The story of Papin’s invention is another example of how, under extractive institutions, the threat of creative destruction impeded technological change. Papin developed a design for a “steam digester” in 1679, and in 1690 he extended this into a piston engine. In 1705 he used this rudimentary engine to build the world’s first steamboat. Papin was by this time a professor of mathematics at the University of Marburg, in the German state of Kassel. He decided to steam the boat down the river Fulda to the river Weser. Any boat making this trip was forced to stop at the city of Münden.
