Early Steam Boat Pioneers
The French inventor Denis Papin, after inventing the steam digester (a type of pressure cooker) and experimenting with closed cylinders and pistons pushed in by atmospheric pressure, designed and built a steam pump similar to the pump advertised by Thomas Savery in England during the same period. In France, by 1774 Marquis Claude de Jouffroy and his colleagues had made a 13-metre (42 ft, 8 in) working steamboat with rotating paddles, the Palmipède. This is a model of the steam ship, built in 1784 by Marquis Claude de Jouffroy.