LITERARY NOTICES.
The Life of John Fitch, the Inventor of the Steamboat. By Thompson Westcott. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.
What would not honest Sancho have given for a good biography of the man who invented sleep? And will not the adventurous pleasure-tourist, who has been jarred, jammed, roasted, coddled, and suffocated in a railroad-car for a whole night, with two days to sandwich it, on being deposited in an airy stateroom for the last two hundred miles of his journey, think the man who invented the steamboat deserving of a "first-rate" life? We well remember the time when nobody suspected that person, whoever he might be,—and nobody much cared who he was,—of any relationship to the individual whose memory Sancho blessed, so great was the churning in the palaces that then floated. But in our present boats this unpalace-like operation has been so localized and mollified as to escape the notice of all but the greenest and most inquisitive passengers. And now that we find the luxury of travelling by water actually superior to that of staying at home on land, we begin to feel a budding veneration for the man who first found out that steam could be substituted, with such marvellous advantage, for helpless dependence on the wind and miserable tugging at oars and setting-poles. Who was he? What circumstances conspired to shape his life and project it with so notable an aim? How did he look, act, think, on all matters of human concernment? Here comes a book, assuming in its title that one John Fitch, of whom his generation seems not to have thought enough to paint his portrait, was the inventor of the steamboat. It professes to be "The Life of John Fitch"; but we are sorry to say it is rather a documentary argument to prove that he was "the inventor of the steamboat." As an argument, it is both needless and needlessly strong. We already knew to a certainty that nobody could present a better claim to that honor than John Fitch. True, the idea did not wait for him. The engine could not have been working a hundred years in the world without giving birth to that. But till Watt invented it anew in 1782, by admitting the steam alternately at both ends of the cylinder, it was too awkward and clumsy to become a practical navigator. Moreover, though it could pump admirably, it had not been taught to turn a crank. The French assert, that experiments in steam-propulsion were made on the Seine, by Count Auxiron and Perrier, in 1774, and on the Saone, by De Jouffroy, in 1782; but we know they led to no practical results, and the knowledge of them probably did not, for some years, travel beyond the limits of the French language. There is no satisfactory evidence that a boat was ever moved by steam, within the boundaries of Anglo-Saxondom, before John Fitch did it, on the 27th of July, 1786. His successful and every way brilliant experiment on that occasion led directly to practical results,—to wit, the formation of a company, embracing some of the foremost men of Philadelphia, which built a small steam-packet for the conveyance of passengers, and ran it during three summers, ending with that of 1790. The company then failed, and broke poor Fitch's heart, simply because the investment had not thus far proved lucrative, and they were unwilling to make the further advances requisite to carry out his moderate and reasonable plans. The only person who ever claimed, in English, to have made a steamboat experiment before Fitch, was James Rumsey, of Virginia, who, in 1788, published some testimony to show that he had done it as early as April, 1786, that he had broached the idea, confidentially, two years earlier, and that Fitch might have received it from one who violated his confidence. Fitch promptly annihilated these pretences by a pamphlet, a reprint of which maybe found in the Patent-Office Report for 1850. This, and a contribution to Sparks's "American Biography," by Col. Charles Whittlesey, of Ohio, seem quite sufficient to establish the historical fact that John Fitch was the father of steam-navigation, whoever may have been its prophets. Though the infant, with the royal blood of both Neptune and Pluto in its veins, and a brand-new empire
