Simple as the idea of the sleeping-car is in reality, it was not introduced until 1858, when the Lake Shore Railroad ran the first crude and uncomfortable night-cars. George M. Pullman in 1859 set for himself the task of producing a palace car which should be used for continuous and comfortable travel through long distances by day and night. He remodelled into sleeping-cars two passenger coaches belonging to the Chicago and Alton Railroad. Though these cars fell far below the inventor's ideal, they were far in advance of the first make-shifts and in consequence created a demand for more and better cars of the same kind. In 1863, at his factory in Chicago, Pullman began the construction of the "Pioneer," the first of the Pullman palace cars. This car was built at a cost of $18,000. It was first used in the funeral train which conveyed the body of President Lincoln to his burial place in Springfield, Illinois. Few inventions have been financially so remunerative to the inventors as the Pullman palace car. It brought Mr. Pullman an immense fortune. The Pullman Palace Car Company, founded by Pullman in 1867, is one of the largest and most successful manufacturing concerns in America. It employs a capital of $40,000,000, gives work to fourteen thousand persons, furnishes sleeping-car service for 120,000 miles of railway, and operates over 2,000 cars. Mr. Pullman adopted plans for the vestibule car in 1887. He died at his home in Chicago, October 19, 1897. The idea of the steamboat did not originate in the brain of Robert Fulton. It is claimed that, as early as 1543, Blasco de Garay propelled a boat by steam, and that in 1707, just a hundred years before the time of Fulton's _Clermont_, Papin ran a boat with steam on a river in Germany. In 1763 William Henry experimented with a steamboat on the Conistoga River in Pennsylvania. James Rumsey, a Scotchman living in Maryland, is said to have been the first American to discover a method for running a vessel with steam against wind and tide. He conceived the idea in August, 1783. During 1785 he made his boat, and in 1786 he navigated it on the Potomac River at Shepherdstown, Virginia, in the presence of hundreds of spectators. He wrote to General Washington of his invention, and Washington wrote concerning it to Governor Johnson of Maryland. In 1839 Congress voted a gold medal to James Rumsey, Jr., son and only surviving child of the inventor, in recognition of the elder Rumsey's achievement. In 1787 John Fitch exhibited on the Delaware River a vessel to be propelled by steam, and in 1790, from June to September, he ran a steamboat on that river between Philadelphia and Trenton. But he could not induce the public to patronize his boat, and for lack of business it had to be withdrawn.