miles an hour, the highest rate attained being twenty-nine.
This was Stephenson's locomotive, and so fully vindicated his theory
that the idea of stationary engines on a railroad was completely
exploded. He had picked up the fixed engines which the genius of Watt
had devised, and set them on wheels to draw men and merchandise,
against the most direful predictions of the foremost engineers of his
day.

In all the records of invention there is no more sad or affecting story
than that of John Fitch. Poor he was in many senses, poor in
appearance, poor in spirit. He was born poor, lived poor, and died
poor. If there ever was a true inventor, this man was one. He was one
of those eager souls that would coin their own flesh to carry their
point. He only uttered the obvious truth when he said one day, in a
crisis of his invention, that if he could get one hundred pounds by
cutting off one of his legs he would gladly give it to the knife.

He tried in vain both in this country and in France to get money to
build his steamboat. He would say: "You and I will not live to see the
day, but the time will come when the steamboat will be preferred to all
other modes of conveyance, when steamboats will ascend the Western
rivers from New Orleans to Wheeling, and when steamboats will cross the
ocean. Johnny Fitch will be forgotten, but other men will carry out
his ideas and grow rich and great upon them."

Poor, ragged, forlorn, jeered at, pitied as a madman, discouraged by
the great, refused by the rich, he kept on till, in 1790, he had the
first vessel on the Delaware that ever answered the purpose of a
steamboat. It ran six miles an hour against the tide, and eight miles
with it.

At noon, on Friday, August 4, 1807, a crowd of curious people might
have been seen along the wharves of the Hudson River. They had
gathered to witness what they considered a ridiculous failure of a
"crank" who proposed to take a party of people up the Hudson River to
Albany in what he called a steam vessel named the _Clermont_. Did
anybody ever hear of such a ridiculous idea as navigating against the
current up the Hudson in a vessel without sails? "The thing will
'bust,'" says one; "it will burn up," says another, and "they will all
be drowned," exclaims a third, as he sees vast columns of black smoke
shoot up with showers of brilliant sparks. Nobody present, in all
probability, ever heard of a boat going by steam. It was the opinion
of e