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 of the Mississippi
The historical roots of the prototypical Mississippi steamboat, or Western Rivers steamboat, can be traced to designs by easterners like James Rumsey, John Fitch, John Stevens, Oliver Evans, Robert Fulton and Daniel French. In the span of just six years the evolution of the prototypical Mississippi steamboat would be well underway:In the 1810s there were 20 boats on the river; by the 1830s there were more than 1200. By the 1820s, with the southern states joining the Union and the land converted to cotton plantations so indicative of the Antebellum South, methods were needed to move the bales of cotton, rice, timber, tobacco and molasses. The steamboat was perfect. America boomed in the age of Jackson. Population moved west, and more farms were established. In the 1820s Steamers were fueled first by wood, then coal, which pushed barges of coal from
Pittsburgh to New Orleans. Regular steamboat commerce begun between Pittsburgh and Louisville.