Robert Fulton
The first successful trial run of a steamboat had been made several years earlier in the United States by inventor John Fitch, on the Delaware River on August 22, 1787. Attendees included delegates from the Constitutional Convention, who were observing while taking a break from their summer-long sessions at Independence Hall. The steamboat was propelled by a bank of oars on either side of the boat. The following year Fitch launched a boat powered by a steam engine driving several stern-mounted oars. These oars paddled in a manner similar to the motion of a swimming duck's feet. With this boat he carried up to thirty passengers for hire on numerous round-trip voyages on the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Burlington, New Jersey.
Steamboats on the Volga River
Alfred Nobel built fifty steamers at Baku to move Caspian oil. He also built the MS Vandal, which in 1903, was probably the first ship (and not barge) propelled by a diesel engine. In 1902 Karl Hagelin, "a veteran of the Volga and sometime visionary", suggesting mating diesel engines to river barges. He envisioned direct shipment of oil through a 1,800-mile route from the lower Volga to Saint Petersburg and Finland. The first Volga steamers 'Komar', 'Shmel', and 'Tungus' were constructed between 1908 and 1917 in the Nobel Shipyard in Rybinsk.