ROBERT FULTON
ROBERT FULTON
Fulton was tall, and his face showed great intelligence. He was refined, and possessed grace and elegance of manner.
Similar to all truly great inventors, he was a man of broad vision and keen imagination. What he was most interested in was not immediate consequences, but ultimate effects, and in working on the complicated mechanical problems with which his mind was incessantly occupied he kept steadily in view their significance to society as a whole. Thus, one of his most ingenious creations—the famous Fulton torpedo, crude forerunner of the deadly submarine missiles of today—was inspired by an ardent desire to produce something that would make war so terrible as to impel mankind to universal peace. And similarly it was with an eye to increasing the welfare and happiness of society that he went to work on the invention with which his name will always be linked,—the steamboat.
He was not the first to whom the idea had occurred of applying the steam engine to purposes of water transportation. Already the Pennsylvanian, William Henry, the Connecticut mechanic, John Fitch, the New Jersey inventor, John Stevens, and the Scotsman, William Symington, had demonstrated more or less successfully the possibility of using steam as a motive power on the water; but it was left to Fulton to establish definitely the value of the steamboat as a medium for passenger and freight traffic. This he did with his historic Clermont, built at New York in 1807, partly with funds provided by Chancellor Livingston and partly by loans from reluctant and skeptical friends.
FULTON’S FIRST EXPERIMENT WITH PADDLE WHEELS
In the summer of 1779 Fulton first tried the method of propelling a boat by means of paddle wheels on Conestoga Creek in eastern Pennsylvania.
The general impression was that Fulton had undertaken a hopeless and visionary task. “As I had occasion,” he himself has related, “daily to pass to and from the shipyard while my boat was in progress, I often loitered unknown near idle groups of strangers, gathering in little circles, and heard various inquiries as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, sneer, or ridicule. The loud laugh often rose at my expense; the dry jest; the wise calculation of losses and expenditures; the dull but endless repetition of ‘Fulton’s Folly.’”