The experiments of John Cox Stevens, of New York, were not particularly successful, although made at an expense of some 20,000 dollars. His vessel was a “stern-wheeler,” similar to those common enough on many American rivers to-day. But he deserves the credit, apparently, of having been the first to practically apply a tubular boiler to marine engines. His boiler, only 2 feet long by 15 inches wide and 12 inches high, consisted of no less than 41 copper tubes, each an inch in diameter. While Fitch and Stevens were experimenting, another American citizen, Oliver Evans, was endeavouring to mature a plan for using steam at a very high pressure, to be employed in propelling road wagons, and in an account of his plans, which he published in 1786, he suggests a mode of propelling vessels by steam. “He states,” says Lindsay, “that in 1785 he placed his engine, used to clean docks, in a boat upon wheels, the combined weight being equal to 200 barrels of flour, which he transported down to the water, and when it was launched he fixed a paddle-wheel to the stern, and drove it down the Schuylkill to Delaware, and up the Delaware to the city, ‘leaving all the vessels going up behind, one at least half-way, the wind being ahead.’” In 1794 and 1797 one Samuel Morey, of Connecticut, is said to have built two steamers, which were publicly exhibited and made passages, but which do not appear to have been afterwards employed. It is to Robert Fulton, who all this time was working at naval applications of many kinds, that not merely America, but the whole world owes the practical and continuous use of steam-vessels. He and his associates started the first paying line of steam-boats. The life of this remarkable man is little known in England, and not generally even in his own country. Pursuing then the plan which has guided the writer throughout this work, he proposes to give it, for these very reasons, in fuller detail than has been usual with better known examples of patient and struggling inventors.