Fulton, Robert
Robert Fulton
Born November 14, 1765
Little Britain, Pennsylvania
Died February 24, 1815
American engineer, inventor
"What, sir? You would make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I pray you excuse me. I have no time to listen to such nonsense.
—Napoléon Bonaparte, emperor of France, reacting to Fulton's proposal for a steamboat.
Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who developed the first commercially successful steamboat, or a boat powered by steam, thereby transforming the transportation and travel industries and speeding up the Industrial Revolution, a period of fast-paced economic change that began in Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century.
As a child, Fulton enjoyed building mechanical devices, taking on such projects as rockets and a hand-propelled paddle wheel boat. His interest turned to art as he matured, and at the age of twenty-one, Fulton left the United States to study painting in England. Although he managed some success, the general response his work received was disappointing and convinced him to concentrate on his engineering skills. He spent a number of years designing a canal system in Europe and later worked on a concept for a submarine. But his fame was guaranteed by the Clermont, the first practical steamship, which he designed and built in 1807 to navigate the Hudson River.
By succeeding at building his steamships in the early years of the United States, Fulton made a dramatic contribution to the advancement of the Industrial Revolution. Steam-powered ships changed the nature of global commerce by making travel by sea much faster and more reliable. This made it possible for factories in Europe (especially in England) to ship goods to North America and expand their markets, just as American farms and factories could ship goods to Europe.
Childhood and youth
Robert Fulton was born in 1765. His father, also named Robert, had immigrated to the English colony of Pennsylvania from Northern Ireland. In 1759 Robert Fulton Sr. married Mary Smith of Oxford, Pennsylvania, and they raised three daughters and a son, Robert, on a 364-acre farm on Conowingo Creek, in the town of Little Britain, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia. When Robert was just three years old his father died, leaving the Fulton children living in relative poverty.
Young Robert was taught at home until he was eight years old, after which he attended a school run by Caleb Johnson, a strict and conservative Quaker (also known as the Society of Friends, an English religious movement) and Tory. (In Fulton's time, a Tory was someone conservative in politics who opposed the growing move for American independence from Britain.) Although Fulton would prove to be brilliant later in life, his talents were not obvious in his early schooling. He was more interested in painting and in what mechanics were doing in their nearby shops than in what Caleb Johnson was trying to teach him.
When he was seventeen years old, Fulton left home and went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which was a sophisticated center of learning and the arts. It was an exciting environment for a curious and intelligent young man, and Fulton thrived. He pursued his childhood interest of painting and earned a living by creating miniature portraits, which were in some ways the equivalent of photographs in an era before photography was invented.
One person whose portrait Fulton painted was Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), perhaps Philadelphia's best-known citizen and a leader of the American independence movement. Franklin encouraged Fulton to go to England to perfect his trade as a painter, as Franklin had done as a young man to perfect his trade as a printer. Before leaving for England, Fulton bought an 840-acre farm in the town of Hopewell, Pennsylvania, for his widowed mother. She lived there until her death in 1799, as did Fulton's sister Elizabeth, also a widow, and Elizabeth's daughter.
Off to England
In 1786, at the age of twenty-one, Fulton moved to London, England, with the intention of pursuing a career as an artist. He had little money, but he did have a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin to a successful American painter working in London, Benjamin West (1738–1820), who also happened to be from Pennsylvania.
Fulton worked as a painter for five years. In 1791 his work was exhibited in the Royal Gallery. Thanks, perhaps, to introductions by West, Fulton obtained several commissions to paint portraits of English aristocrats. Despite his relative success as a painter, the general response his work received was disappointing and convinced him to concentrate on his engineering skills.
A new career
Fulton began working at designing canals, artificial waterways that were often dug to connect two rivers, at a time when canal building was expanding rapidly in England. After several years of work, Fulton devised a system to help boats move from one level of a canal to a higher (or lower) level, such as when a canal was moving over a hill, for which he was granted a British patent in 1794. He also developed a series of inventions using mechanical power to dig canals, as well as a plan to use cast iron in building aqueducts, or channels of water. In 1796, he published a summary of his ideas on improving canal navigation in his Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation.
Moving to France
Having made little progress in building canals in England, Fulton decided to try his luck in France in 1797. He began working on other projects as well, including one for fireproofing houses and another for exploding gunpowder underwater. He also developed a plan for an experimental submarine that could plant underwater mines without being detected. The submarine, or "plunging boat," as it was called, caught the eye of Robert Livingston (1746–1813), then a wealthy American ambassador to France and the owner of a twenty-year monopoly on steam navigation in New York State. Fulton shared some of his own ideas about steam power with Livingston, and Livingston agreed to provide the financing for Fulton to develop a working steamboat. If Fulton succeeded, the two would become business partners. Fulton, always in search of financing for his schemes, agreed and got to work.
Steamboat success
A practical steam engine, a machine that converts the heat energy of steam into mechanical energy by means of a piston moving in a cylinder, was developed by Scottish engineer James Watt (1736–1819; see entry) in 1769. By the turn of the nineteenth century, steam engines had rapidly come into use. Steam engines were so bulky and heavy, however, that they were used only as stationary power sources until John Fitch (1743–1798) made the first successful trial of a forty-five-foot steam-powered boat in 1787.
In Paris, Fulton spent two and a half years working on his own design for a steamboat. One of his test models sank when a storm caused it to toss violently, and the steam engine plunged through the boat to the bottom of the River Seine. But in August 1803, Fulton succeeded in demonstrating a new model. According to H.W. Dickinson's 1913 work Robert Fulton: Engineer and Artist, a French newspaper at the time described it as follows:
During the past two or three months there has been seen at the end of the quay Chaillot a boat of curious appearance, equipped with two large wheels mounted on an axle like a cart, while behind these wheels was a kind of large stove with a pipe, as if there was some kind of a small fire engine [steam engine] intended to operate the wheels of the boat.… At six o'clock in the evening, assisted by three persons only, [the builder] put his boat in motion with two other boats in tow behind it, and for an hour and a half he afforded the curious spectacle of a boat moved by wheels like a cart, these wheels being provided with paddles or flat plates and being moved by a fire engine.
In following it along the quay the speed against the current of the Seine appeared to us about that of a rapid pedestrian, that is about 2400 toises [a French measurement equivalent to about 2.2 miles] per hour; while in going down stream it was more rapid.
Flush with success, Fulton set about making a larger boat that would be commercially feasible. He was now forty-one years old, and although he had met many influential people, he had not earned a fortune. He was, however, beginning to make a name for himself. He received an offer from the administration of President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) to develop canals in the region acquired from France in 1803 through the Louisiana Purchase (an area extending roughly from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains). But Fulton was entirely focused on the steamboat, as he explained in a letter to the secretary of war in turning down the canal project in 1811:
I now have Ship Builders, Blacksmiths, and Carpenters occupied at New York in building and executing the machinery of my Steam Boat, and I must return to that City in ten days to direct the work till finished.… The enterprise is of much importance to me individually and I hope will be of great use in facilitating the navigation of some of our long rivers. Like every enthusiast, I have no doubt of success. I therefore work with ardor, and when adjusting the parts of the machine I cannot leave the men for a day.
Upon completion of the project, Fulton named his steamship the Clermont, after Robert Livingston's estate in New York. The ship was actually built by an established shipbuilder in New York, and it used a steam engine purchased from James Watt's company in England. On August 17, 1807, the Clermont was launched, four and a half years after Fulton entered into his agreement with Livingston in Paris. The next month, the first commercial trip was launched, at a cost of $7.00 one way. The service ran for two months until ice in the river became a problem in mid-November of that year.
Fulton obtained a patent (guaranteeing an inventor the exclusive right to earn money from an invention) for his ship in 1809, as well as an exclusive license from the state of New York to operate steamboat transportation on the Hudson River. Neither his patent nor his license deterred competitors from building similar ships and launching service up the Hudson. Fulton eventually won legal battles over his patent, but in 1825, a U.S. court ruled that he could not have the business all to himself.
Fulton's success led him to build other successively larger boats and to experiment with new designs. Competitors rushed in with their own designs, and soon steamboats were used as river ferries and to carry passengers and freight along the shores of Long Island Sound from New York to New Haven, Connecticut.
The impact of Robert Fulton
As with most inventions, that of the steamboat was not the work of any one man or of any one nation. While Fulton's name will always be associated with its evolution, he was only the last in a series of individuals inspired to apply steam power to transportation. Fulton, more than any other individual, succeeded in bringing mechanical power to ships, just as others had brought steam power to manufacturing fabric, pumping water from mines, and farming. Steam applied to transportation opened up new economic opportunities and freed people from total dependence upon the wind and weather, which had restricted water transportation since the days of the first sailing vessel.
Within a decade, in 1819, the American ship Savannah claimed to be the first steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean, even though the vessel had sails and relied on wind power for a good deal of the journey. Fulton's invention, and later improvements, made crossing the Atlantic faster and less dangerous than voyages in sailing ships. By so doing, steamships facilitated the shipment of manufactured goods and raw materials between Europe and North America, and eventually around the world.
Fulton died in New York on February 24, 1815, of complications from a chest cold he had caught during a journey to New Jersey. Businesses in New York closed for a day in his honor.
For More Information
Books
Morgan, John Smith. Robert Fulton. New York: Mason/Charter, 1977.
Philip, Cynthia Owen. Robert Fulton, A Biography. New York: F. Watts, 1985.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the AmericanDream. New York: Free Press, 2001.
Periodicals
Philip, Cynthia Owen. "Adventurer Armed with Fortitude." AmericanHistory Illustrated, December 1986, p. 8.
"Robert Fulton." American Heritage, May–June, 1991, p. 74.
Web Sites
Dickinson, H. W. "Robert Fulton: Engineer and Artist." Steam Engine Library, University of Rochester.http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/dickinson (accessed on February 13, 2003).
Fulton, Robert. "A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation." University of Rochester. http://www.history.rochester.edu/canal/bib/fulton/1796/ (accessed on March 3, 2003).
"Fulton, Robert." Yahooligans Directory.http://www.yahooligans.com/science_and_nature/machines/inventions/inventors/Fulton__Robert/ (accessed on February 13, 2003).
"Robert Fulton." Virtuology.com.http://www.robertfulton.org/ (accessed on February 13, 2003).
Sutcliffe, Alice Crary. Robert Fulton and the Clermont. New York: Century Company, 1999. http://www.ulster.net/hrmm/diglit/sutcliffe/chapter4-5.html (accessed on January 9, 2003).
Thurston, Robert H. "Robert Fulton: His Life and Its Results." Steam Engine Library, University of Rochester.http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/thurston/fulton/ (accessed on February 13, 2003).