Samuel Morey

Samuel Morey was an American inventor and businessman, born October 23, 1762 in Hebron, Connecticut and died April 17, 1843 in Fairlee, Vermont, who built one of the earliest working steamboats in the United States and later patented what is credited as the first internal combustion engine built in the country. In the 1790s he designed and operated a working steam-powered vessel on the Connecticut River, developing an early effective paddle wheel propulsion system years before Robert Fulton's better known commercial steamboat. In 1826 he patented an engine burning a vaporized liquid fuel, using a heated surface to vaporize the fuel ahead of ignition, a design credited with the first documented liquid-fuel carburetor arrangement in an internal combustion engine. Morey held about twenty patents over his lifetime, including steam engine improvements between 1793 and 1817 and a steam-powered rotisserie and water heater; most of his original patent papers were destroyed in an 1836 fire at the U.S. Patent Office, and ten of them were rediscovered among his papers at Dartmouth College in 2004.