August 17 · This Day in America
A long, narrow boat with a smokestack and two great paddle wheels pulls away from a New York City wharf, bound for Albany. Crowds line the banks. Some laugh. Sailing men call it Fulton's Folly. Then the boilers catch, the wheels bite the water, and the thing moves upriver against wind and current, smoke trailing, doing the impossible at five miles an hour. Robert Fulton's North River Steamboat covers roughly 150 miles in about 32 hours of running time. It is not the first steam engine, nor the first boat to carry one. It is the first to make steam navigation pay. After this, rivers run both ways. Cargo and people climb the continent instead of only drifting down it. The American interior, once weeks of mud and portage, becomes a network. A man stood on a deck and bent geography to his will, and everyone watching the smoke knew it.
Source: www.britannica.com
Also on this day · 1978
For 119 years, the Atlantic had killed every balloonist who tried to cross it — seventeen failed attempts, at least seven dead. Then Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson, and Larry Newman lift off from Presque Isle, Maine, in a silver helium balloon. Six days and 3,233 miles later, low on ballast and luck, they sink gently into a field near Paris. Farmers run to meet them. The ocean that swallowed the others had finally let three Americans simply float across.
Source: airandspace.si.edu