After Henry Eckford, Allaire would go on to install several more steamboats with compound engines,[7] decades before the technology was to achieve widespread acceptance in marine applications.

Since no steamboat had previously been utilized in such a role, the proposal was widely greeted with scepticism, but in the first attempt, Henry Eckford pulled two barges from New York to Albany in 24 hours, a commercially viable time.

[11] Eventually superseded by newer, faster steamboats, Henry Eckford spent her later years as a towboat in New York Harbor.

[1] On April 27, 1841, while getting up steam in dock at the foot of Cedar St., New York, to tow a canal boat, Henry Eckford suffered a boiler explosion.

[13] The ship's engineer and firemen were hurled from the vessel by the force of the blast but escaped serious injury; however, a worker on board the canal boat, which was in the process of being secured to the steamer, was killed by a piece of flying metal.

Cause of the explosion was determined to be extreme internal corrosion, which in some places had reduced the boiler plates to a fraction of their original 1⁄4 inch (6.4 mm) thickness.