Highways were essential, not only for the permanent unity of the United States, but to make available the wonderful riches of the inland country, across the Appalachian barrier and around the Great Lakes, into which American pioneers had already made their way.
Those immemorial pathways, the great rivers, were the main avenues of traffic with the interior.

So, of course, when men thought of improving transportation, they had in mind chiefly transportation by water; and that is why the earliest efforts of American inventors were applied to the means of improving traffic and travel by water and not by land.
The first men to spend their time in trying to apply steam power to the propulsion of a boat were contemporaries of Benjamin Franklin.

Those who worked without Watt's engine could hardly succeed.

One of the earliest of these was William Henry of Pennsylvania.

Henry, in 1763, had the idea of applying power to paddle wheels, and constructed a boat, but his boat sank, and no result followed, unless it may be that John Fitch and Robert Fulton, both of whom were visitors at Henry's house, received some suggestions from him.