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Steam: The Untold Story of America's First Great Invention (review)

Steam: The Untold Story of America's First Great Invention. By Andrea Sutcliffe. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. 296. Cloth, $24.95; paper, $14.95.)Inventors long have fascinated historians, especially historians of technology and industrial progress. From Samuel Smiles's Lives of the Engineers (1862) through modern classics from David McCullough (The Great Bridge [1972] and The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal [1977]), stories about quirky individuals obsessed with technical problems find a ready audience. The present work by Andrea Sutcliffe certainly belongs on the shelf of stories about quirky, obsessive individuals; but as history of technology, this work will disappoint serious scholars. From its misleading title (steam was hardly an American invention even if the steamboat was) to its irrelevant, unsung-heroesfade-away conclusion, this book-like the early steamboats it describesnever quite delivers.The story Sutcliffe seeks to tell begins with the rivalry between John Rumsey and John Fitch, two quasi-engineers of the 178Os who were interested in finding a way to drive boats against the currents of America's major rivers. Rumsey was famous for first trying to use the current itself to spin the mechanism of propulsion in a kind of water-walking conveyance; Fitch may well have designed the first true steamboat, but his inability to deliver a working prototype, his irascible personality, and his obsession with securing legal privileges and royalties (rather than earning profits) all conspired to deprive him of the fame and fortune he believed he deserved. Steam begins with the competition between these two and their occasional intersections with famous men (and potential patrons) such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. Soon enough the tale picks up a larger cast of characters: Oliver Evans, John Stevens, Robert Fulton, Joel Barlow, Robert Livingston, William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Gibbons and Ogden (of the famous Supreme Court case), and even, in a parting cameo, Henry Miller Shreve.What brings these men together is a web of lies, charges, counterclaims, misrepresentations, and dirty tricks that seems to make no sense except as manifestations of inherently nasty and dishonest personalities. Here is where the book does not succeed as history. Thanks to impressive research, the facts march across page after page as these oddball competitors stalk each other in pursuit of the fabulous riches they believe await the first man to secure an iron-clad monopoly on steam navigation. …