Another interesting experimenter was John Fitch, of Pennsylvania, a man who was handy in the use of tools, and who was also a surveyor and map-maker. On December 2, 1785, he presented to the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia a model, with drawings, of a steamboat. The New Jersey legislature then gave him the exclusive right to navigate the waters of the State with steamboats, and a company was organized to develop the invention. The first engine built had a 3-inch cylinder. It was mounted in a skiff and was connected at one time with a screw propeller, at another with an endless chain dragging alongside, and with a "screw and paddles," but neither device would drive the boat at a practical speed. Then Fitch conceived the idea of driving with paddles somewhat after the fashion of canoe men. This plan worked so well that a boat forty feet long was built and furnished with an engine having a 12-inch cylinder. In spite of the fact that the cylinder of this engine had wooden ends that leaked, and a piston that did not fit the bore, the boat was driven at a speed of four knots an hour. In 1788 Fitch built a boat sixty feet long with a larger engine, and in October she carried thirty passengers to Burlington, New Jersey, a distance of twenty miles, in three hours and ten minutes. The speed of this boat being unsatisfactory, still another was built, and in May, 1790, she covered a measured mile in seven and a half minutes, or at the rate of eight miles an hour. She was then put on the river as a packet plying between Philadelphia and Trenton, and made more than thirty trips of which records remain. She was operated by paddles at the stern. Though Fitch's plan was not the best conceivable, it is now admitted that his boat was a mechanical success. He built a workable boat, but, unhappily, he was far ahead of his day in his hopes and work. The people were not yet ready for steam navigation, and the company failed to pay dividends. Meantime another boat that he had built to run on the Mississippi was wrecked, and that loss ended the enterprise. Fitch finally went to the banks of the Ohio, where he continued his efforts without success. "The day will come," he wrote, "when some more powerful man will get fame and fortune from _my_ invention, but nobody will believe that poor John Fitch can do anything worthy of attention." Then he killed himself. In 1786, Oliver Evans, a Philadelphia millwright, asked the legislature of the State to give him the exclusive right to build steam gristmills and road-wagons,--automobiles, in other words,--but his plans were not treated seriously. In 1801, however, he built a steam plaster mill, and in 1804 he demonstrated, in a way that yet astonishes the reader, the entire feasibility of steam navigation.