ng of indiarubber, by Dr. Mitchell,
renders it a most useful article. Dyer's discovery of soda ash yielded
him a competence. Our countrymen have also made most valuable
improvements in refining sugar, in the manufacture of lard oil and
stearin candles, and the preservation of timber by Earle's process.
Sugar and molasses have been extracted in our country from the
cornstalk, but with what, if any profit, as to either, is not yet
determined. No part of mechanics has produced such surprising results as
the steam engine, and our countrymen have been among the foremost and
most distinguished in this great and progressive branch. When Rumsey, of
Pennsylvania, made a steamboat, which moved against the current of the
James River four miles an hour, his achievement was so much in advance
of the age, as to acquire no public confidence. When John Fitch's boat
stemmed the current of the Delaware, contending successfully with sail
boats, it was called, in derision, the _scheme boat_. So the New
Yorkers, when the steamboat of their own truly great mechanic, Stevens,
after making a trip from Hoboken, burnt accidentally one of its boiler
tubes, it was proclaimed a failure. Fulton also encountered unbounded
ridicule and opposition, as he advanced to confer the greatest benefits
on mankind by the application of steam to navigation. So Oliver Evans,
of Pennsylvania (who has made such useful improvements in the flour
mill), was pronounced insane, when he applied to the Legislatures of
Pennsylvania and Maryland for special privileges in regard to the
application of steam to locomotion on common roads. In 1810 he was
escorted by a mob of boys, when his amphibolas was moved on wheels by
steam more than a mile through the streets of Philadelphia to the river
Schuylkill, and there, taking to the water, was paddled by steam to the
wharves of the Delaware, where it was to work as a dredging machine.
Fulton's was the first successful steamboat, Stevens's the first that
navigated the ocean, Oliver Evans's the first high-pressure engine
applied to steam navigation. Stevens's boat, by an accident, did not
precede Fulton's, and Stevens's engine was wholly American, and
constructed entirely by himself, and his propeller resembled much that
now introduced by Ericsson. Stevens united the highest mechanical skill
with a bold, original, inventive genius. His sons (especially Mr. Robert
L. Stevens, of New York) have inherited much of the extraordinary skill