Just why this was so is a little difficult to comprehend at this time, unless it was that Stevens' boat was such a small affair that it did not attract the attention it deserved, as did Fulton's larger boat. And yet we should not be guided too much by retrospective judgment. The significant fact remains that Stevens himself did not have entire confidence in his boat, or in the principle of his screw propeller, as is shown by the fact that three years later, while Fulton was building the _Clermont_, Stevens was also constructing a steamboat, not along the lines of his previous inventions, but as a paddle-wheel boat. This leaves little room for doubt that Stevens had not full confidence in the propeller; and when an inventor himself mistrusts his own device, there is little likelihood that anyone else will supply the necessary confidence. This may account for the fact that Stevens found difficulty in securing financial backing for his enterprise; and when such backing was found it was for the construction of the paddle-wheel boat, which was finished a few months after Fulton's boat had solved the problem of steam navigation.
As we shall see in another place, Fulton was no novice in the construction of peculiar boats at this time. He had built experimental boats both at home and abroad, was familiar with the principle of the screw and the paddle-wheel, and had come to have absolute confidence in the possibility of propelling boats at a good rate of speed by the use of steam. When he began his now famous _Clermont_, in the spring of 1807, it was not as an experimental skiff, but as a boat of one hundred and fifty tons burden--half again the size of the boats in which Columbus had discovered America--to be placed in commission between Albany and New York city. By August, this boat was completed, and the engines in place, and, under her own steam, the new boat was moved from the Jersey shipyard where she was constructed, and tied up at a New York dock. On August 7th, she started on her maiden trip up the Hudson. To the astonishment of practically every one of the persons in the great throng that had gathered along the shores, she left her dock in due course, and with wind and tide against her, steamed up the river at the rate of about five miles an hour. At this speed she covered the entire distance between New York and Albany, settling forever the question of the practicability of steam navigation.