John Fitch, whose original idea was a steamboat propelled by means of an endless chain of flat boards, afterwards experimented with an arrangement, “borrowed no doubt from the action of Indians in a canoe,” of paddles held vertically in frames mounted along the sides of the boat and operated by cranks. In 1786 a boat thus equipped made a successful trial on the Delaware, and in the following year a larger boat, fitted with a horizontal double-acting engine with a 12-inch cylinder and a 3-foot stroke, giving motion to six paddles on each side, was publicly tried on the same river. The speed attained was very small. At last in 1790, still protected by a patent which granted him a temporary monopoly in steamboat building, Fitch succeeded in building a boat which was an undisputed mechanical success. Discarding the paddle-frame and adopting a beam engine to drive paddle-boards at the stern, he produced a steamboat which, after being tested and credited with eight knots’ speed on a measured mile in front of Water Street, Philadelphia, in the presence of the governor and council of Pennsylvania, ran two or three thousand miles as a passenger boat on the Delaware before being dismantled. It was a considerable achievement. But the excessive weight and space absorbed by the machinery prevented the boat from being a financial success; and, after a journey to France, then distracted by the Revolution, Fitch returned home to America and ended his days a disappointed and a broken man. Nevertheless, the work he did was of service to others. He proved that the ponderous nature of the machinery was the greatest obstacle to the propulsion of small craft by steam, and from his failure deduced the conclusion, on which later inventors were able to build, that the solution of the problem lay in the _scale_: that, “it would be much easier to carry a first-rate man-of-war by steam at an equal rate than a small boat.”[139] James Rumsey, a Virginian, carried out in 1775 the first practical trials of water-jet propulsion, a small boat of his plying the Potomac at a small speed by means of a steam pump which sucked in water at the bow and threw it out at the stern. But as he felt himself obstructed in further experiments by the patent rights which had been given his rival Fitch he came to England; where, financed by a wealthy compatriot and aided by James Watt himself, he produced in ’93 a boat which on the Thames attained a speed of over four knots. Unfortunately Rumsey died in the middle of his experiments.