The Future Of An Explosion

On the twenty-fifth of April, 1838, the crack steamboat Moselle tied up to a raft a mile and a half above the Cincinnati landing to take on a group of westward-bound immigrants. With the passengers aboard, the packet cast off and was edging away from the raft to continue the downstream voyage when her boilers exploded.

The effect, said one witness, was “like that of a mine of gunpowder.” Smoke and steam boiled into the sky, and fragments of the boat and pieces of human bodies rained down not only on the nearby Ohio shore but on the Kentucky side a quartermile away. It was impossible to fix the casualty figures accurately, but the best estimates put the total number of passengers at more than three hundred. One hundred and seventeen survived.

Steamboat explosions were hardly uncommon; the utter absence of regulation combined with powerful machinery in the hands of men who did not fully understand it saw to that. But the Moselle catastrophe was so brutal that it forced Congress to take steps, and the results are still very much with us today.

Even as early as 1838 some action was long overdue. Robert Fulton had launched the first commercially successful steamboat, the North River , on the Hudson in 1807. The first deadly boiler explosion came less than a decade later. This was aboard the Washington during her trial run near Marietta, Ohio, on June 9, 1816. “All hands were summoned aft to haul in the kedge [anchor],” reads one early account, “and while they were collected on the quarter for that purpose, … the end of the cylinder nearest the stern was blown off, and a column of scalding water was thrown among the crowd, inflicting the most frightful injuries on nearly all of the boat’s crew, and killing a number on the spot.”

That the first explosion of an American steamboat should have occurred on a Western river is tragically appropriate. Over the next three decades 185 steamboats would blow up on Western waters, as opposed to only 45 throughout the rest of the country. Steamboats were opening up the nation, but at a terrible cost in human lives.

Although the majority of boiler blowups occurred in the West, the first attempt to do something about them took place in the East. In 1817 the city council of Philadelphia decided to look into improving the safety of steamboats that used the city’s wharves. The council appointed a panel that in turn “availed [itself] of the learning and experience of scientific characters.” The committee reached no definite conclusion on why boilers exploded, but it did recommend regulations: Two safety valves should be required, with one kept locked to prevent tampering; boilers should be tested, much as gun barrels were; and steamboat builders should follow the lead of gunpowder manufacturers who used a weakly constructed wall or roof to help safely channel the effects of accidental explosions. The city authorities decided that the problem required state action. They forwarded the panel’s recommendations to the state legislature, which totally ignored them.

As the explosions continued, Western states became more concerned. Alabama was first to act when it passed a law requiring steamboat inspections in 1826 (someone calculated that by the year of its passage 41 percent of all steamboats ever built had either sunk or been destroyed). During the next decade Alabama’s act was followed by similar legislation in Louisiana, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, and Wisconsin. But because these laws could be applied only to travel within each state, they were extremely limited and virtually ineffective.

The year 1824 saw some action on the federal level, and although it did not bear directly on steamboat explosions, it had far-reaching effects. When Fulton first churned out onto the Hudson in his North River , the New York legislature passed an act giving him—and his backer, Robert Livingston—a monopoly on steamboat navigation on the waters of that state. A little later, when Aaron Ogden set up as a steamboat man, he bought a license from the Livingston-Fulton monopoly. But another entrepreneur, Thomas Gibbons, refused to, and this made Ogden sore. He obtained an injunction against his rival, and the upshot was the Supreme Court’s hearing the case of Gibbons v. Ogden .

Daniel Webster represented Gibbons—he later said it was one of the two cases that had given him the most satisfaction in his career— and he argued that Congress possessed exclusive authority to regulate commerce in all its forms on all navigable waterways without restraint from state legislatures. This appealed to the nationalistic Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote the decision breaking the Fulton-Livingston monopoly.

Predictably, the decision spurred an immense and immediate growth in the construction of steamboats, and equally predictably, more and more of them blew up. But if Gibbons v. Ogden in a sense increased the number of boiler explosions, it also gave Congress the tools to do something to halt them. Congress, however, was not yet ready to act.

Nevertheless, the pressure to do so was growing. In the same year of Gibbons v. Ogden , 1824, the Aetna blew up, killing more than a third of the thirty-four people aboard. It didn’t happen on some remote waterway north of Cincinnati; it happened in New York Harbor, and a vast amount of publicity attended the terrible results. Seeing the survivors flayed by steam and shrieking in agony, one witness said, “How well might they have envied those whom death had already relieved from bodily anguish.”

This time the outcry reached the House of Representatives, whose members discussed the possibility of enacting legislation barring high-pressure steamboat engines. With little time left in the session for consideration of what, if any, legislation could be proposed, and with virtually no information available about steam engines and boilers, the resolution died. But the subject had at last officially arisen.

That same busy year of 1824 contained yet one more event that would have enormous ramifications on the subject of steam-boiler explosions: Under the prodding of Samuel V. Merrick and Professor William H. Keating, the mechanics, craftsmen, and inventors of Philadelphia formed the Franklin Institute “for the promotion of the mechanic arts.”

Samuel Merrick had been put in charge of a small fireengine factory by an uncle. He had no technical experience whatever, and when he tried to get some by joining a local mechanics’ association, he was blackballed by one of the members. Undaunted, Merrick decided to form his own society, and in time he met with Professor Keating.

Keating had returned home to Philadelphia in 1819 after spending three years studying in European technical schools. He had also visited mechanics’ institutions in Great Britain, where they originated, and he was, said a contemporary, “full of zeal for the diffusion of science applied to agriculture and the mechanic arts.” He brought focus to the planned association, seeing it as an organization devoted to the practical application of science.

Factionalism and jealousy among Philadelphia’s craftsmen and artisans frustrated Merrick and Keating’s initial attempts to get their organization going, but in the end they prevailed, and the February 14, 1824, issue of The Saturday Evening Post announced the formation of the Franklin Institute “to advance the general interests of Manufacturers and Mechanics, by extending a knowledge of mechanical sciences to its members, and others, at a cheap rate.”

Over the next few years the institute worked out the means to implement its aims: popular lectures, a display of models, a library, prizes for useful scientific improvements, a workshop, a laboratory, and a journal. From the beginning the Journal of the Franklin Institute gave space to the possible causes and solutions of boiler explosions. In 1827 the institute offered a silver medal to the “person who shall invent and disclose to the Institute, a method of rendering boilers used for steam-engines less liable to accidents from explosions.” The medal went unclaimed.

Meanwhile, the explosions continued: the Teche in 1825, with sixty killed; the Ohio and the Macon in 1826; the Union and the Hornet in 1827; the Grampus in 1828; the Patriot and the Kenawa in 1829; the Car of Commerce and the Portsmouth in 1830.

That year, 1830, the Franklin Institute turned its full attention to the problem. At a board of managers meeting on May 13, Keating spoke of the vessels that had lately blown up and called for an ad hoc committee to look into the possibility of conducting an investigation of steamboat boiler explosions.

The committee reported that it was high time for regulation, but before anyone could be persuaded to enact it, there had to be some understanding of what was making the boilers explode in the first place. “A public body whose views are so well known & appreciated by the community as to place their motives beyond suspicion” must conduct the research. And the Franklin Institute “constitutes such a body.”

The board of managers promptly appointed a committee of seventeen members, chaired by Keating. It was a capable group of men: Dr. Robert Hare, who had, in 1801, discovered the oxyhydrogen blowpipe, the source of the highest degree of heat then known; Frederick Graff, superintendent of the Philadelphia Water Works, first in the States to be powered by steam; Matthias W. Baldwin, whose works would build fine steam locomotives for a century; Alexander Dallas Bache, great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin and a highly regarded scientist; and Samuel Merrick.

Unfortunately, the committee concluded that it would not be able to conduct experiments. The institute was just completing an extensive and costly series of experiments with waterpower, one member explained, and “the contributions they have levied on the liberality of the public in the prosecution of their enquiries … have been so great… they were apprehensive a sufficient fund could not be obtain’d immediately from the same source.”

Instead of experimenting, they would send out questionnaires, sift through existing data, and, if luck was with them, spot patterns that would point to the causes of boiler explosions. It was better than doing nothing.

On February 24, 1830, as the Helen McGregor prepared to pull away from the Memphis waterfront, the starboard boiler blew. The blast itself and flying debris killed a number of people, and about thirty others were scalded to death. Perhaps sixty died in all.

Once again Congress looked at the problem, and in May it appointed Samuel D. Ingham, the Secretary of the Treasury, to report on a means to protect against such accidents. Ingham, a Pennsylvania industrialist who owned several paper mills, was aware of the Franklin Institute and even had written to its journal about boiler problems, but he did not know about its current investigation. Instead he hired two investigators, one on the Atlantic Coast and one in the Mississippi Valley. They encountered resistance wherever they went. Steamboat owners and officers flatly refused to help. This was purely an individual problem, they told the investigators again and again, and was no business of the government’s.

Then, in late August, Ingham read a newspaper account of the Franklin Institute’s work and wrote suggesting cooperative action. More important, he said he had money to spend. Bache promptly drew up a list of experiments he deemed necessary and said they would come to about fifteen hundred dollars. Ingham said to go ahead. It was the first time the federal government had ever advanced funds for private research.

The institute set up two subcommittees, with Bache as overall supervisor of both. One would test steam generation, boiler manufacturing, and boiler explosions; the other would investigate the strength of boiler metals.

The first subcommittee built two boilers. One was a glass cylinder fourteen inches long by eight inches in diameter with brass heads at each end, equipped with thermometers to measure steam and water temperature and a gauge to show water level and any discrepancy between indicated and true level. The second boiler was iron. A foot in diameter and three feet long and enclosed in a brick furnace, it was similarly equipped but built on a much larger scale.

Using interrelated tests, the institute set about examining the wide variety of existing explanations for boiler explosions, explanations that, as one writer said, “were tangled together in an intricate mass of truths, half truths, and error.”

One reputable steam engineer held that when the metal got too hot, a boiler became so saturated with heat that any added water was immediately transformed into highly expansive steam—explosively expansive. The institute found the opposite to be true. When water was added, not only was steam pressure reduced, but “the greater the quantity of water thus introduced, the more considerable was the diminution in the elasticity of the steam.”

The institute tested the effects of overheating on both copper and iron boilers and proved that metal untouched by fluid tended to be weakened by constant heating and cooling. Then the investigators moved on to the fusible alloys that were, at that time, required by law in the boilers on all French steamboats. The alloy was supposed to melt at a given temperature, triggering an alarm or opening a controlled hole in the boiler. The institute discovered that steam pressure could force some elements out of the alloys, altering the compound and reducing its safety effectiveness. Bache came up with a simple solution: Enclose the fusible materials in a hollow metal tube. This would allow the alloy to react to temperature but prevent pressure from having an effect on it.

One way the subcommittee tested boilers was by exploding them in an abandoned quarry outside Philadelphia. Western steamboat men believed that explosions occurred only with a sudden increase in pressure. The institute’s test group gradually fed steam into a boiler, and the resulting explosion proved that a slow increase of pressure could be just as deadly as a quick one.

In the meantime, the other subcommittee, headed by Walter Johnson, a Philadelphia chemist, geologist, and inventor, was looking into the strength of boiler materials. Strength-of-materials research was a new endeavor in America—and not all that old in Europe—and Johnson was the first to attempt it in the States. Without precedent to guide him, he created sophisticated devices to apply and measure the effects of high temperatures on cast iron, wrought iron, cast steel, and copper. His materials-testing machine, still owned by the Franklin Institute, is thought to be the oldest one anywhere in the world.

The testing took almost seven years. The Franklin Institute finally submitted its report on boilers and explosion to the House of Representatives in 1836, its report on materials in 1837. The experiments had exposed errors and dispelled myths while establishing guidelines on the design and construction of boilers, the choice of materials, and the design and arrangement of valves and gauges for more efficient operation. The reports also outlined proper maintenance and safety-checking procedures and upheld the widespread belief that many explosions were due to the negligence and incompetence of engineers.

In their general report the members of the institute translated their findings into three categories: One recommended the establishment of an inspection and certification system for steam boilers; one set up minimum standards for safety devices, operating procedures, and personnel qualifications; and one called for penalties for improper operation or noncompliance.

Congress wasn’t interested. Daniel Webster quoted the “ominous sentences” he had heard from a member who succinctly stated the general view: “Let the Government attend to its own business, and let the people attend to theirs.”

In January 1838, at President Van Buren’s urging, the Senate finally passed steamboat legislation, but the House refused to budge. That spring the Moselle moved out into the stream above Cincinnati and killed her scores of passengers. That tipped the balance. The house moved at last, and the Steamboat Act of 1838 became law.

It did not become very effective law. Although the act required the inspection of steamboat boilers, it provided virtually no means to enforce it or to stop operating a boat that failed the inspection. Dozens more vessels blew up, hundreds more people died, but the trend had begun, and in 1852 a second act put real muscle into its 1838 predecessor and established the Steamboat Inspection Service under the Secretary of the Treasury.

To most mid-nineteenthcentury Americans, the steamboat acts of 1838 and 1852 were significant simply because they made travel safer. But those acts had other effects that are very much with us today, long after the steamboat became merely an object of nostalgic fancy.

The Franklin Institute’s experiments saw the beginning of federal funding for private research, but the most farreaching effect came when legislators reluctantly decided they had an obligation to intervene in the private sector to protect American lives and property. From that distant carnage on the rivers of the West came the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, and all the other government regulatory and investigative agencies that seek to protect us today.