Inventor created ‘roller boat’ in 1901
Frederick Augustus Knapp was not really a con man. Certainly, he was anxious to separate the credulous from their money. But, unlike a common or garden fraudster, he genuinely believed his scheme would work, making vast profits for himself and his investors alike.
The 47-year-old Knapp was in the city early in 1901, and on this very date, Feb. 23, the Montreal Daily Star published a long interview with him. As the story proclaimed, he was the inventor of the Knapp Roller Boat, which would soon “divert the trade of the whole North American continent through Canadian channels, and … secure the greater portion of the trade of China and Japan for the Canadian route.”
Knapp’s invention was a vessel like no other. Picture a giant steel cylinder 110 feet long and 22 feet in diameter, not forcing its way through the waves narrow end first like a normal boat, but rolling broadside at great speed over them.
Knapp explained that inside this immense tube was a smaller one for passengers or freight, supported on bogeys so this tube wouldn’t rotate while the outer one did. Put steam engines inside, he said, connect them to paddles outside, and — voilà! — you had a boat that would easily make eight miles per hour and potentially as move as fast as 60. Tests in the St. Lawrence River off Prescott, Ont., were scheduled for the following week.
Prescott was Knapp’s hometown, but he was no stranger to Montreal. He had studied law at McGill, and was part of a small firm here before returning to Prescott to set up his own practice. But his real calling was not the law.
He managed to raise $25,000 from an Ottawa contractor named George Goodwin. A Toronto shipyard was contracted to build the roller boat, which was duly launched in 1897. And it worked — sort of. Its outer cylinder turned, but at a disappointing seven revolutions a minute. It could slowly huff and puff its way around Toronto harbour, but that was all, and tinkering in subsequent weeks didn’t improve matters much.
Knapp was undaunted. In 1899, another backer sank as much as $125,000 into the project. That persuaded Knapp to roll his boat some 200 miles to Prescott where more modifications would take place.
Alas, the voyage was a fiasco. Just 25 miles from Toronto, some critical machinery failed. The coal ran out. Then the boat drifted far off into the lake. Finally, Knapp had to hire a more dependable boat to tow his contraption the rest of the way.
By 1901, Knapp was ready to resume promoting his invention in earnest: hence his trip to Montreal. He called on local grain exporters, but they were skeptical. Even if a scaled-up roller boat could carry four million bushels, he was told, no port would be able to handle so strangely configured a ship. They just don’t understand, an aggrieved Knapp told the Star: “With this boat I will create new conditions.”
For the moment, Knapp had to be content with plotting a ferry service between Prescott and Ogdensburg, N.Y. The roller boat “has accommodation for four hundred persons comfortably seated,” the Star blithely reported — as if that many people would want shuttling between those small towns every time the roller boat was ready to cross.
Knapp was back in Montreal the following year trying to get a local yard to build a new, improved and larger roller boat. The yard seems to have gone along with the idea at first, but then pulled out when some more conventional — and less risky — projects could be entered in its order book.
By 1904, Knapp’s bizarre craft had slipped out of his hands and become a coal barge in Toronto. Its engines and part of its outer shell were removed and, far from rolling on its own, it was towed from place to place end on.
Knapp continued to dream of giant, ocean-going roller boats, but they never got beyond his drawing board. He even tried to design a roller automobile. He died in Prescott, in 1942.
The hulk of his original roller boat, meanwhile, has lain buried — the precise location unknown — in a Toronto harbour landfill project since the 1920s.