When Robert was seventeen, he went to Philadelphia. His father was dead, and he earned his living and helped his mother and sisters, by painting pictures. He staid in Philadelphia until he was twenty-one. By that time he had saved up money enough to buy a small farm for his mother, so that she might have a home of her own.
2 Fulton was born in Little Britain (now called Fulton) in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. See map in paragraph [135].
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FULTON'S DIVING-BOAT. (Going under water to fasten a torpedo on the bottom of a vessel.) |
[194. Fulton goes to England and to France; his iron bridges; his diving-boat, and what he did with it in France.]—Soon after buying the farm for his mother, young Fulton went to England and then to France. He staid in those countries twenty years. In England Fulton built some famous iron bridges, but he was more interested in boats than in anything else.
While he was in France he made what he called a diving-boat. It would go under water nearly as well as it would on top, so that wherever a fish could go, Fulton could follow him. His object in building such a boat was to make war in a new way. When a swordfish[3] attacks a whale, he slips round under him and stabs the monster with his sword. Fulton said, 'If an enemy's war-ship should come into the harbor to do mischief, I can get into my diving-boat, slip under the ship, fasten a torpedo[4] to it, and blow the ship "sky high."'
Napoleon Bonaparte liked nothing so much as war, and he let Fulton have an old vessel to see if he could blow it up. He tried it, and everything happened as he expected: nothing was left of the vessel but the pieces.
3 Swordfish: the name given to a large fish which has a sword-like weapon, several feet in length, projecting from its upper jaw.
4 Torpedo: here a can filled with powder, and so constructed that it could be fastened to the bottom of a vessel.
| WHAT THE TORPEDO DID. |
[195. What Fulton did in England with his diving-boat; what he said about America.]—Then Fulton went back to England and tried the same thing there. He went out in his diving-boat and fastened a torpedo under a vessel, and when the torpedo exploded, the vessel, as he said, went up like a "bag of feathers," flying in all directions.