil War: " Here then are rare documentsthe wartime writings of German Americans from a border state" ( xxxWOGERMANS * WARA . Tlle Diary of John Daeable andthe V 1,¢ tters* Gottfried Rentsdiler, * 6,1,Kmmrky Winicerlitily IMPH R.REI? HARI 14(, 3tfthrGit& 24 vii). Reinhart' s pithy reasoning answers precisely why historians of the nineteenthcentury U.S., the Civil War,ethnicity. and the Ohio River Valley should sit up and pay attention to this tidy little volume. Few extant and accessible primary source accounts in the English language written by GermanAmericans in the war, and Kentuckians provided only slightly more. To have discovered the diary of John Daeuble in the hands of one of his descendants, along with Gottfried Rentschler's letters preserved exactly as they were published in the Louisville Anzeiger, is indeed unusually good luck; indeed, no more than 2, 000 Kentucky Germans served in the war. Yet Reinhart has also done the scholarly community a service by sharing these gems through careful editing and painstaking translation. The volume is arranged chronologically and by chapters based on major military events,from October 1863 to September 1864, with Rentschler' s letters interspersed among Daeuble' s diary entries. Rentschler' s letters tend to be more colorful and better written because they were created for public consumption at the time, but Daeuble's remarks about dayto day life are just as valuable. At first SUMMER 2005 89 ...