Livingston already had no little experience in the same field of invention as Fulton. In 1798 he had obtained, for a period of twenty years, the right to operate steamboats on all the waters of the State of New York, a monopoly which had just lapsed owing to the death of Fitch. In the same year Livingston had built a steamboat which had made three miles an hour on the Hudson. He had experimented with most of the models then in existence--upright paddles at the side, endless-chain paddles, and stern paddle wheels. Fulton was soon inspired to resume his efforts by Livingston's account of his own experiments and of recent advances in England, where a steamboat had navigated the Thames in 1801 and a year later the famous stern-wheeler Charlotte Dundas had towed boats of 140 tons' burden on the Forth and Clyde Canal at the rate of five miles an hour. In this same year Fulton and Livingston made successful experiments on the Seine. It is fortunate that, in one particular, Livingston's influence did not prevail with Fulton, for the American Minister was distinctly prejudiced against paddle wheels. Although Livingston had previously ridden as a passenger on Morey's stern-wheeler at the rate of five miles an hour, yet he had turned a deaf ear when his partner in experimentation, Nicholas J. Roosevelt, had insisted strongly on "throwing wheels over the sides." At the beginning, Fulton himself was inclined to agree with Livingston in this respect; but, probably late in 1803, he began to investigate more carefully the possibilities of the paddle wheel as used twice in America by Morey and by four or five experimenters in Europe. In 1804 an eight-mile trip which Fulton made on the Charlotte Dundas in an hour and twenty minutes established his faith in the undeniable superiority of two fundamental factors of early navigation--paddle wheels and British engines. Fulton's splendid fame rests, and rightly so, on his perception of the fact that no mere ingenuity of design could counterbalance weakness, uncertainty, and inefficiency in the mechanism which was intended to make a steamboat run and keep running. As early as November, 1803, Fulton had written to Boulton and Watt of Birmingham that he had "not confidence in any other engines" than theirs and that he was seeking a means of getting one of those engines to America. "I cannot establish the boat without the engine," he now emphatically wrote to James Monroe, then Ambassador to the Court of St. James. "The question then is shall we or shall we not have such boats."