1783: A young French nobleman demonstrates the first successful steamboat on the River Saône at Lyon. Fame and fortune would elude the inventor.

Claude-François-Dorothée de Jouffroy, the Marquis d’Abbans, was serving in the infantry in 1772 when multiple infractions of military discipline sent him to the prison near Cannes. While watching convicts rowing galleys there, he began speculating on how the newfangled steam engine could power boats.

After his release, de Jouffroy went to Paris in 1775 to study the latest steam tech. He used a Newcomen engine on his steamboat 1.0. The engine of this 42-foot steamship moved oars equipped with rotating, hinged flaps modeled on the webbed feet of waterfowl. He called it the Palmipède, or Webfoot, and he tried running it on the Doubs, a tributary of the Saône, in June and July of 1776. Tried is the operative word here, or perhaps we should say, inoperative.

Undaunted, de Jouffroy adapted James Watt’s designs to build a parallel-motion, double-acting steam engine. He put that in a boat named the Pyroscaphe (from the Greek for fire-boat). Instead of ungainly and inefficient mechanical duck feet, this boat was equipped with two large paddle wheels (like those used to power water mills), one on each side of the hull.

The Pyroscaphe was three times the size of his earlier attempt: more than 148 feet long, with a beam of nearly 15 feet. It displaced 163 tons and carried a crew of three. The horizontal engine moved a reciprocating double rack, which geared to ratchet wheels on a shaft that carried the paddle wheels.

The waning years of the ancien régime were a time of considerable innovation in France. Brothers Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier had demonstrated the first hot-air balloon capable of carrying passengers just six weeks earlier, and thousands of people lined the banks of the Saône when de Jouffroy showed his pride and joy in Lyon.

The Pyroscaphe steamed upstream at 6 mph without a sail, and the crowds cheered this technological marvel. But after 15 minutes, the boat began to break up under the pounding of the engine. De Jouffroy quickly and cannily steered the boat ashore, and then bowed to the cheering multitudes.

The marquis continued experimenting on the Saône for 16 months. Still, the French Academy of Sciences refused to recognize his achievement, ostensibly because the demonstration was not done in Paris, but perhaps because of the jealousy of rival inventors.

The French Revolution soon ensued, and though the nobleman kept his head, he never got his patent: not from the republic, not from Napoleon (a “usurper” to whom the legitimist de Jouffroy would not even apply for a patent), not from the restored Bourbon monarchy and not from citizen-king Louis Philippe.

De Jouffroy ended life discouraged and poor in France’s grand old soldiers’ home, the Hôtel des Invalides. He died of cholera in 1832, at age 80.

American steamboat pioneer Robert Fulton, whose own experiments began not on the Hudson but the Seine, acknowledged that “if the glory … belongs to any one man, it belongs to the author of the experiments made on the River Saône at Lyons in 1783.” The solons of France’s Third Republic finally acknowledged de Jouffroy with a statue in 1884.

Source: Catholic Encyclopedia, others

Image: Artist’s rendering of the fashionable crowds watching the Marquis d’Abbans’ steamboat demo in 1783.

This article first appeared on Wired.com July 15, 2008.