"Occupying an ordinary and commonplace position in one of the show-cases
in the large hall of the Patent Office is one little model which in ages
to come will be prized as one of the most curious and most sacred relics
in that vast museum of unique and priceless things. This is a plain and
simple model of a steamboat roughly fashioned in wood by the hand of
Abraham Lincoln. It bears date 1849, when the inventor was known simply
as a successful lawyer and rising politician of Central Illinois.
Neither his practice nor his politics took up so much of his time as to
prevent him from giving some attention to contrivances which he hoped
might be of benefit to the world and of profit to himself. The design of
this invention is suggestive of one phase of Abraham Lincoln's early
life, when he went up and down the Mississippi as a flatboatman and
became familiar with some of the dangers and inconveniences attending
the navigation of the western rivers. It is an attempt to make it an
easy matter to transport vessels over shoals and snags and 'sawyers.'
The main idea is that of an apparatus resembling a noiseless bellows
placed on each side of the hull of the craft just below the water line
and worked by an odd but not complicated system of ropes, valves, and
pulleys. When the keel of the vessel grates against the sand or
obstruction these bellows are to be filled with air, and thus buoyed up
the ship is expected to float lightly and gayly over the shoal which
would otherwise have proved a serious interruption to her voyage. The
model, which is about eighteen or twenty inches long and has the
appearance of having been whittled with a knife out of a shingle and a
cigar-box, is built without any elaboration or ornament or any extra
apparatus beyond that necessary to show the operation of buoying the
steamer over the obstructions. It is carved as one might imagine a
retired railsplitter would whittle, strongly but not smoothly, and
evidently made with a view solely to convey to the minds of the patent
authorities, by the simplest possible means, an idea of the purpose and