In the spring of 1831, a flatboat loaded with barrels of pork, corn and live hogs came down the Sangamon River in Illinois and stopped dead at the village of New Salem. It had run onto the mill dam there, and for a day and a night it hung over the edge, taking on water. One of the hired hands was a tall 22-year-old named Abraham Lincoln.
The crew moved much of the cargo onto a borrowed boat and rolled the rest of the barrels forward. Then Lincoln bored a hole in the end of the boat that jutted out over the dam. The water that had leaked in ran out, and the boat slid over. The owner, Denton Offutt, was so taken with the performance that he told the crowd watching from the hill he would build a steamboat for the Sangamon and make Lincoln her captain.
He never built it. But Lincoln never quite stopped thinking about boats stuck in shallow water.
Seventeen years later he was a congressman. On a trip home to Illinois in 1848, he stopped to see Niagara Falls, then went on by boat down Lake Erie. Somewhere along the way the boat ran onto a sandbar. The captain had the crew gather loose planks, empty barrels and boxes and force them under the sides of the hull. Slowly the boat lifted and swung clear. Lincoln watched the whole operation closely.
Back in Springfield he set to work. His idea was to build the barrels into the boat. Long air chambers with sides of “india-rubber cloth” would ride folded up along each side of the hull. When the keel touched bottom, the crew would turn a long main shaft, by hand or by steam, and a system of ropes and pulleys would push the chambers down into the water and spread them open, so that they filled with air “for buoying up the vessel by the displacement of water.” Turn the shaft the other way, and they folded back up out of harm’s way.
A mechanic named Walter Davis, whose shop was near Lincoln’s law office, lent him tools and helped him build a model. Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, remembered him carrying it into the office and whittling on it while he talked about how it would change steamboat travel. Herndon privately thought it would never work, but he kept quiet, probably out of respect for Lincoln’s reputation as a boatman.
Lincoln filed his application on March 10, 1849, a week after his term in Congress ended. On April 13 his patent agent in Washington wrote with the news: “It affords me much pleasure to inform you that I have obtained a favorable decision on your application for a patent.” Patent No. 6,469 was issued on May 22, 1849.
As far as anyone knows, no boat was ever fitted with his chambers. There is no sign that Lincoln ever tried to put the idea into production, and his model went onto a shelf at the Patent Office. He still thought very highly of patents. In a lecture on discoveries and inventions ten years later, he named the patent laws, along with writing, printing and the discovery of America, as discoveries of special value, because they helped bring about all the others. In his words, the patent system “added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.”
He remains the only president to hold one. The model he whittled is in the Smithsonian today.
Publius
The Publius Papers · No. 2
Sources
- A. Lincoln, Buoying Vessels over Shoals, U.S. Patent No. 6,469, May 22, 1849. Patent drawing, National Archives, NAID 102278487.
- Abraham Lincoln, request for a patent. The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 2, ed. Arthur Brooks Lapsley.
- Zenas C. Robbins to Abraham Lincoln, April 13, 1849. Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.
- Abraham Lincoln, lecture on “Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements,” 1859. Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 5, ed. John G. Nicolay and John Hay (1905).
- William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln (1889), Vol. 1, p. 74, and Vol. 2, pp. 296-299 (second volume).
- Abraham Lincoln’s Patent Model, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
- Abraham Lincoln Patent Model Replica, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution (notes that this was “the only patent ever obtained by an American president”).
- Abraham Lincoln, autobiographical notes, May to June 1860 (his term in Congress ended “with the inaugeration of Gen. Taylor, in March 1849”). Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.
