The First Family Of Inventors

Sitting on the deck of the packet boat taking him to England in the fall of 1830, Robert Livingston Stevens whittled at a block of wood he had obtained from the ship’s carpenter. He knew he would have to carve just the right kind of cross section for the rail he had in mind, for much depended on it. Already known as a brilliant engineer and designer of steamboats, the forty-two-year-old Stevens was entering a new field of endeavor: He was crossing the Atlantic Ocean to purchase a locomotive and iron rails for his family’s fledgling Camden and Amboy Railroad, which had just been chartered by the New Jersey legislature and was to be one of the first railways in the United States. But the rails themselves were a problem. Up to then most rail track had consisted of iron straps fastened to wooden rails. Stevens not only knew this could be dangerous—the straps tended to work loose and could pierce the underside of a carriage—but thought that something far stronger would be needed if American railroads were to grow at the rate he and his family envisioned. The so-called Birkenshaw rail, an English innovation, had a promising profile in the shape of a T but had to be supported by chairs, or clamp bases, which would be difficult to produce in the United States, where metalworkers were scarce. Something better was required. He pared carefully.

The design Stevens finally carved added a strong but tapering base to the Birkenshaw profile; it was a shape not seen before. The resulting rail was strong, yet it could be spiked easily to a block or tie, so there was no need for a chair. But could the rail be produced easily? The Welsh ironworkers retained to make it had their doubts when he talked to them a few weeks later, fearing its odd shape would wreck their machinery. But Stevens persisted, and he deposited a large sum of money as a guarantee. The difficulties were overcome, and the result made transportation history. The Stevens rail, first used on the Camden and Amboy (and carrying the John Bull, the epoch-making locomotive Stevens acquired on his English trip), was gradually accepted not only in the United States but elsewhere as well and has since become standard. Almost anyone who has ever traveled by rail anywhere in the world has ridden on the design shaped that day in the mid-Atlantic. What’s more, Stevens later designed the spike that holds the rail to its support and the fish plate that fastens rail ends to each other. He also introduced the use of wooden ties embedded in crushed rock, for simplicity of railway construction and the eternal comfort of passengers.

That he came up with such critical inventions just when they were needed would have surprised no one who knew his background. For he was the son of John Stevens of Hoboken, New Jersey, himself a famed engineer, inventor, and developer of steamboats and an extraordinarily influential pioneer in the field of mechanical transportation. Robert had grown up surrounded by new ideas and revolutionary innovations, as had his ten brothers and sisters, some of whom also became inventors. One brother, Edwin Augustus, designed a successful plow and a novel kind of delivery wagon as well as a number of steam-engine improvements and also founded the Stevens Institute of Technology, which is still located on the former family estate in Hoboken. John, Robert, and Edwin working together introduced some far-sighted advances in naval warfare. Invention even carried into a third generation, a son of Edwin’s developing what is now the standard double-ended ferryboat. A good case can be made, in fact, for calling this astonishing lineage America’s first family of invention.

This is no rags-to-riches story, however. The Stevenses were well-to-do landowners, and the patriarch of the family, John Stevens, was a true eighteenth-century gentleman scientist—educated, cultivated, fascinated by the world about him and eager to improve it. His grandfather had come over from England in 1699 at the age of seventeen, become a lawyer, and purchased land in New Jersey; his father, a merchant and shipowner, extended the landholdings and became prominent in New Jersey politics. John himself, born in 1749, trained as a lawyer and in the American Revolution served as treasurer of New Jersey, collecting money for the colonial cause. He rose to the rank of colonel and for the rest of his life was known as Col. John Stevens. His home had been in New York, but after marrying, in the early 1780s, he bought for himself and his bride a sizable tract of land on the Jersey side of the Hudson River that had been seized from its proBritish owner. Called the Island of Hoboken (its Indian name had been Hopoghan Hackinge , “The Land of the Smoking Pipe”), the estate dominated a rise of land beside the river but was otherwise surrounded by swamps.

Crossing to Manhattan in the family’s plum-lined barge to attend church was often agreeable to the colonel but always slow and sometimes perilous, and early on he began to interest himself in better transit. Sometime around 1788 he chanced to see John Fitch’s experimental steamboat churning along the Delaware River, and it changed his life. Steam power—still in its rudimentary stages even in England—was certainly the answer, he could see, and he read everything he could find about it. Soon he was corresponding with Fitch’s rival James Rumsey to suggest improvements in Rumsey’s engine (“Within the worm aforesaid should be another worm, extending the whole length thereof.…”), and in no time at all he had designed a steam engine of his own with an improved vertical boiler. Casting about for a way to protect his ideas, he petitioned friends in Washington and helped bring about the first U.S. patent laws, earning one of the initial patents for himself in 1791.

Although nothing came of his first engine design, he continued tinkering while pursuing personal business. A severe problem was his lack of mechanical training, which made him utterly dependent on hired hands, most of them incompetent. His zeal did not flag, though, and new ideas constantly sprang from his brain. The story goes that he awoke one morning with a new scheme for eccentrics and connecting rods and, finding no pencil and paper handy, sketched it with his finger between the shoulder blades of his wife lying in bed next to him. “Do you know what figure I am making?” he asked as she awoke with a start.

“Yes, Mr. Stevens,” she replied. “The figure of a fool.”

Around 1797 he joined with a New Jersey foundry operator, Nicholas Roosevelt (ancestor of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts), and New York’s Chancellor Robert Livingston (who happened to be his brother-in-law) to build a steamboat. Roosevelt had the mechanical expertise, and Livingston the political muscle necessary to acquire a monopoly on steam operations in New York State for twenty years—considered a must for any private group introducing a new service. With the colonel’s enthusiasm, the combination looked like a winner. Trouble was, the chancellor fancied himself a steam designer, too, and insisted on imposing his ideas, which were half-baked, on the others. The resulting craft was unworkable. Then Livingston was named minister to France and departed for Europe.

Undaunted, Stevens carried on. In 1804, all on his own, he produced a truly revolutionary craft, the twenty-odd-foot Little Juliana (named for a daughter), which was driven by twin-screw propellers. Incorporating a multitubular boiler and a single cylinder that delivered power to the screws via connecting rods, she was the first successful propeller-driven steamboat in the world. (Her engine may be seen today at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington.) Many years later an observer recalled being startled to see the boat proceeding across the Hudson with “no visible means of propulsion!” Operating her that day were the colonel’s eldest son, John Cox Stevens, and the younger Robert, the latter-day whittier.

John Cox had shown less talent for engineering than for other pursuits, but the seventeen-year-old Robert (named for his uncle) was already marked for impressive inventive accomplishments, having helped design and build the Little Juliana . The colonel was seeing to it that he got solid training, and from this time on Robert served as his father’s chief assistant. Soon the colonel was ready to build a far larger craft, the hundred-foot Phoenix , which he hoped would carry passengers and freight from New York City to Albany and back. The boat’s design was largely the work of Robert, who gave her concave waterlines, the first such feature ever incorporated into a boat of this type, and special bracing for the engine, to reduce strain on the hull. The Phoenix would not be propeller-driven, however. Although the Little Juliana had delighted everyone, her boiler was not strong enough to develop the high pressure needed to drive propellers efficiently, and after a year or two it simply gave way. Colonel John remained convinced that propellers would one day supplant paddle wheels, but until a strong enough boiler was developed, he would have to accept low pressure and paddles. As it was, the Phoenix , completed in 1808, was a stout craft capable of moving at more than five miles an hour, which was fast for the day.

The big question was, Could she move legally? The colonel’s brother-inlaw and erstwhile partner, Robert Livingston, had while in France become an admirer of Robert Fulton, the submarine visionary lately turned steamboat builder, and was now his patron. Furthermore, he had managed to get the old Roosevelt-Livingston-Stevens monopoly changed to one granting rights exclusively to Livingston and Fulton, thus barring any Stevens boat from the Hudson River. And Fulton had just successfully sailed his Clermont up the Hudson and was being lionized. Suddenly the colonel was out in the cold.

He fumed, to no avail. He claimed that the monopoly (now that he was not in it) was illegal, but this got him nowhere. When Fulton and Livingston offered to make him a partner, provided Fulton’s designs were paramount, he indignantly refused. Confident that the Phoenix was faster than the Clermont , he proposed a race between the two, the winner to get exclusive rights to the Albany trade; the challenge was ignored. Although the brothers-in-law remained civil to each other, their letters were filled with taunts and accusations, and the fight was not resolved.

What to do with the Phoenix ? There was only one solution: Take her to the Delaware, where the monopoly would not apply. The only way to get there, however, was via the Atlantic Ocean, 150 miles of it down to and around Cape May, and no steamboat was considered safe on the open seas; nautical experts and old salts alike were sure the waves would lift the paddles out of the water, gravely damaging them and the engine. We’ll try it anyway, said Colonel John.

Early in June 1809, after Stevens had peered at the skies through the telescope on his estate and, with a side glance at the barometer, pronounced the prospect calm enough, the Phoenix cast off and splashed out to sea. In command was an experienced hand, Capt. Moses Rogers; Robert Stevens, now twenty-one, was his chief mate (the colonel stayed behind). To rescue anyone washed overboard—there were those who predicted the entire crew would be—a schooner had been assigned escort duty, but she soon got blown off course and was hardly seen again. Each night Rogers prudently ducked into a sheltering harbor (Robert’s log refers to one as “Barny Gat”), and several times the Phoenix lay over, waiting for a storm to pass. After eleven days Cape May was cleared, and two days later they were in Philadelphia. It was the first time a steamboat had ventured onto the open ocean.

The Phoenix was a great success on the Delaware, plying regularly between Philadelphia and Trenton, and three years later the Stevenses added a faster craft, the Philadelphia , another of Robert’s designs, which contained two innovations in steamboat construction: bolts instead of nails to hold the frame together, and stiffening knees—braces of wood and iron—to reduce the shattering vibrations that had plagued all steamboats.

Of course it was nice to make money on a distant river, but the colonel could not long close his eyes to the Hudson, and in 1811 he was back with another challenge to the monopolists in the form of the steam ferryboat Juliana (his daughter was older now), which he put into service between Hoboken and New York. It was the first steam ferry service in the world, and it flourished for more than a year. Then the Livingston interests got an injunction, and the Juliana slunk off to Connecticut. Stevens kept up his service on the Hudson, using barges propelled by horses on treadmills, but this was scarcely worth his notice. He had put Robert in charge of the Delaware operations. He was in his sixties. It was time to gaze at new horizons.

As a matter of fact, he had plenty of things in mind. All the time he had been building steamboats his fertile brain had thrown off new ideas with seeming abandon. Back in the late 1790s he had helped design New York City’s first water-supply system (its mains made of hollowed-out pine logs); when the city in 1795 fell prey to a yellow fever epidemic, the colonel dashed off a letter to a physician friend urging the establishment of “floating stages” in the river out beyond the wharf line where the sick could be sequestered—an idea that would be realized many decades later with floating hospitals. Along about this time he also suggested to associates that a formidably efficient engine might be devised by “introducing inflammable matter … into each end of the cylinder of a steam engine. When the piston in the cylinder shall have moved one-third of the way … I set fire to the same … thus causing an explosion in each end of the cylinder at each stroke of the piston, up and down.” Here, in effect, was the concept of a device the colonel would never live to see: the internalcombustion engine.

Always interested in better transit across the Hudson, the colonel around 1805 predicted that ferries would one day prove unable to carry all the traffic between New Jersey and Manhattan. He proposed building a floating bridge, then, when this evoked no response, suggested wooden spans up to six hundred feet long reinforced with iron, to stretch “from the bluff at Hoboken to the upper Battery.” Alternatively, he thought a tunnel might do. He would construct cylinders of wood, join them together, fill the tube with water to sink it, add some weight to hold it on the river bottom, and then pump out the water. He costed it out, took soundings, and pronounced the plan feasible. Needless to say, nothing came of this idea either; New York would not begin building tunnels until the end of the century.

In a totally different vein, as the United States drifted into war with England in 1812, Colonel Stevens took to thinking up ways to help the nation defend itself. His first proposal, in 1813, was for a saucer-shaped, ironclad, circular warship for harbor defense. Secured to a firmly anchored swivel and mounting a number of guns facing outward in all directions, the craft would revolve as needed; when a gun had fired, propellers would rotate the ship until the next gun was lined up with the target, and so on around the circle. Although the craft was never built, it was the first ironclad ever designed and an early embodiment of the Monitor principle.

At about the same time, the colonel joined Robert and Edwin in experiments that had vast significance. Believing that naval firepower could be improved, they designed—the major part of the work was actually Robert’s—an elongated shell that comprised a shot ball plus three pounds of gunpowder and exploded after penetrating its target. In a test the shell was fired at a barrier of stout oak timbers bolted together and completely destroyed it. A beefed-up shell with more gunpowder blasted a hole in a four-foot-deep barrier “large enough for a man and horse to enter.” The shell could be dropped from a high point onto a hard surface without being harmed; it could be immersed in water for a period, then dried off, and it would fire perfectly. The government ended up ordering five thousand of the shells from Robert, and with good reason. The invention was a clear forerunner of the modern armor-piercing projectile.

But what sort of ship could resist such a weapon? The father and his two inventive sons proposed a different kind of armored ship, one that would sit low in the water, her machinery thus protected, with little more than her gun or guns above the surface. This additional precursor of the Monitor was also never built, but a quarter of a century later Edwin Stevens was to supervise the building of a much larger version, as will be seen.

What the colonel really had on his mind these days was railroads. He was to spend the rest of his life arguing for them, planning them, and finally building them. In 1812, when he first spouted off on the subject, there were no true steam railroads anywhere. The Englishman Richard Trevithick had built a locomotive that worked briefly, and other designs were being considered here and there, but in both England and the United States, a railway meant a ponderous horse-drawn affair for hauling coal out of a mine. As a railway visionary, Stevens had been preceded in this country by Oliver Evans, who before 1800 had advanced the preposterous notion of a steam railroad between Philadelphia and New York. The colonel’s ideas were more fully developed, and he stuck to them more zealously. In 1812 he had the audacity to propose to De Witt Clinton, the proponent of canals, that the future lay in railways; money invested in canals was a waste. Don’t dig that ditch from Albany to Lake Erie, he said; build a railroad instead. It will be cheaper and more efficient. He thereupon published a work entitled Documents Tending to Prove the Superior Advantages of Rail ways and Steam-carriages over Canal Navigation , which said rail travel was not only potentially more comfortable and available year-round but better for national defense and much, much faster. He envisioned “suits of carriages” weighing as much as a hundred tons apiece and hauling people and freight to distant places. “I can see nothing to hinder a carriage,” he added, “from moving on these ways with a velocity of 100 miles an hour.”

For starters, what he personally wanted to do was connect his Delaware River operations with New York by traversing New Jersey, and in 1815 he obtained a charter permitting him to build a railway from Trenton to New Brunswick, whence steamboats could deliver passengers via the Raritan River to New York. Unable for the moment to attract backers—the prevailing view was that rail travel was inherently unsafe, and anyway the locomotives would frighten livestock—he and his sons set up a stagecoach service across New Jersey. In 1820 the colonel tried Pennsylvania, assuring its legislature that “diverging from the centre, like rays of the sun, railroads will diffuse light, heat and animation to every extremity of the Commonwealth. …” Again he was awarded a charter, for a line from Philadelphia westward. His organization was called the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Here, too, he was far ahead of the pack, and nothing was built for many years, but John Stevens has justifiably been called the father of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

There was nothing to do, it seemed, but build a demonstration railroad on his own. And so he did, laying out a circular track in 1826 on a field near his Hoboken estate and setting on it a “steam carriage”—or locomotive—that he (now aged seventy-seven) and Robert had designed and built. The engine—the first locomotive ever built in the United States—delivered its power through a cogged third rail and kept its water supply in a wine barrel, but it puffed around the track at a brisk twelve miles per hour, carrying up to a dozen alarmed passengers.

Finally, in 1830, the colonel’s efforts were rewarded. Robert and Edwin had been busy lobbying New Jersey legislators for a new rail charter and had found a powerful ally in Robert Stockton, a flamboyant entrepreneur who controlled rights to a potential canal from Trenton to New Brunswick. Dodging a conflict between the two means of transportation and observing that Stockton and the Stevenses were prepared to cooperate, the legislature voted to build both. This time financial backing was available, and the Camden and Amboy Railroad came into being. Its right of way would stretch all the way from Camden, across the Delaware from Philadelphia, to Amboy, just below Staten Island—an easy boat ride to Manhattan. And it was the C&A on whose behalf Robert, as its president and chief engineer (Edwin was treasurer), sailed to England to acquire the historic John Bull—the first truly efficient passenger locomotive in the United States—and those equally historic rails.

Granted monopoly status, the C&A began to earn handsome profits. Robert made sure it was as up-to-date as possible too. In addition to its precedentsetting rails and spikes, its engines presently sported a feature that would become familiar to all Americans. If a locomotive struck a cow, the impact often derailed the train, and so Robert and his top mechanic, Isaac Dripps, devised a fearsome assemblage of pointed iron bars to be mounted on a truck in front of the engine. After finding that this tended to impale the animal instead of casting it aside, they went back to the drawing board and came up with a more efficient grid of sloping bars enclosed at the base. Thus was the lowly cowcatcher born.

The family’s steamboats were doing very well, too. The Livingston-Fulton monopoly on the Hudson had weakened perceptibly after the deaths of the principals (both the chancellor and Fulton were gone by the end of 1815) and was finally ruled unconstitutional by the landmark 1824 Supreme Court decision in Gibbons v. Ogden , in which Chief Justice John Marshall decreed that all such pacts violated the interstate-commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. The colonel had already started running steam ferries again across the river, and the family soon had boats churning up to Albany and intermediate points as well. Robert added improvements almost with each new boat. Among his innovations were the substitution of much lighter, openwork wrought iron for the solid cast iron that had been used for walking beams; the placement of boilers outside the paddle wheels to allow more deck space and to afford greater safety; the use of protecting guard beams supported by iron rods around the hull; and the introduction of balance valves, which enabled a single operator to control a complex engine easily. Robert Stevens was the first to use anthracite coal to fire a steamboat’s boilers and the first to protect the man at the wheel by enclosing him in a pilothouse. To this day, in addition, all ferryboat operators are indebted to him for one critical invention: the use of piles driven deep into the ferry-slip bottom in such a way that when a boat nudges heavily into them, they yield and then spring back.

Robert Stevens liked as a sort of hobby to design yachts, and this brought him into an odd juxtaposition with his eldest brother, John Cox Stevens. Not an inventor but a capable businessman, John Cox enjoyed living well. He maintained a home in lower Manhattan so luxurious that New York society referred to it as “Stevens’s Palace.” He kept a stable of racehorses and was also an avid sailor—it was on his yacht Gimcrack in 1844 that the New York Yacht Club was formed, with the host becoming its first commodore. (Its first clubhouse was on Stevens property in Hoboken.) In 1850, on the club’s behalf, he accepted an invitation from the Royal Yacht Squadron to enter a boat in a forthcoming race to be held in English waters and formed a syndicate which built the now-legendary schooner America . The story goes that before the America set sail across the Atlantic, she was pitted in a trial run against Robert Livingston Stevens’s sloop Maria , which was known as the fastest racing yacht of her day. The Maria won. She had not, however, been designed for ocean travel, and so the America departed, shortly thereafter to make yachting history, as all followers of the America’s Cup are aware. On board when she trounced all others were John Cox and Edwin, and it was the commodore who accepted the cup and brought it back in triumph to New York.

If it would seem through all these achievements that Edwin Augustus Stevens operated in the shadow of his illustrious father and his brilliant brother Robert, not to mention the splendiferous John Cox, that would be mistaken. True, he was the youngest of six sons and hardly one to upstage any of the others. But Edwin exhibited in his early adulthood a combination of talents that none of the rest had: He was not only mechanically ingenious but possessed of an astute business sense. So his father and Robert, while regarding him as a fully equal partner in engineering exploits like the development of the elongated shell, came to entrust their business affairs to him as well, and in 1821 the colonel turned over to him full responsibility for the family’s estate in Hoboken and other such properties. Edwin was only twenty-six.

It was in that year that Edwin produced the first of a series of inventions in his own right. It was a cast-iron plow with a moldboard ingeniously curved to leave no dirt sticking to it and with a heel piece (the part on which the plow’s weight rests) easily replaceable when it wore out. Known as the “Stevens plow,” it was highly popular among New Jersey farmers for many years. Later Edwin designed for New York City a “twohorse dump wagon” with removable sides; the city used it for many years to haul refuse. For the family’s steamboat fleet he developed what is known as the “closed fireroom” system of forced draft; air, after being heated and put under pressure by blowers, is routed through the boiler’s ash pit and the fire on the grate, an arrangement that greatly increases the engine’s efficiency. And for the Camden and Amboy, Edwin contributed a simple but extremely useful fixture that would become a familiar part of American railway life. Passenger cars on European railroads were all entered from the side, with no communication between compartments; for this country Edwin introduced the vestibule car, with its center aisle, its door at each end, and its open or enclosed vestibule for getting on or off and for passing to the next car.

It fell to Edwin, in fact, after his father died in 1838 at the age of eighty-eight, to take charge of one of the family’s most significant contributions to the nation. When hostilities with England suddenly appeared likely in 1841 because of a dispute over the Canadian border, Edwin and Robert resurrected the old plans for an ironclad naval vessel and expanded on them. First Edwin supervised a series of tests to find out how much armor a vessel should have to defend itself adequately against the naval guns of the day; four and a half inches of iron would suffice, they learned. The two brothers then proceeded to construct a huge armored vessel the like of which had never been seen—and from which the Navy learned much. Known as the “Stevens Battery,” it was 410 feet long (i.e., much longer than a football field) and 45 feet wide, and its flat deck, which would carry several guns, was designed to ride only 2 feet above the water. The entire ship was sheathed in four-and-a-half inches of iron. Built in Hoboken, the craft was never quite finished. Each time the brothers began readying it, the Navy changed the specifications because of gunnery advances.

When Robert died in 1856, Edwin was left to carry on. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War, he offered to hand his armored ship over to the government, but this time there was no interest (John Ericsson was having trouble getting backing for his Monitor too). He thereupon built a scaled-down version at his own expense, the hundred-footlong Naugatuck , which the Navy did accept and which saw action during the war alongside the Monitor . After the war, unfortunately, both the Naugatuck and the awesome “Battery” were sold for scrap. Both, however, deserve to be considered hallmarks in the development of the modern warship.

As Edwin recalled, Colonel Stevens had always hoped the family could one day found an academy of science. The old man never had enough cash to spare, however; his money was forever tied up in one provocative project or another. But by the time Edwin himself had gotten along in years, the family was very well off, and in his will he stipulated that $650,000 plus part of the family’s land in Hoboken were to be used to establish a school. He died in 1868, and two years later the Stevens Institute of Technology came into being.

With the passing of the last of the second generation of Stevens inventors, it might seem as if the talent for innovating must dry up. It did not.

One of the third generation had already made a contribution. That was Francis Bowes Stevens. He was the son of James Alexander Stevens—another of the sons of Colonel John but one whose main claim to distinction seems to have been that as an adroit fly fisherman he was able to drop a lure unfailingly into a teacup fifty feet away. Francis was more in Robert’s mold and from an early age showed promise as an engineer. In 1839 he designed what became known as the “Stevens cutoff,” in which the steam and the exhaust valves of an engine were separately but interdependently controlled by their own eccentrics. Enabling a single person to put the engine into reverse easily, the cutoff became a standard feature of paddle-wheel steamers.

Perhaps of even greater import, however, was the double-ended propeller-driven ferryboat developed in the 188Os by Edwin’s son Edwin Augustus Stevens, Jr. Ironically, the idea of a reversible propeller-driven ferry had been advanced by the colonel himself back in 1813, but neither he nor Robert had ever gotten around to building a prototype. There had been doubleended ferries driven by paddle wheels, but wheel-driven boats cannot be stopped (by being put suddenly into reverse) as effectively as propeller craft. There had also, by 1880, been one or two propeller-driven reversible ferries, but they were side-loaded vessels, not double-ended. It remained for Edwin, Jr., to work out the mechanism whereby a single drive shaft running the length of a vessel, powered by a single engine and with a propeller at each end, could be combined with the ability to load vehicles at both ends as well as to go into reverse quickly. His solution, which he incorporated in 1881 into the ferry Bergen , put an end to the use of paddle-wheel ferries in New York Harbor and elsewhere and gave ferries essentially the look they still have.

Edwin Augustus Stevens, Jr., was the last of his family to live in Hoboken. The colonel’s descendants are now scattered, although many still live in the western part of New Jersey. The family is still heard from; the feisty former New Jersey congresswoman Millicent Fenwick is a great-great-granddaughter of Colonel John. And of course, when ferry service between Hoboken and New York resumes in the near future, as now seems likely, the ghosts of the colonel, John Cox, Robert, Edwin, Francis, and Edwin, Jr., will all be alive and well on the Hudson.