Historic Inventions

by Rupert Sargent Holland

“Quicksilver Bob” he was called as a boy in Lancaster, because he used to buy all that metal he could for experiments. Even then he was many-sided. He made designs for firearms and experimented with guns to learn the carrying distance of various bores and balls. There was a factory in Lancaster where arms were being made for the Continental troops, and “Quicksilver Bob” was given the run of the place. In addition he painted signs to hang before the village shops and taverns.

To simplify his fishing expeditions he made a model of a boat propelled by paddles, and later he built such a boat and used it on the Conestoga River. No one could tell what he would turn to next. When Hessian prisoners were kept in the neighborhood the town boys would go out to look at them, and Robert would make sketches of them. These sketches gave him a local reputation, and his friends were not surprised when at seventeen he left Lancaster to seek his fortune as a painter of portraits and miniatures in Philadelphia.

He was well liked in the city. He had a talent for friendship, which, combined with good looks, more than ordinary intelligence, and most uncommon industry, carried him far. He drew plans for machinery, he designed houses and carriages, he worked as professional painter. Franklin became his patron and adviser. Then illness sent him to the fashionable hot springs of Virginia, and there he heard so much talk of England and of France that he decided to see those countries for himself. Before he left America he bought a farm in Washington County, Pennsylvania, in order to insure a home for his mother and sisters. That done, he sailed for England, with a packet of letters of introduction, in 1786.

In London Fulton professed himself to be an artist, although his thoughts were constantly tending toward inventions. He lived at the house of Benjamin West, and painted, and his portraits were shown at the Royal Academy and at the Society of Artists. Betimes he enjoyed himself in society and in trips to the counties. He journeyed into Devonshire and stayed at Powderham Castle, copying famous pictures there. Wherever he went he made friends, and their influence was constantly helping him forward on what must have been a somewhat precarious career.

Two of these friends, the Duke of Bridgewater and the Earl of Stanhope, were scientists of repute. The Duke owned a great estate, of untold mineral wealth, which had never been properly worked because of lack of transportation facilities. He had recently built several canals on this property, and was at the head of a number of companies which were planning to intersect England with waterways. He interested Fulton in his schemes and gradually weaned his thoughts away from art to civil engineering. The Earl of Stanhope corresponded with him over the possibility of propelling boats by steam, and in these letters Fulton first gave the outlines of the plans he was later to perfect in the Clermont. The Earl was deeply interested, and encouraged the young American to persevere, but for the time Fulton left the steamboat to work out other problems.

The possibility of a great English canal system appealed to him strongly, and in 1794 he obtained an English patent for a double inclined plane for raising and lowering canal boats. Later he took English patents on a machine for spinning flax, and on a new device for twisting hemp rope. There followed others for a machine that should scoop out earth to make canals or aqueducts, for a “Market or Passage Boat” to use on canals, and for a “Dispatch Boat” that should travel quickly. He sent drawings of all these inventions to his influential friends, hoping that they would push them, and he also wrote and published “A Treatise on Canal Navigation.” By this time he would seem to have given up all thought of the artist’s career, and to have turned his talent with the pen to the aid of his mechanical drawings.

The French Revolution was imminent, and Fulton was busy studying the conditions that were leading to it. He believed that Free Trade would tend to abolish many of the difficulties that divided nations, and he wrote a paper on that subject, addressed to the French Directory. He believed in democracy, but he was strongly of the opinion that the young American republic should take no part in the struggle for liberty in Europe. In a letter written in 1794 he says, “It has been much Agitated here whether the Americans would join the French. But I Believe every Cool friend to America could wish them to Remain nuter. The americans have no troublesome Neighbors, they are without foreign Possessions, and do not want the alliance of any Nation, for this Reason they have nothing to do with foreign Politics. And the Art of Peace Should be the Study of every young American which I most Sincerely hope they will maintain.”

But Fulton himself was in a manner to be drawn into the turmoil. When France had quieted somewhat England began that policy of aggression on the sea toward American ships and crews that was to lead to the War of 1812. Fulton’s attention was drawn from canal-building to the possibility of some invention that might tend to subserve peace, and this in time led him to design and build the first torpedo.

Again Fulton’s talent for friendship stood him in good stead. When he had left London for Paris he called upon Joel Barlow, poet and American diplomat, and was urged to take up his residence first at the hotel where the Barlows were staying, and later at their house. For seven years Fulton lived with them, busy about the most diverse matters, and always keenly interested in the struggles of the new and hot-tempered republic. A rich American had bought a tract of central real estate in Paris and had built a row of shops arranged on the two sides of a cloister. Fulton suggested that he add a panorama to the other buildings, and the idea was adopted. Fulton was given charge, and by 1800 he had built and opened the first panorama that Paris had ever seen. The show made money, and the inventor, a perfect Jack-of-all-trades, added another feather to his varicolored cap.