Robert Fulton

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Fulton was 12 years old when he made the visit that would shape his life. In 1777, he traveled to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to call on William Henry, a state delegate who had recently returned from England with news about a revolutionary engine. Henry had seen James Watt's steam engine firsthand. For a boy from a farm in Little Britain, Pennsylvania, that conversation planted a seed that would not bear fruit for another three decades. When it finally did, in August of 1807, a steamboat Fulton built with a business partner carried passengers up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany and back, a round trip of 300 nautical miles completed in 62 hours. The vessel people had mockingly called "Fulton's Folly" had just changed how a continent moved. What drove Fulton to that moment, and what else did he build along the way, is a story that stretches from Pennsylvania farms to Parisian panoramas, from the depths of the Seine to the battlefields of the Royal Navy.

• 2. Artist Turned Engineer

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  For six years before he ever touched a steam engine, Fulton lived in Philadelphia painting portraits and landscapes. He drew houses and machinery. He sent money home to his mother. When his father died in 1785, Fulton spent £80 to buy a farm at Hopewell Township in Washington County near Pittsburgh, settling his family before he turned his own attention elsewhere. In early 1786, doctors advised him to take an ocean voyage after he developed symptoms of tuberculosis. He left for England in the autumn of that year carrying letters of introduction from prominent Philadelphians. One of the people he already corresponded with was the artist Benjamin West, whose father had been a close friend of Fulton's father. West took him in, and Fulton spent several years living in West's home, studying painting while earning commissions for portraits and landscapes. The income sustained him while he began experimenting with mechanical inventions on the side. The two ambitions, art and engineering, ran in parallel for years before engineering finally won.

• 3. Canal Mania and Submarines

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  England in the 1790s was gripped by what Fulton's own era called "Canal Mania," a frenzy of investment in inland waterway construction. Fulton caught the fever. In 1793, he began developing ideas for canals that used inclined planes instead of locks, obtained a patent for the concept in 1794, and moved to Manchester to study English canal engineering at close range. There he befriended Robert Owen, a cotton manufacturer and early socialist, who agreed to finance Fulton's designs for inclined planes and earth-digging machines and helped connect him to a canal company that gave him a sub-contract. The practical work proved harder than the theory and Fulton gave it up. He had also, as early as 1793, been proposing steam-powered vessels to both the American and British governments, neither of whom moved quickly. In 1797, he moved to Paris, where he studied French, German, mathematics, and chemistry. Between 1793 and 1797, he designed what became the first working muscle-powered submarine. When tested, the vessel operated underwater for 17 minutes in 25 feet of water. He applied twice to the French government for funding to build it; both times he was turned down. On the third attempt, in 1800, the Minister of Marine agreed. The shipyard Perrier in Rouen constructed it, and the submarine sailed first in July 1800 on the Seine River.

• 4. Napoleon, Pitt, and Naval Weapons

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  In 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte himself commissioned Fulton to build a submarine capable of threatening the British fleet. Fulton delivered the vessel and experimented with torpedoes alongside it. He also, in that same year in Paris, exhibited the first panorama painting ever shown in the city, Pierre Prevost's Vue de Paris depuis les Tuileries, on the street still called Rue des Panoramas today. The combination of art and warfare in a single man was characteristic. By 1804, Fulton had switched sides entirely. Britain's Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger commissioned him to build weapons for the Royal Navy as Napoleon's invasion threats mounted. Among what Fulton produced were the world's first modern naval torpedoes, devices the era called "mines." These were tested during the 1804 Raid on Boulogne, but met with limited success. The question of whether Britain even needed Fulton's weapons was settled the following year. Admiral Horatio Nelson's crushing victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 removed the threat of French invasion. Fulton was sidelined. By 1806, he left Britain and returned home.

• 5. The Clermont and the Hudson

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  Fulton had met Robert R. Livingston in Paris in 1801, when Livingston was appointed U.S. Ambassador to France. The two men had already tried building a steamboat together on the Seine, with partial success; on the 9th of August 1803, their 66-foot vessel with an 8-foot beam sank after a trial run. Back in the United States by 1806, they tried again. The boat they built was 136 feet long and 18 feet wide, with a displacement of 160 tons. Its 24-horsepower engine sat in the center surrounded by cord wood. Above it rose a tall, slender smokestack. On each side turned an open, uncovered paddle wheel 15 feet in diameter. At each end stood a short mast with a small square sail for emergencies. When Livingston's company put the vessel into passenger service, it covered the 150 nautical miles from New York City to Albany in 32 hours. Among the passengers on the maiden voyage were a lawyer named Jones and his family from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His infant daughter Alexandra Jones would later serve as a Union nurse on a steamboat hospital during the Civil War. Fulton received two patents for the steamboat, one in 1809 and the other in 1811.

• 6. Heartland and the New Orleans Run

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  Proving the Hudson route was only the beginning. From October 1811 to January 1812, Fulton worked with Livingston and Nicholas Roosevelt, born in 1767, on a far more ambitious project: a steamboat sturdy enough to navigate the Ohio and Mississippi rivers all the way to New Orleans. The vessel was built in Pittsburgh and stopped at Wheeling in West Virginia, Cincinnati in Ohio, past the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville in Kentucky, near Cairo in Illinois at the confluence with the Mississippi, then south past Memphis in Tennessee and Natchez in Mississippi, arriving finally at New Orleans, some 90 miles by river from the Gulf of Mexico coast. This was less than a decade after the United States had acquired the Louisiana Territory from France. The rivers were not well settled, mapped, or protected. Proving that a steamboat could travel upstream against the powerful currents of those rivers, not merely drift downstream, transformed what the American interior could become. The Erie Canal Commission, appointed by the Governor of New York, added Fulton to its membership in 1811, a role he held until his death.

• 7. Death and Remembrance

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  Fulton married Harriet Livingston on the 8th of January 1808. She was the daughter of Walter Livingston and niece of his business partner Robert R. Livingston, nineteen years younger than Fulton, educated, and an accomplished amateur painter and musician. They had four children together. His final engineering project was a floating battery, the first steam-driven warship ever built for the United States Navy, designed for the War of 1812. It was not completed before he died. Fulton's end came partly from the same loyalty that defined his life. Walking home one winter day across the frozen Hudson River, he saw his friend Thomas Addis Emmet fall through the ice. He went in after him. Soaked with icy water, Fulton came home ill; pneumonia followed, and the tuberculosis that had sent him to Europe in 1786 reasserted itself. He died on the 24th of February 1815, in New York City, at 49 years old. He is buried in Trinity Church Cemetery at Wall Street, near Alexander Hamilton and Albert Gallatin. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania later donated a marble statue of Fulton to the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol. In 2006, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Alexandria, Virginia. The warship he never lived to see launched was named in his honor.