Robert Fulton

• Born: 14 November 1765
• Birthplace: Little Britain (now Fulton), Pennsylvania
• Died: 24 February 1815
• Best Known As: The man who made steamships successful

Robert Fulton is popularly, if inaccurately, considered the inventor of the steamship. Born in Pennsylvania, he began his career as an artist, painting mostly portraits (Benjamin Franklin sat for him in Philadelphia). In 1786 he travelled to England, where he put his efforts to engineering, specializing in canal navigation and shipbuilding. In the late 1790s he worked on designing and building a submarine, first in France and then, more successfully, in England. Something of a celebrity when he returned to the United States in 1806, Fulton set to building a ship powered by an English-built steam engine. In August of 1807 his Clermont made the trip from New York to Albany, upriver on the Hudson, in 32 hours. Although John Fitch had built a working steamboat in 1790, Fulton was the first to establish a commercially successful line of ships, which led to a transportation revolution. After Clermont he built more than a dozen other steamships, a torpedo boat and, under the direction of the U.S. Congress, a steam-powered frigate.

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Fulton, Robert

An American inventor of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He launched the first successful steamboat, the Clermont, in 1807, on the Hudson River in New York.

(1765–1815), inventor

Best known for his development of the first commercially successful steamboat in 1807, Fulton also made important contributions in portrait painting, canal engineering, and naval warfare. Born in Pennsylvania, he lived most of his adult life in Europe. His first naval project was the submarine Nautilus, manually driven underwater and tested successfully in French waters in 1800. Shifting to mine warfare, Fulton successfully blew up two brigs with floating mines in tests off Dover, England, in 1805 and New York in 1807. His grand vision was to promote freedom of the seas and free trade, using naval weapons to prevent war. He offered these weapons alternately to Napoleon and the British with little success. Returning to America, Fulton continued developing steamboats and naval weapons until his death. His American‐developed weapons concepts stressed harbor defense, and included the moored mine, the sub marine gun, use of the steamboat for troop transport in the War of 1812, and the construction of the first steam warship in history, USS Fulton the First. His Nautilus was the first cigar‐shaped submarine, and he was the first to conceive of the moored mine. Fulton's emphasis on the submarine, on mines, and on the deterrent effect have particular relevance for the modern era.

Bibliography

• Alex Roland, Underwater Warfare in the Age of Sail, 1978.
• Wallace S. Hutcheon, Jr., Robert Fulton: Pioneer of Undersea Warfare, 1981.
• Cynthia Owen Philip, Robert Fulton: A Biography, 1985

Fulton, Robert (1765-1815) engineer and entrepreneur, born in Little Britain Township (later Fulton), Pennsylvania. Fulton's improvements over earlier designs led to the successful commercial development of the steamboat (1807), resulting in his being popularly perceived as the vehicle's inventor. In 1813-15 Fulton adapted the steam ferry, a catamaran, into the first steam warship or “steam battery, ” but the War of 1812 concluded before it was put into service.

Fulton spent much of his early career in England and France working on underwater naval weapons, but conceptually he was too far ahead of the technology of his time.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Robert Fulton (1765-1815), American inventor, civil engineer, and artist, established the first regular and commercially successful steamboat operation.

Robert Fulton was born November 14, 1765, in Lancaster County, Pa. His father worked at farming, among other jobs, and died when Robert was a small boy. By the age of 10 Robert showed promise as an artist and was employed by local gunsmiths to make designs for their work. At 17 he went to Philadelphia, the cultural center of the Atlantic seaboard, and spent 4 years making portraits and doing miniatures. Financially successful, he was able to buy a farm near the city for his mother.

In 1786 Fulton went to London to study painting with Benjamin West, who had been a family friend and was by this time one of the leading American painters living in England. England was already in the midst of its industrial revolution, and Fulton was fascinated by the new engineering enterprises - canals, mines, bridges, roads, and factories. His interest became professional, and after about 1793 he gave up painting as a vocation, pursuing it only for his own amusement.

As early as 1794 Fulton considered using steam power to drive a boat. Seven years earlier John Fitch had successfully demonstrated his steamboat on the Delaware River at Philadelphia, but in the interim no one had been able to make both a mechanical and commercial success of the idea. Though the British government had banned the export of steam engines, Fulton wrote to the firm of Boulton and Watt about the possibility of buying a ready-made engine to be applied to boat propulsion.

Most of Fulton's energy during these years was devoted to more conventional problems of civil and mechanical engineering. He patented in England a "double-incline plane" for hauling canal boats over difficult terrain and machines to saw marble, to spin flax, and to twist hemp for rope. He built a mechanical dredge to speed the construction of canals and in 1796 published his illustrated pamphlet, A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation.

For the next 10 years Fulton devoted himself to the development of underwater warfare through the invention and improvement of a submarine and explosive torpedoes. It is thought that he believed that if warfare were made sufficiently destructive and horrible it would be abandoned - a fallacy often invoked by inventors of military devices. He tried to interest the French government in his experiments, and he obtained the promise of prizes for any British ships he might destroy with his devices. In 1801 he proceeded with his submarine, the Nautilus, against various ships but was unsuccessful. By 1804 his failure to win French money for destroying British ships led him to offer to destroy French ships for the British government. Once again he failed in combat, although he was able to blow up one ship during an experiment.

In 1802 Fulton had met Robert R. Livingston, formerly a partner in another steamboat venture but recently appointed U.S. minister to the French government. Despite the failure of Fulton's earlier ventures, Livingston agreed to support Fulton's old idea of building a steamboat. In 1803 an engine was ordered (disassembled and with many duplicate parts) from Boulton and Watt, to be delivered in New York City. But it was 1806 before permission to export the engine was obtained, the parts were assembled, and Fulton was able to sail for America.

The engine was put together in New York and set aboard a locally built vessel. One of the problems was to determine the proper proportions for a steamboat. Fulton was convinced that science dictated a very long and narrow hull, though experience later proved him wrong. Although Livingston had been an advocate of a kind of jet propulsion for steamboats (that is, a jet of water forced out the back of the boat under high pressure), the two now settled on paddle wheels as the best method. On Aug. 17, 1807, the Clermont (as it was later named) began its first successful voyage up the Hudson River to Albany, N.Y. Under way it averaged 5 miles per hour.

After the voyage of the Clermont, steamboats appeared up and down the Atlantic Coast, and Fulton himself introduced the first steamboat on the western waters. Before his death on February 24, 1815 he had erected a large boat works in New Jersey and directed the building of one ferryboat, a torpedo boat, and 17 regular steamboats.

Fulton's success, where at least a dozen other American inventors had failed, had many causes. In Livingston he had a rich and politically powerful patron who was able to obtain a lucrative monopoly on the steam navigation of the state's waters. Fulton also began his work with a first-class engine, purchased from Boulton and Watt, the world's leading engine builders. Previous inventors, including John Fitch, had had to build their own engines. Also, Fulton was able to employ mechanics and experimenters who had, over the past 2 decades, gained considerable experience with steam engines. It was Fulton's luck and genius to be able to combine these elements into a commercially successful steamboat venture.

Further Reading

The first, and still useful, biography of Fulton is Cadwallader D. Colden, The Life of Robert Fulton (1817). The best biography is H. W. Dickinson, Robert Fulton, Engineer and Artist: His Life and Works (1913). Also useful is George Dangerfield, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, 1746-1813 (1960). For the prehistory of steamboats see James Thomas Flexner, Steamboats Come True: American Inventors in Action (1944).

(1765-1815), engineer and artist. Fulton did not invent the steamboat, but he designed and built the first commercially successful one. His genius lay in putting the ideas of others to practical use.

Fulton was born in New Britain, Pennsylvania, not far from Lancaster. He early showed a marked mechanical and artistic aptitude, building a skyrocket in his teens to celebrate Independence Day and designing a human-powered paddle-wheel boat to make fishing expeditions with his friends easier.

Fulton learned the art of gunsmithing but was apprenticed to a Philadelphia jeweler. In 1785 he went into business for himself as a "miniature painter and hair worker," at which he succeeded so well he was able to buy his mother a farm before setting off for England in 1786. There, like many aspiring American artists, he studied painting under Benjamin West but abandoned art for engineering a few years later.

In 1796 he published his Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation and tried unsuccessfully to interest the American government, and then the French, in his canal proposals. He moved to France in 1797, where he submitted plans for a submarine by which, he argued, France could overcome Britain's naval supremacy. He built the Nautilus in 1800, and it worked better than any previous submarine, although in many ways it was modeled on one designed by David Bushnell in 1776. The Nautilus was reconstructed and improved the following year, but the French government still rejected the project.

Fulton turned his energies then to steamboats and, with financing from Robert Livingston, the American minister to Paris, built an experimental vessel in 1803 that operated on the Seine. The following year the British government, well aware of Fulton's activities (having been kept informed by Fulton himself), invited him to return to Britain and experiment there. But after winning the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the British Admiralty lost interest in new naval weapons, and Fulton returned to the United States.

His friend Robert Livingston had also returned by that time and had been granted a monopoly of steamboat navigation in New York waters. The pair ordered a boat powered by a twenty-eight-horsepower steam engine manufactured by James Watt's firm in England. It was launched on August 9, 1807, and on August 17 it made the trip from New York City to Albany in thirty-two hours, far faster than a sailing vessel could travel with any regularity. The vessel was rebuilt the following year, lengthened to 149 feet and named The North River Steamboat of Clermont. The press promptly shortened this to Clermont, by which name the vessel is known to history.

Fulton and Livingston built several other steamboats for the Hudson as well as ferries to connect Manhattan with New Jersey and Long Island. Fulton also designed the first steamboat to operate on the Mississippi.

Fulton's last major project was a floating fortress for New York Harbor. It was launched shortly before the end of the War of 1812, but never saw action. Fulton died in New York City.

Bibliography:

James T. Flexner, Steamboats Come True (1944).

Author:

John Steele Gordon

See also Transportation Revolution.

Fulton, Robert, 1765-1815, American inventor, engineer, and painter, b. near Lancaster, Pa. He was a man remarkable for his many talents and his mechanical genius. An expert gunsmith at the time of the American Revolution, he later turned to painting (1782-86) landscapes and portraits in Philadelphia. In England and France his painting gained some notice, but he became interested in canal engineering and the invention of machinery. He worked at making underwater torpedoes and submarines as well as other mechanical devices. In 1802 he contracted to build a steamboat for Robert R. Livingston, who held a monopoly on steamboat navigation on the Hudson. In 1807 the Clermont, equipped with an English engine, was launched. A number of men had built steamboats before Fulton (see steamship), including John Fitch and William Symington. Fulton's steamship, however, was the first to be commercially successful in American waters, and Fulton was therefore popularly considered the inventor of the steamboat. He also designed other vessels, among them a steam warship.

Bibliography

See biographies by B. Richnak (1984) and C. O. Philip (1985).

(1765-1815)

1796

Observations on the Various Systems of Canal Navigation, with Inferences Practical and Mathematical.... Written more than a decade before Fulton's commercially successful steamship design, the work establishes its author as an innovative engineer. It argues for a cost-effective system of canals for small boats. Critics view the work as visionary but impractical.

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