By Bradd Libby

In October 1811, a boat built by a man named Nicholas Roosevelt departed Pittsburgh down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River and from there to the city of New Orleans, arriving three months later in January 1812 two thousand miles (3000 kilometers) away from where it started.

In many ways, it was a remarkable trip. Captain Roosevelt’s young daughter and eight-months-pregnant wife, Lydia, accompanied him on the voyage and she gave birth early on. This was wild territory they passed through. In fact, most of the states along the banks of the rivers were not yet incorporated, and even some of the land ownership along the Gulf coast was disputed with Spain. The Great Comet of 1811 was easily visible in the sky and, at times, people along the Mississippi thought that the sounds Mr. Roosevelt’s ship was making might be the sounds of bits of the comet itself crashing into the river. And starting in December 1811, a series of earthquakes hit the region, a part of the world where seismic activity is very uncommon, the strongest earthquakes ever recorded in the eastern United States.

The quakes were so strong that the Mississippi River temporarily ran backwards in places, waterfalls briefly emerged, and some islands in the river disappeared while others were created, rendering navigation maps useless.

But Mr. Roosevelt’s boat, named (appropriately enough) the New Orleans, arrived safely. It spent the rest of its short life running a route that ran only a couple of hundred miles up river and then back down again, never leaving the newly formed state of Louisiana, before sinking in an accident just two years after its historic voyage.

A New Era of Navigation

That first voyage was remarkable in another way, however: the New Orleans was powered by a steam engine and the trip made by Nicholas Roosevelt and his family was the first to prove that a powered, flat-bottomed craft could make it.

At the time, the primary way to navigate the Mississippi was by raft, barge, or keelboat. But getting these kinds of vessels upriver requires manual labor - using oars, using long poles to push against the riverbed, or pulling the boat with ropes from shore.

In 1815, the first steamboat successfully traveled upstream from New Orleans to Louisville, Kentucky, in just twenty-five days, a remarkable feat at the time considering that upstream keelboat and barge trips often took three to four months. In 1825, the Tecumseh made the same trip in eight days and in 1849, the Sultana in five-and-a-half days. So, even from the start, steamboats were about four times faster than keelboats when going upriver and within a decade were more than ten times faster.

Steamboats Were Not Just Faster, They Were Cheaper

According to Louis Hunter in ‘Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History’, (1949), steamboats were cost-competitive with keelboats right from the start. While in 1815 it cost about $5 to send 100 pounds (45 kg) of cargo from New Orleans to Louisville by either method, within five years, sending cargo by steamboat was 40% of the price of using keelboats and by 1828, just thirteen years after the first New Orleans to Louisville steamboat trip, it was one-tenth of the price.

Understandably, the adoption of steamboats in the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio river system was swift. RethinkX co-founder Tony Seba has said, “10X has always caused a disruption. I’ll repeat: a 10X difference in cost for the same product or service has always caused a disruption - every single time”. According to Hunter, in 1826, 13% of the arrivals of keelboats and steamboats in Pittsburgh were steamboats. By 1839, just thirteen years later, 80% were steamboats.

Our New-Fangled Engines

Now we are building new forms of machinery as transformative to our lives as steam-powered ships, railroad locomotives, and steam-driven stationary engines were a couple of centuries ago.

If you were on the internet in the past couple of years, you might have come across some short videos of Hollywood actor Will Smith goofily eating spaghetti. These videos were created with artificial intelligence, but the image quality was so poor that it was obvious that they were not genuine images of the famous actor. Now, just a couple of years later, videos like this are so much better quality that it is only the subject matter that makes it clear that the videos are fake: late physicist Stephen Hawking performing wheelchair tricks in a skateboard park, elderly women lifting giant boulders over their heads, and zoo animals participating in Olympic sports. AI videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti are now astonishingly believable.

If you are an actor, a voice actor, writer, or involved in making videos, music creation, data analysis, or writing computer code, you are hopefully already aware of how quickly AI software is improving in these areas. Artificial intelligence is also enabling autonomous electric vehicles and humanoid robots that are on the cusp of disrupting many other aspects of life as well.

Perhaps cases like the adoption of steamboats have some lessons for us about how the adoption of these new powerful technologies might play out.

First, new technologies often start out deceptively limited in their usefulness. The New Orleans made one significant trip downriver, at an average speed no greater than a person could walk, and then spent the next couple of years doing much shorter runs. Judging solely from its performance in the early 1810s, it would have been understandable to not foresee what would happen to aquatic transportation over the next decades from steam-powered riverboats or in the decades after that from ocean-going steamships, from the railroads, and other forms of powered transportation.

New technologies often get cheaper and better over time. Initially, steamboats did not offer much of a cost or speed advantage over keelboats. Within just a few years, steamboats were setting speed records and bringing significant cost savings.

Adoption of new technologies might be slow at first, but can become fast. Fifteen years after the New Orleans departed Pittsburgh, keelboats still had about 90% of the freight market there. But just thirteen years later, steamboats had 80% of the market.

1826, 13% of the arrivals of keelboats and steamboats in Pittsburgh were steamboats. By 1839, just thirteen years later, 80% were steamboats. Likewise, the US government held its DARPA self-driving car challenge contest in 2004, Google started their ‘self-driving car project’ in 2009, spun off Waymo in 2016, and, according to Waymo, they had their first customer in 2018. Almost a decade-and-a-half from an engineering contest to a new industry. With new entrants like Tesla entering the robotaxi market, it looks like we are moving from the ‘slow’ to the ‘fast’ phase of the market adoption. Artificial intelligence spent decades slowly simmering in academic labs, but its rapid adoption over just the past couple of years is undeniable and just getting started.

New technologies and industries develop in new locations… and open new locations to new industries. The steam engine was invented in Europe by people like Papin, Savery, and Newcomen before being made practical by James Watt. But steam riverboats were pioneered by outsiders across the ocean, like Robert Fulton on the Hudson River, in New York City, in a country barely forty years old, and then adopted most heavily on the Mississippi River, a place where Nicholas Roosevelt and his crew saw Chickasaw people watching them from the shoreline. It was not the builders of steam engines who made the most money from their technology. It was the users. Farmers were able to ship their products to market by steamboat and railroad. Entire cities sprang up, from St. Louis to Chicago to Minneapolis because of these technologies. Artificial intelligence, humanoid robots, and robotaxis can make fortunes for their developers, but it is likely industry outsiders, using these technologies in new ways, who will benefit the most.

New technologies require new skills (and make old ones obsolete). The ability to move a keelboat with a pole became an obsolete skill as the demand for steamboat maintenance and operation abilities rose. We are living now in a new world of opportunity being rapidly opened up by powerful technologies that were largely a dream just a few years ago. The benefits will accrue to those who move the quickest in taking advantage of them...

This is the latest installation in a series that tracks stories from Bradd Libby's new book, 'The Pattern of Progress'. 

Read some of the earlier stories from our 'Pattern of Disruption', series, here.