![]() ![]() Fitch was not to see his second child, a daughter, for twenty-five years. Although his wife bore him a son, he left her in 1769, not knowing that she was again pregnant. Intelligent but not handsome, he married, but it was not a happy union. Even though his father took him away from school at the age of nine, he learned arithmetic and geography two years later he could not only locate every country on the globe but also tell its population and religion. His mother died soon after, but he grew up a precocious child. Like Benjamin Franklin, Fitch was originally a New Englander. In fact, the rather unkempt and ill-clad John Fitch was soon forgotten and, two decades later when fellow Pennsylvanian Robert Fulton (1765-1815) showed his steamboat in New York, Americans reacted as if Fulton had invented the steamboat. ![]() However, for the steamboat’s inventor, the unfortunate John Fitch (1743-1798), the glory he experienced that day came only with that moment of success – not the kindness of history.Įventually the steamboat would take the United States by storm and forever change the American landscape and the culture itself, but on that sweltering late summer day very few individuals, if any, thought much of it. The event should have been a historic benchmark, heralding the beginning of an important era in the chronicles of American commerce and transportation. The delegates – several of whom even boarded the vessel for a brief ride – witnessed the first public demonstration of a steamboat capable of ferrying passengers. With the promise of some relief from their intense debate and the heavy summer air, delegates to the Constitutional Convention strolled a few blocks from the State House (now Independence Hall) to the banks of the Delaware River.Īlong the river puffed an oddity, a curiosity that the statesmen had never before seen: a steam-operated boat – the first of its kind-propelled by six paddles on each side, in Indian war canoe fashion. ![]()
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