James Crosby Brown, Jr., was born in Hartford, Conn., in 1929 and spent most of his life in Philadelphia, where he pursued a career in business. After retiring in 1981, he turned full-time to his life-long avocation of maritime history. Starting around 1984 he began research on the early history of the Schuylkill Navigation Company. During that research he found that shortly after being faced with competition from the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, the Schuylkill Navigation Company offered a prize to the first person to build a steamboat suitable to canal operations. Although many designs were tried on different canals, the wash from paddles or propellers generally eroded the banks of artificial waterways, and none were widely adopted. This episode piqued Brown's interest, and he also began to study the pioneers of steamboating on eastern canals and non-tidal rivers, a neglected part of the early history of steam-navigation. In 1989 he began to write a monograph on these two subjects, but he died in Blue Hill, Maine, in July 1990.