, where a steamboat had navigated the Thames in 1801 and a year
later the famous sternwheeler 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 sternwheeler 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."

But there were difficulties in the way. Though England forbade the
exportation of engines, Fulton knew that, in numerous instances, this
rule had not been enforced, and he had hopes of success. "The British
Government," Fulton wrote Monroe, "must have little friendship or even
civility toward America, if they refuse such a request." Before the
steamboat which Fulton and Livingston proposed to build in America could
be operated there was another obstacle to be surmounted. The rights of
steam navigation of New York waters which Livingston had obtained on
th