to wager $3000 that, on a level road, he could make a carriage
driven by steam equal the speed of the swiftest horse, but he
found no response. In 1812 he asserted that he was willing to
wager that he could drive a steam carriage on level rails at a
rate of fifteen miles an hour. Evans thus anticipated the belief
of Stephenson that steam-driven vehicles would travel best on
railed tracks.

In the development of the steamboat almost all earlier means of
propulsion, natural and artificial, were used as models by the
inventors. The fins of fishes, the webbed feet of amphibious
birds, the paddles of the Indian, and the poles and oars of the
riverman, were all imitated by the patient inventors struggling
with the problem. Rumsey's first effort was a copy of the old
setting-pole idea. Fitch's model of 1785 had side paddle wheels
operated by an endless chain. Fitch's second and third models
were practically paddle-wheel models, one having the paddles at
the side and the other at the stern. Ormsbee of Connecticut made
a model, in 1792, on the plan of a duck's foot. Morey made what
may be called the first real stern-wheeler in 1794. Two years
later Fitch ran a veritable screw propeller on Collect Pond near
New York City. Although General Benjamin Tupper of Massachusetts
had been fashioning devices of this character eight years
previously, Fitch was the first to apply the idea effectively. In
1798 he evolved the strange, amphibious creation known as his
"model of 1798," which has never been adequately explained. It
was a steamboat on iron wheels provided with flanges, as though
it was intended to be run on submerged tracks. What may have been
the idea of its inventor, living out his last gloomy days in
Kentucky, may never be known; but it is possible to see in this