[Illustration: ROBERT FULTON
_Fulton was tall, and his face showed great intelligence. He was
refined, and possessed grace and elegance of manner._]
Similar to all truly great inventors, he was a man of broad vision and
keen imagination. What he was most interested in was not immediate
consequences, but ultimate effects, and in working on the complicated
mechanical problems with which his mind was incessantly occupied he
kept steadily in view their significance to society as a whole. Thus,
one of his most ingenious creations--the famous Fulton torpedo, crude
forerunner of the deadly submarine missiles of today--was inspired by
an ardent desire to produce something that would make war so terrible
as to impel mankind to universal peace. And similarly it was with an
eye to increasing the welfare and happiness of society that he went to
work on the invention with which his name will always be linked,--the
steamboat.
He was not the first to whom the idea had occurred of applying
the steam engine to purposes of water transportation. Already the
Pennsylvanian, William Henry, the Connecticut mechanic, John Fitch, the
New Jersey inventor, John Stevens, and the Scotsman, William Symington,
had demonstrated more or less successfully the possibility of using
steam as a motive power on the water; but it was left to Fulton to
establish definitely the value of the steamboat as a medium for
passenger and freight traffic. This he did with his historic Clermont,
built at New York in 1807, partly with funds provided by Chancellor
Livingston and partly by loans from reluctant and skeptical friends.
[Illustration: FULTON’S FIRST EXPERIMENT WITH PADDLE WHEELS
_In the summer of 1779 Fulton first tried the method of propelling
a boat by means of paddle wheels on Conestoga Creek in eastern
Pennsylvania._]
The general impression was that Fulton had undertaken a hopeless and
visionary task. “As I had occasion,” he himself has related, “daily to
pass to and from the shipyard while my boat was in progress, I often
loitered unknown near idle groups of strangers, gathering in little
circles, and heard various inquiries as to the object of this new
vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, sneer, or ridicule.
The loud laugh often rose at my expense; the dry jest; the wise
calculation of losses and expenditures; the dull but endless repetition
of ‘Fulton’s Folly.’”
As everybody knows, the Clermont did not sink or otherwise come to
grief when she started up the Hudson, August 11, 1807, for her maiden
voyage to Albany. On the contrary, she made the journey, against the
wind, at an average rate of nearly five miles an hour; and, with
the wind again ahead, returned to New York at about the same speed.
Compared with the steaming powers of the modern ocean leviathan,
this was a sorry enough showing; but, with the continued success
of the Clermont and her sister boats, the Raritan and the Car of
Neptune,--which together constituted the world’s first regular line of
steamboats,--it was sufficient to prove for all time that man had made
another superb advance in the mastery of the forces of Nature.
[Illustration: MODEL OF ROBERT FULTON’S FIRST STEAMBOAT, THE CLERMONT
_Constructed for the Hudson-Fulton celebration at New York in the fall
of 1909._]