Robert Fulton

Robert Fulton (born November 14, 1765, Lancaster county, Pennsylvania [U.S.]—died February 24, 1815, New York, New York) was an American inventor, engineer, and artist who brought steamboating from the experimental stage to commercial success. He also designed a system of inland waterways, a submarine, and a steam warship.

Fulton was the son of Irish immigrants. When their unproductive farm was lost by mortgage foreclosure in 1771, the family moved to Lancaster, where Fulton’s father died in 1774 (not 1786 as is generally written). Having learned to read and write at home, Fulton was sent at age eight to a Quaker school. Later he became an apprentice in a Philadelphia jewelry shop, where he specialized in the painting of miniature portraits on ivory for lockets and rings.

After settling his mother on a small farm in western Pennsylvania in 1786, Fulton went to Bath, Virginia, to recover from a severe cough. There the paintings by the young man—tall, graceful, and an engaging conversationalist—were admired by people who advised him to study in Europe. On returning to Philadelphia, Fulton applied himself to painting and the search for a sponsor. Local merchants, eager to raise the city’s cultural level, financed his passage to London in 1787.

Although Fulton’s reception in London was cordial, his paintings made little impression; they showed neither the style nor the promise required to provide him more than a precarious living. Meanwhile, he became acquainted with new inventions for propelling boats: a water jet ejected by a steam pump and a single, mechanical paddle. His own experiments led him to conclude that several revolving paddles at the stern would be most effective.

Beginning in 1794, however, having admitted defeat as a painter, Fulton turned his principal efforts toward canal engineering. His Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation, in 1796, dealt with a complete system of inland water transportation based on small canals extending throughout the countryside. He included details on inclined planes for raising boats—he did not favour locks—aqueducts for valley crossings, boats for specialized cargo, and bridge designs featuring bowstring beams to transmit only vertical loads to the piers. A few bridges were built to his design in the British Isles, but his canal ideas were nowhere accepted.

Undaunted, he traveled in 1797 to Paris, where he proposed the idea of a submarine, the Nautilus, to be used in France’s war with Britain: it would creep under the hulls of British warships and leave a powder charge to be exploded later. The French government rejected the idea, however, as an atrocious and dishonourable way to fight. In 1800 he was able to build the Nautilus at his own expense. He conducted trials on the Seine and finally obtained government sanction for an attack, but wind and tide enabled two British ships to elude his slow vessel.

In 1801 Fulton met Robert R. Livingston, a member of the committee that drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Before becoming minister to France, Livingston had obtained a 20-year monopoly of steamboat navigation within the state of New York. The two men decided to share the expense of building a steamboat in Paris using Fulton’s design—a 66-foot- (20-metre-) long boat with an eight-horsepower engine of French design and side paddle wheels. Although the engine broke the hull, they were encouraged by success with another hull. Fulton ordered parts for a 24-horsepower engine from Boulton and Watt for a boat on the Hudson, and Livingston obtained an extension on his monopoly of steamboat navigation.

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Returning to London in 1804, Fulton advanced his ideas with the British government for submersible and low-lying craft that would carry explosives in an attack. Two raids against the French using his novel craft, however, were unsuccessful. In 1805, after Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, it was apparent that Britain was in control of the seas without the aid of Fulton’s temperamental weapons. In the same year, the parts for his projected steamboat were ready for shipment to the United States, but Fulton spent a desperate year attempting to collect money he felt the British owed him.

Arriving in New York in December 1806, Fulton at once set to work supervising the construction of the steamboat that had been planned in Paris with Livingston. He also attempted to interest the U.S. government in a submarine, but his demonstration of it was a fiasco. By early August 1807 a 150-foot- (45-metre-) long Steamboat, as Fulton called it, was ready for trials. Its single-cylinder condensing steam engine (24-inch bore and four-foot stroke) drove two 15-foot-diameter side paddle wheels; it consumed oak and pine fuel, which produced steam at a pressure of two to three pounds per square inch. The 150-mile (240-km) trial run from New York to Albany required 32 hours (an average of almost 4.7 miles [7.6 km] per hour), considerably better time than the four miles per hour required by the monopoly. The passage was epic because sailing sloops required four days for the same trip.

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After building an engine house, raising the bulwark, and installing berths in the cabins of the now-renamed North River Steamboat, Fulton began commercial trips in September. He made three round trips fortnightly between New York and Albany, carrying passengers and light freight. Problems, however, remained: the mechanical difficulties, for example, and the jealous sloop boatmen, who through “inadvertence” would ram the unprotected paddle wheels of their new rivals. During the first winter season he stiffened and widened the hull, replaced the cast-iron crankshaft with a forging, fitted guards over the wheels, and improved passenger accommodations. These modifications made it a different boat, which was registered in 1808 as the North River Steamboat of Clermont, soon reduced to Clermont by the press.

In 1808 Fulton married his partner’s niece, Harriet Livingston, by whom he had a son and three daughters.

In 1811 the Fulton-designed, Pittsburgh-built New Orleans was sent south to validate the Livingston-Fulton steamboat monopoly of the New Orleans Territory. The trip was slow and perilous, river conditions being desperate because of America’s first recorded, and also largest, earthquake, which had destroyed New Madrid just below the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Fulton’s low-powered vessel remained at New Orleans, for it could go no farther upstream than Natchez. He built three boats for Western rivers that were based at New Orleans, but none could conquer the passage to Pittsburgh.

Fulton was a member of the 1812 commission that recommended building the Erie Canal. With the English blockade the same year, he insisted that a mobile floating gun platform be built—the world’s first steam warship—to protect New York Harbor against the British fleet. The Demologos, or Fulton, as the ship was alternately called, incorporated new and novel ideas: two parallel hulls, with paddle wheel between and with the steam engine in one hull and boilers and stacks in the other. It weighed 2,745 displacement tons and measured 156 feet (48 metres) in length; a slow vessel, its speed did not exceed 6 knots (6 nautical miles, or 11 km, per hour). Launched in October 1814, the heavily gunned and armoured steamship underwent successful sea trials but was never used in battle; when peace came in December, it was transferred to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where it was destroyed by an accidental explosion in 1829.

By 1810 three of Fulton’s boats served the Hudson and Raritan rivers. His steamboats also replaced the horse ferries that were used for heavily traveled river crossings in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. He retained the typical broad double-ended hulls that needed no turning for the return passage. Manhattan’s crosstown Fulton Street, named in 1816, was the principal thoroughfare connecting the two river terminals.

Fulton spent much of his wealth in litigations involving the pirating of patents relating to steamboats and in trying to suppress rival steamboat builders who found loopholes in the state-granted monopoly. His wealth was further depleted by his unsuccessful submarine projects, investments in paintings, and financial assistance to farmer kin and young artists. After testifying at a legal hearing in Trenton early in 1815, he became chilled en route home to New York, where he died. His family made claims on the U.S. government for services rendered. A bill of $100,000 for the relief of the heirs finally passed the Congress in 1846 but was reduced to $76,300, with no interest.

A Hudson-Fulton Celebration in 1909 commemorated the success of the North River Steamboat of Clermont and the discovery in 1609 of the North River by the English navigator who was the first to sail upstream to Albany. A “Robert Fulton” commemorative stamp was issued in 1965, the bicentenary of his birth, and the two-story farmhouse, his birthplace, was acquired and restored by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.