PULTON
723
FULTON
handsome boy, that everyone who knew him, loved and admired him. A busy city of 50,000 people to-day, Lancaster, at the time of the Revolutionary War, was only a farming village in the rich valley of the Susquehanna. The Dutch and Quakers who dwelt there were very sober people and
frone to be critical of conduct; so Robert ulton, the lively, imaginative son of poor Irish immigrants, must have been an exemplary youth to have won their approval.
This in mentor of the steamboat was born on November 14, 1765, on a farm in what now is Fulton township, but the family soon afterwards moved to town and, the father dying, was left to a rather precarious manner of living. At a very early age Robert was earning money by painting miniatures, so the prediction was freely made that he was to become as famous a painter as Benjamin West, a Quaker boy who had gone to London. Many held to the opinion that the boy was to be an inventor, for his talent for mechanics was equally well-marked in boyhood. He powdered lead and made his own pencils; he attached a paddle-wheel, worked with a crank, to his pole-boat, so as to leave himself free to fish; he pulled heavy loads up a hill by means of an inclined plane and a windlass; and he made his own rockets for celebrating the Fourth of July. He designed guns for the gunsmith and then calculated how far they would shoot. For the making of these boyish devices he had to study mathematics and physics, and he applied the same principles that he used in later inventions. Besides, he learned everything he could from practical workmen. The smith, the chemist and the miller delighted to talk to him, because he asked no idle questions, and he never broke or mislaid a tool he was permitted to use. For a long time he was making mysterious experiments with mercury, and so got the nickname of Quicksilver Bob, which so accurately described his active fingers and brain that the name stuck to him, even after he became famous.
At 17 Fulton went to Philadelphia to study art. So well did he use his time and talents that at 21 he had $400 to invest in a farm for his mother and sisters. He took the long journey across the Alleghanies and back to see them comfortably settled, before going to London to continue his studies under Benjamin West, It was this act of filial duty that turned his thoughts from art to engineering. He had seen many rich valleys that were unsettled because farm-produce could not, except at great expense, be brought out of them to market. The locomotive was not yet invented. Everyone expected that a network of canals was to solve the transportation-problem, with horses on a tow-path pulling huge flat-boats. But Fulton already-
had the idea of using steam instead of horse-power. On the ocean there was the further necessity of protecting the carrying trade from interference by powerful navies. So the ideas of better and cheaper canals, of swifter travel by steam and of explosives began to occupy his mind, although he continued to paint. He was slowly winning recognition as an engineer and inventor by the substitution of cast-iron for stone in aqueducts and the introduction of the inclined plane, in place of locks, in small canals. He also invented a dredging-machine, a marble-cutter and a fiaxspinning frame.
A man less in earnest would have had his head turned by his popularity in London and Paris, but he used his social success to further his serious plans. He invented a torpedo to be fired from a submarine or diving boat and set off by clock-work. That France failed to see the value of the invention was one of those curious instances of shortsightedness in men and governments. Fulton's patriotism was shown by his refusal of an offer for the secret from England. Had the United States purchased the invention and set Fulton to perfecting it, the War of 1812 might have been avoided or much shortened. Disappointed in getting recognition for his torpedo, Fulton turned his attention to the steamboat. The stationary engine of James Watt was then in general use in England, in mine and mill and factory. The inventor's mind recurred to the pole-boat in which he had fished on the Susquehanna and the paddle-wheel he had devised to propel it. Why could not a paddle-wheel of any size be turned by steam-power? Theoretically it could, but there were many steps to be taken, long years of experimenting and much money required to put this simple idea into practical use. The first boat, built on the Seine at Paris, broke in two from the weight of the engine and sank. The second boat had too small an engine for the load. But Fulton learned success by failure. In 1806 he had an engine constructed in England after a special design and shipped to New York. He knew how to make the steamboat, and he wanted to launch the first one in his native country, on the Hudson.
Although an enthusiast, a dreamer, Robert Fulton was determined, untiring, shrewd, practical. He had money of his own, and he interested other men of wealth and influence who secured a monopoly of traffic by "fire-boats" on the waters of New York. When he began to build the Clermont on East River, it was ridiculed as Fulton's Folly. Beside the graceful sailing-vessels on the river, the paddle-wheel steamer "looked like a back-woods saw-mill mounted on a scow and set on fire,7' as Robert Livingston wittily described it. But the in-
