How a Bucks County man 'just missed' inventing the first automobile

Recently I discovered something new about a Warminster man who invented the steamboat and a workable submarine. He also conceived the first car while strolling through town. John Fitch “just missed being the inventor of the modern automobile,” noted Bucks historian George MacReynolds in 1942.

Let me backtrack a bit.

Born on a Connecticut farm in 1743, Fitch loathed fieldwork to the resentment of his family. Tall and rail slim with black hair and penetrating eyes, he preferred reading books. Temperamental and extremely unhappy in a failed marriage with two kids, he ran away to Trenton, N.J., to become a silver- and gunsmith. When the British occupied the city in 1776, he moved to John Mitchell’s home in Langhorne before emigrating to Kentucky to become a surveyor, itinerant silversmith and property owner. Following a long period of Indian captivity, he returned to Bucks and resumed crafting silver in Warminster.

Drawing his interest were newspaper drawings of a steam-driven pump removing water from a mine in England. With that in mind, he was walking along Street Road when a one-horse rolling chair from Hatboro known as a “shay” came into view. As it crossed on York Road, Fitch had an epiphany. A small steam engine could power that shay. The first automobile! However, word had filtered back to Philly from Paris that Nick Cugnot had invented a “Fardier à vapeur,” a steam car that crashed while speeding at 6 mph. For recklessness, Cugnot was the first human to get a traffic ticket.

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Fitch had a more prudent idea: Make a fortune building steam-powered riverboats. First order of business was to construct a working model. He did so in 1785 in Hartsville and launched it beside a mill pond dam on the Watts’ farm in nearby Davisville. Ten witnesses fanned out along the dam to retrieve the craft if it came ashore. “The fire was lighted, the boat put in the water, and after a few moments delay, she started puffing away up the dam,” described one observer. Several test runs succeeded. Fitch, brimming with confidence, tucked the model under his arm and headed home to seek financial backing from Congress, Ben Franklin and George Washington to build a full-scale version in a Philadelphia shipyard. They weren’t interested. Not to be denied, Fitch pooled enough cash from private stock offerings in 1787 to construct the world’s first operational steamboat.

Afloat on the Delaware, the 45-foot-long “Perseverance” seemed devilish from the steam, noise and mechanical movements of side-mounted Indian paddles much like a duck in motion. Fitch made history steaming 20 miles up the Delaware to Burlington. “We reigned Lord High Admirals of the Delaware,” he boasted.

It was clear however Fitch needed a bigger boat. It took three years. On the morning of July 27, 1790, his 60-foot-long vessel with a high smokestack and stern-mounted paddles made its maiden voyage. Despite providing free beer, rum and sausage to as many as 30 passengers for each voyage, the inventor lost money. Though Congress issued him a patent, he was unable to attract major investors to expand operations. Frustrated, he left for France where he failed to sell his inventions including a workable steam submarine.

Relocating to Kentucky, “Crazy Fitch” — the nickname Bardstown neighbors gave him — seemed “distant, and imposing” while strolling about “in black coat, a beaver hat, a black vest, with light-colored short breeches, stockings, large shoe buckles and coarse shoes; the representative of another age and school of life.” His face twitched nervously. “The day will come when some more powerful man will get fame and riches from my invention,” he anguished. “Vessels propelled by steam will cross the ocean . . . . and that same power will be utilized in moving vehicles on land.”

Broken in spirit, he drank heavily and passed away on July 2, 1798, at age 55. Unbeknownst to him, designs he left with an associate in Paris were loaned to a visitor from New York by the name of Robert Fulton. Based on those plans, Fulton in 1807 launched the “Clermont,” forerunner of his fleet of paddle-wheel steamboats. Two years later the “Phoenix” built in New York became the first steamer to dock in Bucks County where the idea of steamboats was born. The arrival at the Bristol wharf drew quite a crowd.

By that time, Fulton’s steamboats dominated American rivers making “the inventor” rich and famous. Meanwhile, steam locomotive trains, as Fitch predicted, soon spanned the nation. Steamships and submarines followed on the oceans.

Today, Fitch’s legacy is described in detail at an interactive museum at Street and Newtown roads in Warminster. On my visit to the building behind Craven Hall, the curator powered up a large model of the steamboat that revolutionized travel in America for which John Fitch is nearly forgotten.

Sources include “Justice to the Memory of John Fitch” by Charles Whittlesey published in 1845; “Bucks County Place Names” by George MacReynold’s published in in 1942; “Steam: The Untold Story of America’s First Great Invention” by Andrea Sutcliffe published in 2004, and “A History of Bristol Borough” by Doron Green published in 1911. Thanks to library director Dana Barber at the Grundy Library for her help. A video of Fitch’s steamboat model in operation is posted on the web at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_G5U7wcWQo.

Carl LaVO is the author of four books and numerous articles for the Naval Institute Press in Annapolis. He can be reached at carllavo0@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: A Bucks County man almost invented the world's first car