Livingston agreed to advance five hundred dollars for experimentation in Europe.

In this same year Fulton built a model and tested different means of propulsion, giving "the preference to a wheel on each side of the model."* The boat was built on the Seine, but proved too frail for the borrowed engine.

A second boat was tried in August, 1803, and moved, though at a disappointingly slow rate of speed.
* Fulton to Barlow, quoted in Sutcliffe, "Robert Fulton and the Clermont", p.

124.
Just at this time Fulton wrote ordering an engine from Boulton and Watt to be transported to America.

The order was at first refused, as it was then the shortsighted policy of the British Government to maintain a monopoly of mechanical contrivances.