{"id":43370,"date":"2021-02-06T14:28:23","date_gmt":"2021-02-06T19:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rivercruiseadvisor.com\/?p=43370"},"modified":"2021-02-18T14:09:17","modified_gmt":"2021-02-18T19:09:17","slug":"where-river-cruising-began-a-fire-boat-on-the-saone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rivercruiseadvisor.com\/2021\/02\/where-river-cruising-began-a-fire-boat-on-the-saone\/","title":{"rendered":"Where River Cruising Began: A \u2018Fire Boat\u2019 On The Sa\u00f4ne"},"content":{"rendered":"
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18th-century steam engines propelling paddle-wheels gave birth to the river cruise industry. In Europe today, CroisiEurope operates three paddle-wheelers, although they are powered by diesel engines. Pictured here the Loire Princesse\u2019s paddle-wheels allow the ship to navigate the notoriously shallow waters of the Loire. \u00a9 2015 Ralph Grizzle<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1783, in the city of Lyon, a 32-year-old engineer and inventor did something remarkable: He unwittingly gave birth to river cruising as we know it today.<\/p>\n

On what was presumably a warm day in mid-July, thousands of Lyonnaise gathered along the banks of the Sa\u00f4ne to watch the Frenchman chug upstream in a boat measuring 150 feet long and 16 feet wide. They were witnessing a spectacle never before seen: the world\u2019s first successful voyage by steamboat.<\/p>\n

Up until this time, ships had been propelled by wind or by men rowing. The chance to see a boat move on its own power, without sails or oars, drew curiosity seekers, scientists, engineers, businessmen and skeptics.\u00a0Spewing plumes of smoke from its chimney, the Frenchman’s boat must have appeared as a fire-breathing dragon to those onlookers.<\/p>\n

Named Pyroscaphe<\/i> (\u201cfire boat,\u201d derived from Greek), the steamboat\u00a0was powered by a two-cylinder engine that turned a pair of paddlewheels, each 15 feet in diameter and capable of pushing the boat against a strong current. With a crew of only three, the boat puffed upstream for 15 minutes to cover a distance of nearly four miles, cut short when Pyroscaphe<\/em> began to break apart under the constant pounding of its powerful engine. Before anyone ashore could notice, the quick-thinking Frenchman maneuvered the boat ashore and bowed to a cheering crowd.<\/p>\n

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Artist rendering of the first successful steamboat sailing, which took place on the Sa\u00f4ne in 1783.<\/p><\/div>\n

Not The First, But The First Successful Steamboat<\/h3>\n

Despite his success of being the first person ever to sail under steam, our Frenchman ended up not as a celebrated inventor but as a footnote in history. His 15 minutes of fame on the Sa\u00f4ne were remarkable, but his life ended with scant recognition of his achievement. He died embittered, impoverished and in relative historical obscurity. It was not until a century after his sailing on the Sa\u00f4ne that the French government recognized his contribution to history.<\/p>\n

Credit, instead, went to the American engineer and inventor Robert Fulton. “We tell our schoolchildren that Robert Fulton invented the first steamboat,” wrote the University of Houston’s John Lienhard. “Fulton is really just America’s thin claim to an invention that’d been proven feasible in Europe – long, long before.” 1<\/sup><\/p>\n

Fulton’s achievements even were celebrated in a\u00a01940 film\u00a0Little Old New York<\/a>,\u00a0starring Alice Faye, Fred MacMurray and Richard Greene. But\u00a0Fulton himself graciously acknowledged our Frenchman, proclaiming, \u201cIf the glory … belongs to any one man, it belongs to the author of the experiments made on the River Sa\u00f4ne at Lyon in 1783\u201d.<\/p>\n

To see why the Frenchman deserves his rightful place in history, we’ll need to follow as many twists and turns as a meandering river. Along the way, we’ll learn that while propelling a boat by steam engine had been attempted several times, it was always with the disappointment of watching one\u2019s boat slowly break up and descend beneath the water’s surface.<\/p>\n

We’ll begin on the Conestoga River, across the Atlantic, where Great Britain had established 13 colonies with a growing – and inventive – colonial population. One of those inventors was William Henry, a master gunsmith who provided rifles to British troops during the French and Indian War. When that war ended in 1763, Henry\u00a0set out on the \u201cfirst attempt that had ever been made to apply steam to the propelling of boats.\u201d\u00a02<\/sup>. On its maiden voyage near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, however, the heavy stern-wheeler promptly sank into the murky depths of the\u00a0Conestoga River.<\/p>\n

Now, let’s head back to Europe, where, in Paris, we’ll find\u00a0Claude Fran\u00e7ois Joseph d\u2019Auxiron.\u00a0You\u2019d be hard-pressed to find a more tragic story of steamboat experiments gone awry than that of the\u00a0French engineer and inventor.<\/p>\n

In December of 1772, a little more than 10 years before Pyroscaphe<\/i> chugged upstream in Lyon, d\u2019Auxiron began work on a boat equipped with a steam boiler on a brick foundation for fire protection. Parisians had never seen anything like d’Auxiron’s odd boat, and many made fun of it. Some even went so far as to make threats against it; d’Auxiron responded by having the military guard his boat.<\/p>\n

In 1774, he moved this boat from \u00cele des Cygnes<\/em> (Isle of Swans) to Meudon, in the southwest suburbs of Paris.\u00a0While docked there, d\u2019Auxiron\u2019s boat mysteriously sank one night in September 1774.\u00a0Though foul play was suspected (French inventors were not above sabotaging their peers), indubitably the culprit was the heavy steam engine and its brick foundation. The loss was devastating. The sinking of his boat also submerged an agreement he had with the French government for a 15-year license to operate commercially. It was a huge financial blow that took a toll on his well-being. After three years of lawsuits with stockholders, not yet 47 years old, he suffered a stroke and died.<\/p>\n

That takes us back to Lyon. Before his death d’Auxiron had encouraged our Frenchman to build his steamboat. Who was this Frenchman? Claude Doroth\u00e9e Marquis de Jouffroy d\u2019Abbans.\u00a0How\u00a0he ended up in Lyon is an interesting story in itself, with sufficient drama for a PBS Masterpiece production: love, jealousy, imprisonment and the life of a celebrated nobleman ending in bitterness and poverty. For that story, we\u2019ll need to wind back the clock 32 years to visit the Doubs river in eastern France. There, in a commune known as Abbans-la-Ville<\/i> (now known as Abbans-Dessus<\/i>), a castle stands with the inscription, \u201cClaude Doroth\u00e9e Marquis de Jouffroy d\u2019Abbans, 1751-1832, Inventa Ici Le Bateau A Vapeur<\/i> (invented the steamboat here).\u201d<\/p>\n

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Claude-Fran\u00e7ois-Doroth\u00e9e, marquis de Jouffroy d’Abbans, who successfully steamed up the Sa\u00f4ne in 1783.<\/p><\/div>\n

A Tinkerer In Good Company<\/h3>\n

In 1751, de Jouffroy was born to a noble family in Roche-sur-Rognon<\/i>\u00a0(now Roches-Bettaincourt<\/i>) in France’s Champagne<\/i> region. He spent his childhood years more than 100 miles south in the family castle near Besan\u00e7on<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Besan\u00e7on serves as the seat of the regional council of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comt\u00e9<\/i> region, and for someone with an inventive mind, there was no better place to grow up. Our ill-fated d\u2019Auxiron was born in Besan\u00e7on<\/i> as was the poet and novelist Victor Hugo. The region brims with tinkerers, skilled tradesman and inventors.<\/p>\n

Besan\u00e7on<\/i> has been France\u2019s watch-making capital since shortly before the French Revolution, and it is perhaps not entirely without coincidence that the working mechanisms of timepieces were what lured de Jouffroy into the world of invention. As a boy, he disassembled the castle clocks to solve the mystery of how they worked. Fortunately, he managed to reassemble them in working order.<\/p>\n

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The castle where de Jouffroy grew up, Ch\u00e2teau d’Abbans-Dessus, courtesy of Arnaud 25, CC BY-SA 3.0<\/a>, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

The young de Jouffroy demonstrated an aptitude for engineering 3<\/sup>. He might have pursued an early career in engineering, but his parents had other plans for him: a career soldier, a profession that they felt was worthy of the family\u2019s aristocratic heritage.<\/p>\n

At the age of 13, de Jouffroy began military instruction in the court of Versailles where he served as a page. While at Versailles, he became intrigued with the lessons from a master mathematician, Louis Charles Victoire Trincano, who had penned the ambitiously titled, \u201cComplete Treatise on Arithmetic for the use of the Military School of the Company of the Light Horses of the Ordinary Guard of the King.\u201d Slowly but surely, de Jouffroy was acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills that would be required to build his steamboat.<\/p>\n

When de Jouffroy returned home to the castle near Besan\u00e7on, his father found him an assignment in an infantry regiment, a fashionable assignment at the time for nobility. While serving in the regiment as a second lieutenant, de Jouffroy and his commanding officer, Comte d\u2019Artois, described as an elegant tall blond with black eyes, had affections for the same lady. Their rivalry escalated to the point of an altercation – one not without consequence for de Jouffroy. After multiple infractions and on what may have been questionable charges, de Jouffroy was sent to prison in the L\u00e9rins Islands. The islands, offshore from the city of Cannes, were home to Fort Ste-Marguerite, the same prison that had held the Man in the Iron Mask in 17th century.<\/p>\n

From his cell overlooking the harbor, de Jouffroy observed the large ships of France’s Royal Navy, propelled by sails and galley convicts chained to their benches who rowed the vessels. An idea hatched in de Jouffroy\u2019s head: Could there be another means to propel the ships? His steamboat was beginning to take shape.<\/p>\n

While in prison for two years, de Jouffroy consumed books about navigation and ruminated on ideas that might result in a successful steamboat. Upon his release in 1773, he returned to the castle near Besan\u00e7on, but left for Paris soon afterward to study steam engines to see if they might have applications for steamboats.<\/p>\n

He Went To Paris Looking For Answers<\/h3>\n

Paris was the epicenter of French intellect and ingenuity. In 1753, the French Academy of Science had launched a competition aimed at finding ways to supplement sail power. The winner, a Swiss mathematician and physicist named Daniel Bernoulli, recognized that steam could be used to supplement sail power but he deemed steam as being an inefficient method.<\/p>\n

In fact, steam was inefficient. In 1712, the English inventor Thomas Newcomen unveiled his “atmospheric engine,” the world\u2019s first practical device to harness steam to produce mechanical work. The engine was used\u00a0to pump water out of tin and coal mines that were prone to flooding. “The problem was that Newcomen’s engine required the cylinder itself be alternately heated and cooled to generate work, which because of thermal inertia of the cylinder walls (usually copper) was a slow process that wasted a lot of heat.”\u00a04<\/sup><\/p>\n

Enter\u00a0the Scottish inventor James Watt, who significantly improved the performance of the Newcomen engine with his Watt steam engine. And that brings us back to Paris.<\/p>\n

In the French capital city,\u00a0de Jouffroy found his way into scientific and engineering circles in which there was buzz about a new hydraulic achievement on Chaillot Hill, which faces the Eiffel Tower across the Seine. The Chaillot machine, powered by Watt\u2019s new improved steam engine, was designed to pump water from the Seine to Ch\u00e2teau de la Muette along Rue de la Pompe, a street named for the \u201cfire pump.\u201d<\/p>\n

The project was spearheaded by Auguste Charles and Jacques-Constantin P\u00e9rier, who were great builders at the time. The two brothers had plans to supply the city of Paris with water through their new pumps powered by steam.<\/p>\n

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The fire pump at Chaillot Hill.<\/p><\/div>\n

While in Paris, de Jouffroy met with the P\u00e9rier brothers, discussing the possibility to use steam engines to propel boats. However, he and the brothers disagreed on aspects of how much propulsion would be needed. The disagreement escalated into a dispute, and their relationship would remain contentious until the end.<\/p>\n

Undeterred, de Jouffroy\u00a0returned home to build an experimental boat using a steam engine. While his father showed little interest, his sister was confident that her brother would succeed. On a visit to his sister in Baume-les-Dames, de Jouffroy spotted a beautiful lake and decided to conduct his experiments there, building a steam engine with the help of a local coppersmith.<\/p>\n

The engine was installed on a boat, 40 feet long, with an engine that moved\u00a0oars equipped with hinged flaps modeled on the form of the webbed feet of waterfowl. In June and July of 1776, de Jouffroy experimented with his boat on the Gond\u00e9 basin, where the Cusancin flows into the Doubs, at Baume-les-Dames. He briefly navigated the boat,\u00a0but the oars on each side prevented passage through the locks. He considered his first boat a relative failure but had a better idea: to replace the oars with paddle wheels, adapting James Watt\u2019s designs to build a parallel-motion, double-acting steam engine driving two large paddle wheels, one on each side of the hull.<\/p>\n

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Pyroscaphe’s design.<\/p><\/div>\n

Success In Lyon, Sabotage In Paris<\/h3>\n

That brings us back to Lyon, with de Jouffroy bowing to the crowds on his nearly broken steamboat. The imaginative Frenchman made quick repairs and adjustments to Pyroscaphe<\/em>, and in August of 1983, his steamboat carried freight and passengers on the Sa\u00f4ne.<\/p>\n

The marquis continued experimenting on the river for 16 months. He applied for a license to launch a steamboat company in the hopes of recovering his investments. The license would have given him a 15-year monopoly more or less. But France’s Minister of Finance, who consulted the Academy of Science, replied, “It appeared that the test made in Lyon did not meet the required conditions.” The minister would grant a license only if the steamboat could be demonstrated on the Seine, a difficult, if not impossible, proposition that would require a new steamboat.<\/p>\n

De Jouffroy had spent a fortune already and was unable to muster the financial resources to continue his fight for a license. Why would the minister demand that the steamboat be demonstrated on the Seine? What dare not be said was that the Academy of Science could not allow Lyon to succeed where Paris had not. But the more sinister motive was that\u00a0the influential P\u00e9rier brothers made the demand, from which they would profit handsomely.\u00a0The brothers offered to build a boat for de Jouffroy for 100,000 livres<\/em>, an exorbitant amount of money at the time. He could not afford it. The P\u00e9rier brothers later entered a relationship with the young American, yes, Robert Fulton.<\/p>\n

Fulton In France<\/h2>\n

Fulton’s interest in steamboats can be traced back to Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, where his neighbor was none other than William Henry. Despite Henry’s sinking of the first-ever attempt to propel a boat by steam, the 12-year-old Fulton was impressed.<\/p>\n

At age 23, Fulton moved to Europe, where he lived for the next two decades. The young engineer became swept up in \u201cCanal Mania,\u201d a period of intense canal building in England and Wales. Of particular interest for Fulton was the canal systems\u2019 locks. He was convinced that there must be a more efficient system to move boats up and down the canals than the locks. They had to fill with and empty water to raise or lower boats before sending them along their onward journeys. In 1794, an idea came to fruition when Fulton\u00a0obtained a patent for the inclined plane, a type of cable railway that raises or lowers boats between varying water levels.<\/p>\n

One such example that you can see today is on France’s Marne-Rhine Canal, where the Saint-Louis-Arzviller inclined plane replaces 17 locks and eliminates 2.5 miles of travel. Guests on my hosted barge trips through Alsace<\/a> get to experience the thrill of ascending or descending the inclined plane just outside the charming village of Saint-Louis. The time-lapse below shows how the incline works. It was filmed by David Weymouth, who barged Alsace with me in October of 2019.<\/p>\n