Hereupon a boat was built and launched in the Delaware.  It was forty-five feet in length and twelve feet beam.  There were six oars, or paddles on each side.  The engine had a twelve-inch cylinder, and the route of service contemplated was between Philadelphia and Burlington.  The inventor agreed that his boat should make a rate of eight miles an hour, and the charge for passage should be a shilling.

He who might have been in Philadelphia on the twenty-second of August, 1787, would have witnessed a memorable thing.  The Convention for the framing of a Constitution for the United States of America was in session.  For some time the body had been wearing itself into exhaustion over this question and that question which seemed impossible of solution.  On the day referred to, the convention, on invitation, adjourned, and the members, including the Father of his country, who was President, went down to the water’s edge to see a sight.  There Fitch’s steamboat was to make its trial trip, and there the trial trip was made, with entire success.

They who were building the ship of state could but applaud the performance of the little steamer that sped away toward Burlington.  But the applause was of that kind which the wise and conservative folk always give to the astonishing thing done by genius.  The wise and conservative folk look on and smile and praise, but do not commit themselves.  Most dangerous it is for a politician to commit himself to a beneficial enterprise; for the people might oppose it!

The facts here referred to are fully attested in indisputable records.  There are files of Philadelphia newspapers which contain accounts of Fitch’s boat.  A line of travel and traffic was established between Philadelphia and Burlington.  There was also a steam ferryboat on the Delaware.  A second boat, called the “Perseverance,” was designed for the waters of the Mississippi; but this craft was wrecked by a storm, and then the patent under which the Ohio river and its confluent waters were granted, expired, and the enterprise had to be abandoned.  On the fourth of September, 1790, the following advertisement of the “Pennsylvania Packet” appeared in a Philadelphia paper: 

“The Steamboat will set out this morning, at eleven o’clock, for Messrs. Gray’s Garden, at a quarter of a dollar for each passenger thither.  It will afterwards ply between Gray’s and middle ferry, at 11d each passenger.  To-morrow morning, Sunday, it will set off for Burlington at eight o’clock, to return in the afternoon.”

This Pennsylvania Packet continued to ply the Delaware for about three years.  The mechanical construction of the boat was not perfect; and shortly after the date to which the above advertisement refers the little steamer was ruined by an accident.  The story is told by Thomas P. Cope, in the seventh volume of Hazard’s Register.  He says:  “I often witnessed the performance of the boat in 1788-89-90.