Your Petitioner humbly begs leave to represent that by a law passed in the year 1787, your honourable Legislature vested in your Petitioner the exclusive Right for a term of years of propelling Vessels through the Water by the agency of Steam, which exclusive Right hath also been granted him in the States of New Jersey, Pensylvania and Delaware, to whose several Legislatures James Rumsey had made application with a view of destroying the Right of your Petitioner, under the pretence of using a different mode in application of Steam to the propelling of Boats and also under a pretence of an invention of boiling water in a pipe for the purpose of creating Steam, which idea of boiling in a Pipe was by your Petitioner laid before the Philosophical Society in Philadelphia some months before the time assum'd by the said Rumsey, as the period of his first invention, and that the mode of propelling by forcing water out abaft, which he claims as his invention, was published by Mon^. Bernoulli in the year 1738, consequently was open to common use, and thereby included in the Law to your Petitioner.

1094 EARLY STEAM

Your Petitioner hath successfully opposed the said Rumsey in his applications to the said Assemblies, and hath hitherto preserved his Rights inviolate, the report of the Committee of Seven leading Members of the honorable Assembly of Pennsylvania, after a debate of five days, supported on the side of M'". Rumsey by an eminent Attorney at Law, your Petitioner begs leave to annex herewith. Since which he has made two fruitless attempts to destroy my just and legal Rights in the state of Delaware and New Jersey;