This module takes another tack in Washington’s Patowmack Canal tale.
Washington’s sophisticated strategy to penetrate the trans-Appalachian hinterland by use of canals and his hope to develop an Atlantic port city (near Alexandria) involved other considerations as well. Left mostly unsaid in the previous module was how Washington dealt with a recognized deficiency of canals which seriously limited the hoped-for success: an inadequate shipping mode, the pole-boat, which could not effectively and inexpensively provide two-way transportation of cargoes.He needed a breakthrough technology innovation that revolutionized canal shipping, and maximized the potential productivity that canals provided–and which would increase volumes that generated revenues to the canal company, revenues that could pay off its debts, and provide profits and dividends to its investors. Succinctly, it was not sufficient that a canal be constructed, the modes of transportation that used the canal had to be revolutionized. Fully understanding his dilemma Washington was in the market to find, or as it turns out, assist in developing, a technological innovation. ED strategy-wise, developmental transportation infrastructure can be closely linked to technological innovation. Accordingly, this module tells, in part, the little known transportation innovation that Washington used to solve his problems: the steamboat, and the combustion engine.
Canal Infrastructure and Innovation Nexus: the Steamboat and Steamboat Engine
A wee bit of background may be helpful in appreciating this tale of technology and innovation.
Canal boats in Washington’s day were “pole-driven”. Men with poles “pushed” the boat along manually–watch Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett and Mike Fink [1] episode to see a pole boat in operation. Lots of fun to watch, but pole or keel boats were little more than man-driven “tramp steamers” on a river, making few profits, with cargoes limited to what could be pushed. Heading upstream meant even lighter loads. Canals (and locks) made it possible to employ mules or horses along the locks edge to pull the boat along–and that generated a great Erie Canal song–but said and done were still a rather ancient technology and locks, except for the Erie Canal, were just a few miles in the river/canal hybrid system.
A major problem these pole boats encountered was river flow. River flow and currents were a major geographic limitation on the use and profitability of canals, pole boats, and river systems. Obviously when the river flowed down to the coast, things went smoothly; equally obviously, going upstream against the current, with a heavy cargo, was the issue. Pole boats stopped at river falls, and the cargo “ported” to the next clear river passage. Pole boats were expensive, slow, and troublesome. Men had to rest and sleep at night–wasted time–and a night on the town was often a fearsome thing to behold.
Washington’s hope that canals could unify and protect the nation, and make a buck for him doing it, was based on this ancient mode of transportation. It is not unreasonable to expect he was looking for alternatives.
With this background we begin our story of Washington’s Patowmack Canal technology-innovation nexus and carry it forward to the American Constitution. We will return to the topic in another future modules.
the Best Beer Washington Ever Drank
The story starts with Washington’s 1784 survey tour into the western hinterlands–the same one in which he stumbled into Gallatin. On the way inward, he stopped for the night at a remote tavern in Bath Virginia, 125 miles away from Mount Vernon (today, Berkeley Springs West Virginia). Washington owned property in Bath, taking advantage of Bath’s warm springs which encouraged a vibrant health-tourism cluster. Forgive a wee bit of a tangent, Washington stayed at Bath because even in 1784 it was a consciously tourist town, with an entertainment, religious and health constituency. Upscale, its inn/restaurants catered to those wealthy enough to travel some distance to appreciate its amenities. Washington and his friends/network were already quite familiar with the place. A new inn, “Sign of the Liberty Pole and Flag” (catchy name to be sure), had just opened so Washington gave it a try So he stopped at a new inn which previously had advertised to its potential clientele that it would in effect cater to their every whim”. I imagine that after a hard day on the trail, Washington, who did not mind indulging in spirited drink, ordered a cold beer to quench his thirst. I think it was as far as economic development goes, it was the best beer he every drank.
The Inn’s owner-entrepreneur, a risk-taker to be sure, was also a natural born salesman, and he saw in Washington an opportunity to sell his wares. It worked. Washington hired him that night, to buy/build on two more properties in the Bath area. But along with being a real estate broker/builder, the innkeeper touted his amazing invention. He was an outstanding inventor; he claimed he had devised a “mechanical boat”–let’s be frank here, a boat with something called an engine on it that propelled the oars or poles on a keel boat. The innkeeper had not yet built a scale-up model for the contraption, but he demonstrated to Washington that night a miniature version in a pan of water. This is only part of the story, the rest will be told below–but suffice it to say (1) Washington was impressed, and (2) the innovator-innkeeper was not there by accident. The night at the inn is described in what is the best description of America’s steamboat complex and confusing innovation, James Thomas Flexner’s, oddly titled Steamboats Come True[2}. Drinking his beer, much like Woody Guthrie, Washington entered into that story, becoming a leading player in America’s first major transportation mode/innovation: the steamboat of Mark Twain fame.
Washington Becomes a Technology Venture Capitalist
The design of the boat was secondary, what really mattered was it was propelled by an engine. The engine could carry heavier cargoes, and potentially solve the earlier-described upstream problem. The innkeeper’s engine delivered power to operate a mechanical pole-driven boat–no pole men–and it seemed to work. So Washington decided then and there to become a venture capitalist. Washington personally invested in the the model–and sustained the innovation until the innkeeper-inventor, James Rumsey died in 1792. Flexner quoting from correspondence and a series of meetings over several years, clearly demonstrates Washington’s close involvement with The Innkeeper aka inventor and Rumsey’s tale, which in no time at all, dovetailed and became intertwined with a then-unknown Philadelphia steamboat rival, John Fitch. The relationship that deepened in the next decade reveals the troubled nature of America’s Early Republic innovation capacity.–BTW Washington’s canal-building took a backseat when he became President.
The Innkeeper, the reader might be alerted, is one of the two (or three) main contenders for the American “invention” of the steamboat–that in fact is no small part of the story below. Our history takes no formal position on who was the “first”–it seems Rumsey’s competitor, a fellow named Fitch, seems ahead at the moment. Washington and his friends got involved, deeply, with the struggle between the two–and on the whole they sided with Rumsey. Rumsey had just pulled ahead, but died unexpectedly in London, securing four patents, and having worked out a patent license and joint venture with none other than James Watt, the famous “inventor” of the steam/combustion engine. His death left the steamboat invention title to Fitch (whose ultimate fate was did little to support that title). From of that struggle between Rumsey and Fitch will come the inclusion of a specific “patent” article in the American Constitution, and America’s initial patent law was to a not inconsiderable extent a reaction to the steamboat engine patent conflict.
That night Washington prepared a letter of introduction to the innkeeper (Remember a letter from Washington was no trivial matter). The letter said that he believed “this a marvelous and unique invention as ‘of vast importance, maybe of the greatest usefulness” for the purpose of moving the boat upstream“. In his diary Washington recorded that the boat/engine “would render the present epoch favorable above all others for securing … a large proportion of the product of the western settlements, and of the fur and peltry of the lakes … also binding these people to us [instead of neighboring foreign nations] by a chain that can never be broken” [3]. Washington, it might be added, was conducting his own due diligence on canals and canal-related technology. That due diligence included an extended meeting at Mount Vernon (1785) with a canal and its technology enthusiast/proponent, Robert Fulton-whom as the reader knows would two decades or so later, develop the first successful commercial application of America’s steamboat technology.
With the letter the Innkeeper contacted a number of Washington’s associates from which he secured financing and political support not only to improve upon his concept, but also assemble a powerful lobbying group to secure governmental funding. In particular, Washington introduced him to sympathetic supporters such as Jefferson, Madison, and John Marshall–all traveled to Rumsey’s Inn in Bath. But the story continues, and assumes an unanticipated new direction.
Having started down the venture capital path, Washington discovered the innovation-protection laws of the States and the Articles of Confederation were fatally flawed. How does one protect ones investment in the event of unanticipated competition, and rival alternate technologies?
Articles of Confederation Patent Process Implodes
First, some background. American colonial patent law [4] and James Rumsey. The colonial/inherited by the Articles of Confederation, patent law was rudimentary, decentralized to the state-level, and, operated within the confines of British patent law which forbade the exporting of British patents. The first known colonial patent had been issued by the Massachusetts legislature in 1646 to a inventor who built a mill to power the production of wheat scythes. From that point forward, the colonial patents were awarded through a political decision by a colonial legislature. Lacking much in the way of formal patent authority (limited as they were by British patent law), the mechanism state legislatures devised to provide patent protection was to create a state monopoly of the commercial use of the patent. By Rumsey’s time, inventors seeking protections similar to a patent relied on acquiring a state legislature’s grant of a monopoly within their state. Charisma and self-promotion to construct a wealthy and influential network were usually how individual inventors convinced the state legislature to approve the monopoly.
Rumsey started his steamboat venture in 1780 and the working model of pole-driving steam-powered engine quickly ran out of money. So in 1780 (still in the midst of the Revolutionary War) he requested the Continental Congress grant him western lands that he could either use for collateral or sell to finance his invention. Other inventors were attempting the same, including another pole-driven steamboat. The Continental Congress set up a sub-committee to reach a decision, but the matter remained unresolved through 1784, when the competitor and Rumsey “merged” and formed a partnership. That hiatus is why Rumsey retreated to Bath and his tavern/boardinghouse and real estate business.
Rumsey, having enlisted Washington, and Jefferson’s support in writing, revisited his earlier Congressional application–and his powerful support motivated the Articles’ sub-committee to approve the grant of western lands–if the model could produce a real steamboat that ran 50 miles a day for six consecutive days without breaking. Rumsey peddled the (Articles) Congressional decision to Maryland and Pennsylvania, which granted state monopolies to him. Washington stepped in directly as did Madison and Jefferson. Now Rumsey could use the state monopolies as security to raise additional venture capital. Rumsey seemed to be on a roll, but at that critical juncture Washington hired him to direct the construction of his canal. (see below).
In doing so, however, Rumsey took his eyes off the ball, his steamboat innovation. In 1785 a new competitor emerged in Philadelphia. A fellow named John Fitch. Born in Connecticut, with a more than an interesting background, Fitch had finally settled in Warminster PA .Only in 1785 did he start working on steamboats, but instead of accepting the conventional pole technology as Rumsey had done, Fitch made the giant leap to experiment with the new-fangled combustion/steam engine. He heard through the grapevine of English James Watt’s latest improvement to the English steam boiler and parlaying his limited understanding of what Watt was up to. BTW James Watt between 1763 and 1775 back in the old mother-country England had embarked on a series of designs and prototypes based on still earlier steam combustion designs–combustion engines experimentation was widespread, there were others who were also developing prototypes as well–one of whom was Benjamin Franklin. In this very crowded competition of technologies, Fitch began his efforts to develop a viable steamboat prototype on Philadelphia’s Susquehanna River. Did I mention that Philadelphia was the nation’s largest, wealthiest port city, and oft-times the de facto capital of the Articles of Confederation.
So in 1875 Fitch presented his designs to the highly influential American Philosophical Society, conveniently located in Philadelphia. With some support from his presentation, Fitch petitioned several state legislatures for state monopolies, as Rumsey had done earlier. He also petitioned the Articles of Confederation Congress for a western land grant similar to Rumsey the previous year. The Articles Congress, having already granted land for the benefit of Rumsey’s steamboat monopoly (because of Rumsey’s influential friends) simply returned the petition by mail to Fitch.
Fitch, now “highly motivated” publicly blasted “the ignorant boys of Congress“. He made a personal appeal to Washington visiting at Mount Vernon. Washington met with him for several hours, but in the end told Fitch he supported Rumsey. Fitch then met with Benjamin Franklin, who in 1785 had independently wrote a paper (titled “Mechanical Inventions“) while on ship crossing the Atlantic literally at the same time Rumsey was meeting with Washington. That paper outlined a steamboat propelled by water thrust created by an engine. Franklin, America’s most acknowledged inventor, aka scientist, had his own dog in that fight. but met with Fitch anyway. Franklin “politely” told Fitch that his support was behind Rumsey, while offering Fitch $4 for his designs. Fitch, in contrast to the naturally genial, salesman Ramsey had an incredibly volatile personality and temper, tending to paranoid obsessions. Fitch did not take all these “no”s very well.
Not without merit, Fitch believed the political/economic “establishment” was backing Rumsey, to his considerable detriment. Naturally, he considered his prototype superior to Rumsey, and he refused to take a second seat to him. Fitch got “blue-collar populist” in his approach; he enlisted support of artisans, small business owners, and mechanics who were both numerous and influential in Philadelphia politics. Working with a new immigrant canal enthusiast, Christopher Colles (who later moved to New York and conceptualized what was later to be the Erie Canal–what a small world this was, huh), and other local investors. Fitch formed his state chartered steamboat company in April 1786 selling shares at a modest $20, raising only $300. This was my first opportunity to discover a pre-Early Republic version of that 21st Century innovation called peer lending. Who would have thought this totally sexy innovative/disruptive post-industrial form of lending was in use two-hundred and fifty years earlier?
But Fitch, not a salesman by any means, soon got in a quarrel with his investors, and bypassed them by securing new monopoly grants in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and New York. Pennsylvania, if one might remember, had already granted a monopoly to Rumsey. This set up an divisive and polarizing, highly publicized conflict within the Pennsylvania state legislature. Fitch argued his position forceably, and in so doing both alerted influential observers as to the importance of patents and the clumsiness of monopolies. Fitch also exposed to key political elites the need to establish a comprehensive, coherent patent/innovation system–and to him and his fight with Rumsey the issue became part and parcel of what would soon be Federalist Party orthodoxy.
Once again, in 1787, he petitioned the Articles Congress for a land grant, and its committee chair, James Madison for a national monopoly on steamboat travel. The subcommittee duly considered his application, but made any support contingent on Fitch’s public demonstration of his steamboat prototype. By that time, Rumsey was back on track, having abandoned his pole-driven engine in favor of a Watts-like steam engine–see above. The steamboat race was on–as each inventor rushed to complete his prototype and demonstrate its viability publicly. Fitch’s successful public demonstration was held on the Delaware in September 1787, with Continental Congress members in attendance (not Washington, I might add). Rumsey slightly behind the eight-ball, despite his powerful friends and earlier start. held his successful public demonstration in far-away Shepherdstown in December. Steamboat technology was operative and available for commercialization by the end of 1787–three years after Washington drank the best beer in his life, its memory began to sour.
Innovation thus far had been messy at best–and it was going to get much worse during the next decade.
Rumsey, after his frustrating experience of managing the Patowmack Canal construction–a wasted year as far as technological innovation was concerned–Rumsey returned to his steamboat experiments, moving eventually to a new Potomac location in VA’s interior, Shepherdstown. As we shall soon realize, Shepherdstown was no steamboat Silicon Valley–at least compared to Philadelphia. After a frustrating year of experimenting with his engine in his new and off-the-beaten track location, Rumsey abandoned the pole technology, and like Fitch turned to the steam combustion engine. Like Fitch, on his own Rumsey developed his own steam-making boiler, also similar to Watt. He commenced his own prototype experiments on the out-of-sight, out-of-mind Potomac. On December 3, 1787 Rumsey successfully demonstrated his boat/engine in a public demonstration in Shepherdstown–three months after Fitch.
Innovation Enters the Federalist Policy Agenda–and the New American Constitution
The bitter and very public competition between Rumsey and Fitch created an intense steamboat rivalry that ultimately led to the inclusion of an article in the Constitution–and eventually when the new government took office, eventually carring over into the formulation of the 1790 Patent Law drafted by none other than Thomas Jefferson (see future module, Jefferson’s Innovation).
By early 1787 it was fast becoming evident the Articles were going to be replaced by a new Republic and a new Constitution. The so-called Continental Convention, held in Philadelphia) certainly had many weighty matters to determine for its new proposed Constitution, including slavery, form of government, and electoral system–and that consumed quite a bit of subsequent academic attention as well. Off to the side, but important none-the-less was discussion on the nature of the new Republic’s economy, and how economic growth and wealth creation was to be achieved. That was among Washington very chief concerns–and sharing those concerns were many of his Virginia neighbors–Madison and Jefferson in particular who were also deeply involved in the Patowmack venture. For them interstate commerce and the need for a stronger national government to coordinate interstate rivalries, was a key concern and top priority. Compared to this technology innovation was secondary. Still if anything had been made clear by the Fitch-Rumsey confrontation–which by that time had polarized several state legislatures–was that American patent law and processes needed reform, and the Thirteen States had to be herded into a common corral by a stronger more assertive national government. Washington indeed had many priorities, but he had not wandered that far from his need for steamboat canal technology.
So James Madison and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney on August 18, 1787 taking note of the patent reform priority, filed a motion to insert a section in the proposed Constitution. Their thoughts on the matter were intended to reviewed by a Constitutional Convention committee, and then onto consideration by the Convention itself. The Madison/Pinckney motion specified the bottom liner goal around which the committee should refine their observations and make their report to the Convention: the ultimate problem to be fixed by the patent law was to sufficiently empower the national government to impose order on the actions of the Thirteen States so “to secure to literary authors their copyrights for a limited time, and to encourage by premiums and provisions, the advancement of useful knowledge and discoveries“ [5]. (The phrase, useful knowledge and discoveries, meant they wanted to create a system of patents for agriculture, manufacture, and trade). The committed did its job and two weeks later, the Committee Report was included, by Convention vote, in the new proposed Constitution, as Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8–which, in its own good time, was approved by the thirteen states.
This has to be ED policy-making at its very best–but the steamboat engine story has only just begun. That, fortunately for the reader will be told in a future module–along with the series of Early Republic patent laws developed by Tidewater Founding Fathers who today are commonly described as anti-manufacturer, pro-yeoman farmer. But as the steamboat patent affair suggests, these were turbulent times. Shays Rebellion fractured Articles of Confederation society and politics during the course of 1786 and 1787, and they underscored much of the debate that produced the Constitution. Still, encouraged and prodded by Washington, innovation and a national patent law became the law of the new Republic–and a not insignificant feature of the newly-crystallizing Federalist Party’s interstate commerce agenda. What was not crystal clear, however, to what degree, and how, Fitch’s populist attack on Rumsey reflected an unease with the preference and facilitation of capitalist-style innovation, and the biases of Early Republic venture capitalism in favor of entrenched wealthy business/political elites.
That unease did not take long to manifest itself. The new Constitution placed responsibility for patents within the purview of the Secretary of State–and that was Jefferson in the Washington Administration. To make a very long and convoluted story short, the Fitch and Rumsey dispute degenerated into a near decade-long patent fight that literally consumed both of them–and their ventures. Rumsey died at an early age in 1792, and Fitch committed suicide in 1798. That fight, along with the polarizing consequences of Shays Rebellion, greatly affected subsequent Early Republic patent-related policy-making as conduced by Jefferson.
In any case, as the reader may surmise, steamboat commercialization languished until Robert Fulton sailed down the Hudson in 1807. The technology existed, but the political and cultural atmosphere did not. Innovation remained decentralized by default to the States, and was viewed as disruptive in the extreme by many, including increasingly Jefferson. The matter became even more convoluted as disruption permeated into capitalist economics–requiring clarification from the Supreme Court which was not provided until 1824. Rivers, and steamboats, shared at least one common attribute: they were interstate, and the matter of interstate competition was itself a novel and disruptive policy concern which even George Washington could not overcome.
Still, what we have just described are the fundamental early years of what is today referred to as the “First Industrial Revolution”, a new industrial capitalist economy powered by coal and steam. It would quickly be followed by the Second (electricity), the Third (automobile), and today’s Fourth Industrial Revolution (computer and Internet). Each of these introduced disruptive new technology innovation to America that stirred political and cultural juices that rocked ED policy-making.
In retrospect we observe that Washington (and Tidewater Founding Fathers) played an important role, the motivation, if not the inspiration, and certainly the Early Republic’ definition of DTIS, developmental transportation ED strategy. as-infrastructure and technology, the canal and the steam combustion engine. It would not take very long for that strategy to develop yet another technology innovation: the railroad locomotive. DTIS is going to be a disruptive and controversial ED strategy for the next seventy-five years. Accordingly, the next module, the last in this opening mini-series, puts much-needed flesh (depth, if one prefers) on the bare bones of a strategy described thus far.
Footnotes:
[1] Mike Fink was a real, honest-to-God historical character. He really lived and was an Ohio River keelboat (pole boat) owner. He lived between 1770 and 1824. It was said he could drink a gallon of whiskey and then shoot the tail off a pig. Born in the Pittsburgh area, he might have died–nobody’s certain–on an expedition into the mountains, shot by a rival. I do not claim him as an economic developer–just thought you might want to know.
[2] James Thomas Flexner, Steamboats Come True (Fordham University Press, 1944, 2nd Ed 1992) See Chapter 5, p. 64ff.
[3] Peter Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters: the Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation ( W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), pp. 68-9.
[4] Thomas Cox, Gibbons v. Ogden, Law and Society in the Early Republic (Ohio University Press, 2009); I rely heavily on Cox for observations on this subject, and have in a few short paragraphs summarized in my words much of his first chapter.
[5] Thomas Cox, Gibbons v. Ogden, Law and Society in the Early Republic, p. 10.
Ron W. Coan 