The Great American Steamboat Race by Benton Rain Patterson Page A

much else as they could. The boat itself, however, was a ruin, and a new one would have to be built.
    By the end of July the new hull was finished, built not with Livingston’s money but with funds Fulton raised on his own, probably from Joel Barlow. This time the boat was seventy-four and a half feet long and approximately eight feet in the beam, substantially slimmer than the one that had been destroyed. When all was in readiness, Fulton issued an invitation for a public demonstration of the boat’s operation, asking France’s prestigious and influential National Institute to send a delegation to witness the demonstration, which was to take place on Tuesday, August 9, 1803, at 6 P . M . The boat was scheduled to make a run in the Seine between the Barriere des Bons Hommes and the Chaillot waterworks, a distance of about a mile.
    At the appointed time, a large crowd of curious onlookers gathered on the banks of the river to behold the spectacle to be put on by the strangelooking, fire-breathing, floating contraption that would attempt to navigate the Seine. The event was recorded in the Journal des Debats :
    At six o’clock in the evening, helped by only three persons, he [Fulton] put the boat in motion with two other boats in tow behind it, and for an hour and a half he afforded the strange spectacle of a boat moved by wheels like a cart, these wheels being provided with paddles or flat plates, and being moved by a fire engine.
    As we followed it along the quay, the speed against the current of the Seine seemed to be about that of a rapid pedestrian, that is about 2,400 toises (2.90 miles) an hour; while going down stream it was more rapid. It ascended and descended four times from Les Bons Hommes as far as the Chaillot engine; it was maneuvered with facility, turned to the right and left, came to anchor, started again, and passed by the swimming school.
    One of the [towed] boats took to the quay a number of savants and representatives of the Institute, among whom were Citizens Bossut, Carnot, Prony, Perier, Volney, etc . Doubtless they will make a report that will give this discovery all the celebrity it deserves; for this mechanism applied to our rivers, the Seine, the Loire, and the Rhone, would bring the most advantageous consequences to our internal navigation. The tows of barges which now require four months to come from Nantes to Paris would arrive promptly in from ten to fifteen days. The author of this brilliant invention is M. Fulton, an American and a celebrated engineer. 5
    The two boats that Fulton’s craft had towed, in which Fulton had provided French government officials and other VIPs a ride to let them participate in the big, historic event, had no doubt slowed his steamboat and had partly accounted for its failure to reach the sixteen-mile-an-hour speed he had predicted. But Fulton was far from being discouraged by the boat’s performance. He would simply have to use a more powerful engine next time — and he would give up the idea of towing other craft.
    There was a good reason for Fulton and Livingston to move promptly from their prototype, once it had passed its test, as it had, to the actual steampowered boat that would ply the Hudson on a regular schedule, as Livingston had long envisioned. Livingston had used his and his family’s powerful political influence to obtain from the New York State legislature the right to be sole operators of steamboats on the Hudson — a privilege Livingston and Fulton hoped to also gain on other American rivers. The Hudson monopoly had been first granted to Livingston in March 1798, its primary justification being to protect the Livingston boat from potential competition by imitators who would copy the designs of the craft in which Livingston had invested so much of his time and money.
    The legislature granted Livingston a monopoly that would, under the terms specified by the legislation, last twenty years, but did so with conditions that the steamboat