Brief biographies from American history, for the fifth and sixth grades

by Edna Henry Lee Turpin

ROBERT FULTON

But this was mere schoolboy sport. It did not occur to Fulton till many years later to make boat-building his profession. Even as a boy he determined that he would be an artist. He spent four years in Philadelphia working and studying; there he succeeded so well that he went abroad. In England he was welcomed by Benjamin West, a popular American painter. Through his courtesy and kindness, his young countryman met many interesting English people, men of affairs and scientists as well as artists. In England Fulton became interested in canals, which he thought would be useful to convey merchandise along the water-ways of New York, as you know was done later. In fact, he became so much interested in this subject that he gave more time to it than to painting and he invented several improvements in canals and canal-boats.

In 1797 Fulton went to France where he continued his art studies and his scientific experiments. He invented a torpedo and diving boat, but he did not succeed in getting either the French or the English government to take it up. In Paris he met a wealthy American, Mr. Robert Livingston, who was interested in science and who had tried to make a steamboat. Fulton said that he was sure he could do so if only he had money to carry on the necessary experiments. Mr. Livingston at once offered to advance the funds and to share the future profits.

Fulton gladly accepted and began his experiments. He made a little model of a steamboat with side-wheels turned by machinery. Then he made a trial boat which broke before it was used. Undiscouraged, he at once set to work on a second one. This was tried on the river Seine and to Fulton’s great satisfaction it worked well. Then he had an engine built in England and sent to America. Mr. Livingston secured the passage of an act by the New York legislature giving to him and Fulton for twenty years the sole right to use on the waters in New York state boats propelled by “fire or steam.” People laughed and said that they were welcome to the right for a hundred years. They called the steamboat on which Fulton was working “Fulton’s Folly.”

In the summer of 1807, there was completed the Clermont, a side-paddle steamboat one hundred and thirty feet in length. It was an ugly object; even Livingston confessed, “It looks like a backwoods sawmill mounted on a scow and set on fire.”

Fulton made ready for a trial trip from New York to Albany. The boat moved off from shore, and then stopped. Fulton hurried to the engine, and discovered and corrected the cause of the trouble. The boat moved off again, and this time it kept on amid the cheers of the people. The steamboat was no longer a question, it was an accomplished fact. On that trial trip the boat went a hundred and fifty miles in thirty hours, which seemed wonderful speed in those days. How different the Clermont was from the swift and powerful boats of to-day, the “ocean greyhounds,” as they are called.

In 1812 during the war with Great Britain, Fulton made a plan for a steam war-ship and he was authorized to build it, the first in the world. While attending to its construction he contracted a severe cold and died in February, 1814.

We have considered improved methods of travel,—canals, railways, and steamboats. Let us look at what invention has done for agriculture in America. We may almost say that Whitney created the cotton supremacy of to-day. Until he invented the gin, the seeds and lint had to be separated by hand. It was a tedious and costly process. The gin does the work so rapidly and well that it is possible to raise and sell cotton much cheaper than other clothing materials. Thus it has become the great agricultural staple of the South.

Whitney, the inventor of the gin, was not, as you might suppose, a southerner. He was born in 1765 on a farm in Massachusetts; he never even saw a cotton plant until about the time that he invented the gin.

From boyhood Eli Whitney showed an intelligent curiosity about machinery and a mechanical turn. One Sunday he was left at home while the other members of the family went to church. He took advantage of the opportunity to investigate his father’s big silver watch; he took the works apart, but with such care and skill that he was able to put them together properly and his father never suspected what had been done until Eli told him years afterwards.