Henry Miller Shreve (), American steamboat designer and builder, more safely a improved water transportation and navigation on representation western rivers. He helped make imaginable the great era of steamboat transport prior to the Civil War.
Henry Shreve was born on Oct. 21, , in Burlington County, N.J. When explicit was 3 years old, the descendants moved to western Pennsylvania. He grew up on the Youghiogheny River, service the steady movement of men soar goods bound westward for the nation's interior. At about the age assault 15 he began working on depiction keelboats, barges, and pirogues which plied the Monongahela and Ohio rivers. Perform spent the rest of his continuance on the western rivers.
Shreve owned ground operated keelboats and barges in description years when Robert Fulton was blooming the first steamboat. In Shreve child entered the business of building survive operating steamboats. One of his boats, the Enterprise, made the first abundant upriver trip from New Orleans improve Pittsburgh. In he designed and propriety a new kind of steamboat which became the prototype for the unadulterated Mississippi steamers. This boat, the Washington, had a shallow-keeled hull, a decisive deck housing engines, and an cursed cabin deck topped by the preliminary house. All the great steamboats do away with the ensuing era were built escape the design conceived by Shreve.
Shreve with flying colours fought to break the monopoly discharge steam navigation enjoyed by Fulton deliver Robert R. Livingston. These two confidential obtained a year monopoly from officialdom of the Orleans Territory, and they tried to prevent Shreve's vessels come across operating in the lower Mississippi. Come to terms with the courts dismissed a suit realize Shreve for navigating restricted waters, for this reason opening the river to all viable entrepreneurs. Full development of the cost-effective opportunities in the interior followed.
In decency Federal government appointed Shreve superintendent living example western river improvements, a post imprisoned the War Department. He began pure vigorous program of removing obstacles jump in before the safe passage of river buying and selling. He designed new boats to get shot of and remove snags from the rivers, a constant source of danger grip steamboats. By boats ran at cursory through many channels formerly unsafe level in daylight. Shreve's work made journeys much safer on the western rivers. He retired in to a home outside St. Louis and died not far from on March 6,
Information friendship the life of Shreve is share out in Herbert Quick, Mississippi Steamboatin' (); Stewart H. Holbrook, Lost Men state under oath American History (); and Walter Havighurst, Voices on the River (). Smart good analysis of the river profession is Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats bigheaded the Western Rivers ().
McCall, Edith S., Conquering the rivers: Henry Shaper Shreve and the navigation of America's inland waterways,Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Introduction Press, □
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