After buying Hoboken in 1784, city founder Col. John Stevens III (1749-1838) had dreams of turning his rustic wooded estate into a moneymaking weekend resort for wealthy Manhattan city dwellers.
To make this a reality, he needed a reliable and efficient ferry service to transport people across the Hudson River. Stevens III was already a noted innovator who was well ahead of his time, and after his purchase of Hoboken, he turned his energy to improving what was then a relatively new technology – the steam engine.
Riding on the water
According to Geoffrey W. Clark’s History of the Stevens Institute of Technology, by 1790 Col. John Stevens III had designed improvements in boilers for steamboats. To protect his innovation and his financial interests, he used his sizable political influence to help pass the law that created the first United States patent office.
Soon after, Stevens was able to obtain one of the first U.S. patents for an improved vertical steam boiler and a “modified Savery-type engine.” According to Clark, in 1804 Stevens built a twin-screw steamship. In 1807, with the help of his son Robert Livingston Stevens (1787-1856), he built the paddle-wheeled steamboat Phoenix, which operated for six years on the Delaware River.
To reach the Delaware, the Phoenix sailed from New York City around New Jersey, thus becoming the first steamship to successfully navigate the Atlantic Ocean.
On Oct. 11, 1811, Stevens’ ship the Juliana began operation as the world’s first steam-powered ferry. The service ran between New York City and Hoboken, according to Fred Erving Dayton’s book Steamboat Days.
Attention turns to the rails
While Col. John Stevens III was a great innovator and thinker, he was neither a mechanic nor a machinist. According to Clark’s book, many of his diagrams “were often sketchy” and lacked detail.
It was his son, Robert Livingston Stevens, who was a gifted mechanical designer, said Clark. With the help of his brother Edwin Augustus Stevens (1795-1868), who ran the financial aspects of the family business, the Stevens family was able to establish the first commercially successful railroad in the United States.
In 1825, at the age of 76, Col. John Stevens III and his sons built a demonstration prototype on a circular track in Hoboken. The family had earlier received the first American railroad charter and designed the “T”-shaped rail that remains standard on American railroads to this day. A model of this prototype locomotive is in the Smithsonian.
Stevens and his sons continued to push for transportation development and were behind the chartering of the Camden and Amboy Railway Company by New Jersey in 1830.
According to information supplied by the Hoboken Historical Museum, with this early start in railroad technology and the city’s waterfront location opposite New York, Hoboken established itself as a rail and water transportation center. Piers sprouted along the waterfront, and Hoboken became a major port for transatlantic shipping lines, including Holland American, North German Lloyd, and Hamburg-American.
Military innovations also
According to the Department of the Navy, Naval Historical Center, the Stevens brothers were also involved in Naval weapons and ship technology.
In 1842, they received a U.S. government contract to produce an innovative steam warship for the defense of New York Harbor. The resulting “Stevens Battery” was never completed, though it absorbed a great deal of government and private money. A much smaller version, produced early in the Civil War to demonstrate the viability of some elements of the Stevens Battery’s design, served briefly in 1862 as the U.S.S. Naugatuck.
Establishment of Stevens Tech
By the time Edwin Stevens died in 1868, the family had accumulated a sizable fortune. Edwin Stevens left money for the establishment of an engineering college on his family’s waterfront land.
Since opening in 1870, the Stevens Institute of Technology’s laboratories have continued their founders’ legacy of technological innovations.