Inventors.

Robert Fulton gets well-deserved credit for building an economically useful combination of steam engine and hull design, but he was certainly not the first person to build a steamboat, nor even the first American to do so. The Englishman Jonathan Hull patented a steamboat in 1737, and Americans James Rumsey, John Stevens, and James Fitch all ran working steamboats on American rivers before Fulton launched The Steamboat (later called the Clermont) in 1807. In 1805 Oliver Evans, of automatic flour-milling fame, launched his own version of a steam wagon-steamboat called the Orukter Amphibolos. In July of that year Evans's contraption, a seventeen-ton steam engine on wheels, trundled around downtown Philadelphia and then plunged into the Schuylkill River, where its paddle wheels took over and pushed the vessel sixteen miles to a dock on the Delaware. Evans would later design an important new steamboat engine, but it was...