James Rumsey's Walking Ship

James Rumsey was a thriving businessman in Bath, Virginia (now Berkeley Springs, WV) in 1784 when he met George Washington. Washington was traveling along the Potomac River to judge if it could be made navigable.

Rumsey Impressed George Washington

When the hero of the Revolutionary War stopped in Bath, Rumsey was anxious to show Washington his invention. It was a model of a boat that used the power of a river’s current to travel against the current. The boat had a set of geared wheels with two long poles attached underneath the hull. Rumsey placed the boat in the Potomac and the current spun the wheels, which in turn, forced the poles to push against the riverbed moving the boat against the current, according to Joel Achenbach in The Grand Idea (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

Washington wrote of the invention in his diary on September 6, 1784, “The model, & its operation upon the water, which had been made to run pretty swift, not only convinced me of what I before thought next to, if not quite impracticable, but that it might be turned to the greatest possible utility in inland Navigation…”

So impressed was Washington that he even gave Rumsey a letter stating that he had witnessed the boat in operation. Rumsey published the letter in newspapers and used it to raise capital.

Rumsey the Canal Builder

Washington continued on his journey and, the following year, became president of the Patowmack Company, which sought to make the Potomac River navigable from Cumberland to Georgetown through the use of skirting canals to take boats safely around the roughest parts of the river, such as Great Falls.

One of Washington’s first problems was that he couldn’t find anyone with experience building canal. In July 1785, Washington remembered Rumsey’s mechanical genius with his walking boat and decided that Rumsey was the man to build the canal, according to Achenbach.

Walking Ship Fails

In the intervening year Rumsey had continued his work on the mechanical boat he had showed Washington, but a full-scale model had not worked as well as the smaller version. The larger boat’s poles would stick or slip on the bottom of the river and when the boat did move forward, it lurched and tilted dangerously.

As making this idea a success seemed to be slipping away, Rumsey turned his sights to a new way to allow a boat to move against the current. Steam power. It was being used in Europe to power mining equipment. Could it be harnessed for boats?

However, Washington recruited Rumsey to his cause just as he was pondering the answer. Washington hired him at the annual salary of 200 pounds a year.

James Rumsey

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