[3] On February 1, 1788, the Georgia legislature awarded Augusta inventor William Longstreet and his associate Isaac Briggs a patent for a steam engine.
Only days before, Robert Fulton had sailed his new steamboat, the Clermont, from New York City up the Hudson River to Albany.
[1] In 1818, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton appointed Briggs as one of the chief engineers of the Erie Canal.
[1] He returned home in January 1819 and was appointed by Thomas Moore in March 1819 as a chief engineer in Virginia on the James River and Kanawha Canal.
He co-founded the American Board of Agriculture and a cotton mill and manufacturing town at Triadelphia in Montgomery County, Maryland in 1809.