ROBERT FULTON was a Pennsylvania boy. His father, a Quaker, died when Robert was a baby. His mother was a beautiful Irish lady, whose mind was as lovely as her face. She taught little Robert, and he knew much that was worth while before he began to go to school at the age of eight years.
In those days school teachers were often strict and harsh with young children. Parents seemed to think their children would not learn fast unless they were whipped or beaten with a ruler. Though little Robert was not a bad boy in school, he sometimes seemed to be idle because he was thinking of something else. So his strict Quaker teacher punished him one day by striking his hands with a ferule. Robert’s boyish sense of fairness rose up within him, and he exclaimed, “I came here, sir, to have something beaten into my head—not my hands!”
One of the pupils brought some artist’s brushes and paints to school, and Robert, who already showed real talent for drawing, was allowed to use them. He made such fine pictures that the other boy gave him the paints. This was the beginning of young Fulton’s career as a painter. But Robert was not content with painting pictures. He was always trying to make things, or to find ways of doing things more easily.
Robert was eleven when the American colonies went into the War for Independence. During this war, when candles were scarce, people were warned not to waste them in lighting up for the Fourth of July. It was to be a saving rather than a safe and sane holiday. The Fulton boy made up his mind to celebrate the day. So he got some gunpowder and pasteboard and made little tubes with a stick pointing out at one end of each. The neighbors were astonished on the night of the Fourth of July to see these tubes, one after another, go whizzing up in the sky, leaving a trail of sparks behind them. They said to one another, “That Fulton boy’s a genius!” Robert had made the first skyrockets these Americans had ever seen.
Robert Fulton afterward became acquainted with Dr. Benjamin Franklin and learned much from the kind old inventor. When Fulton was a young man he went to London and studied painting with Benjamin West, the greatest American painter up to that time. He went also to France to study art. Meantime he kept on inventing things. The French were at war with many of the countries of Europe at that time. Fulton had always been interested in boats; and we have seen that he knew how to use gunpowder. He planned a new kind of boat, which he thought would help the French in their war. It was a submarine, and was provided with torpedoes which could be shot under water. They would have pierced the wooden sides of the best ships built in those days. Fulton’s diving boat was shown to the French minister of war, but the government experts could not understand its great value in war and refused to make use of it in the war. Shortly after, a British officer remarked that Napoleon’s loss of Fulton’s diving boat was the most important event of the century.