Guest column: Stranded ship near Windsor inspired Lincoln invention

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By: Cris Kohl

The big current news is the pending inauguration of a new U. S. president.

The Jan. 20 swearing-in of Donald Trump stirs up recollections of another future president, namely Abraham Lincoln, when he traveled past Windsor several years before his inauguration. His observations and an experience along the Detroit River brought an unusual result — the idea for a practical invention.

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Lincoln was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1847, and the following year he found the opportunity to combine a political campaign swing through New England states with travel and sightseeing with his wife and two small sons.

After a viewing of Niagara Falls, the 39-year-old Lincoln and family booked a stateroom and sailed from Buffalo, New York, at the eastern end of Lake Erie, on Sept. 26, 1848, aboard the sparkling new sidewheel steamship — the Globe, launched only a few weeks earlier at Trenton, Mich., near Detroit — for the start of the 1,675-kilometre (1,047-mile), several-days-long cruise across the Great Lakes to Chicago.

Mrs. Lincoln’s wish to travel by steamship was rewarded in a distinct way — the Globe was reputed to be the largest vessel on the inland seas at that time, with refined accommodations that provided elegance and comfort, rare characteristics on a vessel that navigated wilderness waters.

While the impressive 251-foot (76-metre) Globe steamed up the Detroit River, Lincoln observed efforts to free a stranded Canadian steamer, aptly named Canada, stuck on Fighting Island, with barrels, boxes, and empty casks being forced under the ship to lift it off.

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This gave him an idea. Once back in his office in Springfield, Ill., Lincoln whittled and carved a wooden model of a steamboat with “adjustable buoyant air chambers,” “sliding spars,” ropes, and pulleys to lift boats grounded in shallow waters. Lincoln wrote a description of how it worked and, on May 22, 1849, received Patent No. 6469 from the U. S. Patent Office.

His idea was never commercially produced, but it made Lincoln the only U. S. president to have patented an invention. The steamboat model which he carved reposes today in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

A dozen years later, candidate Lincoln won the U.S. presidency on Nov. 6, 1860, despite his controversial opposition to slavery. A few hours after Lincoln’s election, perhaps a dramatic foreshadowing of things to come occurred back home in Illinois.

One of the boilers aboard the steamship Globe, upon which the president-elect and his family had crossed the Great Lakes 12 years earlier, exploded while workers unloaded cargo onto a Chicago dock. This produced the loudest explosion the city had ever heard and sent heavy debris flying in all directions.

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Sixteen people — workers from the ship as well as innocent bystanders — were killed. The Globe’s days as a Great Lakes steamship were over.

But Lincoln had far greater concerns than the Globe tragedy. The slave-supporting South was outraged that he had won the presidency, and before Lincoln could take office in March 1861, seven southern states seceded from the union, with six of them forming a new country named the Confederate States of America, complete with its own constitution and president.

Other states soon joined, and the resulting Civil War (1861-1865) claimed more American lives than all other U.S. wars combined. To president Lincoln’s credit, he was able to maintain the union of all of the states, but he paid dearly for it.

Not long after Lincoln was re-elected to a second term as president, and only a few days after the Civil War’s end, a Southern sympathizer assassinated Lincoln on April 14, 1865, while he sat in a theatre, making him the first president to be killed while in office.

Today, Abraham Lincoln, despite his unique relationship with the U.S. Patent Office, is remembered and praised for far greater achievements.

Cris Kohl, from Windsor, is a Great Lakes maritime historian, shipwreck diver and author of numerous books about Great Lakes shipwrecks.

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