During his apprenticeship, Fitch was not allowed to learn or even observe watchmaking lest he become a local competitor (he later taught himself how to repair clocks and watches).

In his autobiography, Fitch reveals that he was unhappy with both his business and his marriage and in 1769 he abandoned his son and wife (pregnant at the time with a daughter), never to return.

Unable to raise funds from the Continental Congress, he persuaded various state legislatures to award him a 14-year monopoly for steamboat traffic on their inland waterways.

He moved to Philadelphia and engaged the clockmaker and inventor Henry Voigt to help him build a working model and place it on a boat.

[4] The first successful trial run of his steamboat Perseverance was made on the Delaware River on August 22, 1787, in the presence of delegates from the Constitutional Convention.

During the next few years, Fitch and Voigt worked to develop better designs, and in June 1790, launched a 60-foot (18 m) boat powered by a steam engine driving several stern-mounted oars.

With this boat, he carried up to 30 paying passengers on numerous round-trip voyages between Philadelphia and Burlington, New Jersey during the summer of 1790.

Failing this, he moved to Bardstown, Kentucky, in 1797, where he hoped to sell some of the lands he had acquired in the early 1780s and use the proceeds to build a steamboat for use on the Ohio or Mississippi River.

[10] It was not until four years after Fitch's death that Englishman Richard Trevithick, in 1802, invented a full-size steam locomotive which, in 1804, hauled the world's first locomotive-hauled railway train.

Fitch's legal dispute over state monopoly rights with fellow steamboat inventor James Rumsey and others helped enact the first Patent Act of 1790.

He is mentioned in the personal letters of several historical figures, including George Washington,[13] Benjamin Franklin,[14] Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

[15] Despite his obscurity among other American inventors and engineering pioneers, such as Fulton and Peter Cooper, Fitch's contributions have not been forgotten.