Historic Boyhoods

by Rupert Sargent Holland

At about the same time one of Robert's playmates learned a new way of mixing and preparing colors, using mussel-shells to show them off. This boy carried the shells covered with his new paint to school one day and showed them to Robert. No sooner had young Fulton seen them than he begged to be taught how they were made, and immediately started to work mixing his own colors. The Revolution had made it very difficult to obtain painting materials from abroad, and almost all the paints the boys used were home-made. Fulton now began to study the making of colors, and in a very short time was able to add to his stock.

Wherever he went the young inventor and painter was popular. In the near neighborhood of his home there were several factories making arms and ammunition for the war, and guards were stationed about the doors to make sure that no trespassers entered. But "Quicksilver Bob" was allowed to come and go as he would. Whatever he saw he studied, and the first thing they knew the men in charge of the factories would find the boy submitting new plans and new suggestions to them for the improvement of guns or powder. Much to their surprise these suggestions were almost always good ones, and he became a very welcome visitor. He was paid for some of this work, but much of it he did without any reward, except the knowledge that he was in a way serving his country. To help support the little family he used his skill as a painter in making signs for village taverns and shops, very much as another boy artist named Benjamin West had done in his youth.

It happened that in 1777 some two thousand British prisoners were brought to Lancaster and quartered there. Such a large number of the enemy naturally caused some alarm among the quiet country people. The officers were lodged at the taverns and at private houses, but the soldiers themselves lived in rude barracks just outside the town, and there were so many of them that they made quite a settlement for themselves. Many of the Hessian troopers had their wives with them, and these occupied square huts built of mud and sod. The little encampment had quite a strange appearance, the small mud houses lining primitive streets and looking like some savage settlement.

Naturally the place had a great charm for the Lancaster boys, and whenever they were free from school during that time Robert and his friends were almost sure to be found in the neighborhood of the Hessian huts, watching these strange men who had come from overseas. Fulton drew countless pictures of them, some of them caricatures, but many faithful copies of what he saw. When they were finished these pictures were in great demand, and some of them were carried as far as Philadelphia, to show the people there the curious sights of the country near Lancaster.

In spite of his skill in these different lines, Robert was not a very successful scholar, and his poor schoolteacher, who was a strict Quaker of Tory principles, found him very hard to put up with at certain times. If some inventive idea occurred to the boy while he was on his way to school, he was quite as likely to stop and work it out as not. One time he came in so very late that the teacher quite lost his patience. Seizing a rod he told Robert to hold out his hand, and gave him a caning. "There!" he exclaimed, "I hope that will make you do something." But the boy folded his arms and answered very quietly, "I came to school to have something beaten into my brains and not into my knuckles." It was very hard for the teacher to do much with such a lad, particularly as the boy was so often really very helpful to him.

Another time when he came to school late, he had been at a shop pouring lead into wooden pencils that were better than those he had made before, and he handed several of them to the master. The man examined them carefully and said they were the best he had ever had. It was hard to scold the boy for spending his time in such ways. One time, when the teacher had tried to rouse his ambition to study history, Robert said to him: "My head's so full of original notions that there's no vacant room to store away the records of dusty old books." Yet in spite of these stories, the boy could not help picking up a great deal of general information at school, for his mind was always alert, and he was eager to improve on everything that had been done before.

At this time in his boyhood it was hard to say whether the young Fulton was more the inventor or the artist, but as soon as the war ended he decided that he would become a painter, and went to Philadelphia, then the chief city of the new nation, to study his art. He made enough money by the use of his pencil and by making drawings for machinists to support himself, and also saved enough money to buy a small farm for his widowed mother and younger brothers and sisters.

Benjamin West, the great painter, had lived near Lancaster, and had heard much of Robert Fulton's boyhood inventions, and he now hunted him out in Philadelphia, and helped him in his new line of work. The young artist met Benjamin Franklin and found him eager to aid him in his plans, and so, by his perseverance and the friends he was fortunate enough to make, he laid the foundations for his future.

When he became a man, the spirit of the inventor finally overcame that of the painter. He went abroad and studied in laboratories in England and France, and then he came home and built a workshop of his own. What particularly interested him was the uses to which steam might be put, and he studied its possibilities until he had worked out his plans for a practical steamboat. How successful those plans were all the world knows.

It was a great day when the crowds that lined the Hudson River saw the Clermont prove that the era of sailing vessels had closed, and that of steamships had dawned. But to the boys who had lived along the Conestoga it did not seem strange that Robert Fulton had won fame as an inventor; they had known he could make anything he chose since that second Independence Day when he had come to his country's rescue with his home-made sky-rockets.