Robert Fulton
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Robert Fulton (November 14, 1765 – February 24, 1815) was a U.S. engineer and inventor, who was widely credited with developing the first steam-powered ship marked as a commercial success.
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[edit] Early life
Robert Fulton was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in 1765. He may have become interested in steamboats in 1777 when (at the age of 12) he visited William Henry of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who had found out about Watt's steam engine on a visit to England; Henry then made his own steam engine and in 1763 – two years before Fulton was born – tried putting it in a boat, which sank.
When he came of age, Fulton went to England in 1786 to study painting. There he met James Rumsey who sat for a portrait in the studio of Benjamin West, where Fulton was apprenticing. Rumsey was an inventor from Virginia who ran his first steam boat in Shepherdstown, Virginia (Now West Virginia) in 1786 and repeated his test again on December 3rd 1787. As early as 1793 Fulton proposed plans for steam vessels to both the United States and the British Governments, and in England he met the Duke of Bridgewater, whose canal would shortly be used for trials of a steam tug, and who later ordered steam tugs from William Symington. Symington had successfully tried steamboats in 1788, and it seems probable that Fulton would have been well aware of these developments.
In 1797 Fulton went to France (where the Marquis Claude de Jouffroy had made a working paddle steamer in 1783) and commenced experimenting with submarine torpedoes and torpedo boats. He designed the first practical submarine, Nautilus, commissioned by Napoleon. Nautilus was first tested in 1800.
In that year he met Robert Livingston, United States Ambassador (whose niece he married), and they decided to build a steamboat to try out on the Seine. Fulton experimented with the water resistance of hull shapes, made drawings and models and had a steamboat constructed. At the first trial it sank, but the hull was rebuilt and strengthened, and on August 9, 1803, this boat steamed up the River Seine, watched by a large crowd. The boat was 66 feet (20 m) long, 8 feet (2.4 m) beam and made between 3 and 4 miles an hour (5 and 6 km/h) against the current.
[edit] First commercial steamboat
At about this time Fulton wrote to James Watt of Boulton and Watt, ordering an engine to be built to his plans, and in 1804 he returned to England. In 1802 Symington's Charlotte Dundas had towed two 70 ton barges along the Forth and Clyde Canal, demonstrating the practicality of steam power. Although Fulton probably never saw this boat, he apparently had correspondence with Henry Bell who was taking a keen interest in it. Fulton now worked on torpedo experiments, also corresponding with William Murdoch on the design and technical details of his Boulton & Watt steam engine . When this was completed he had it delivered to New York, sailing there separately himself and arriving at the end of 1806. A suitable hull was built for what would be the first commercially successful Paddle steamer called the "North River Steamboat" by him, but commonly known as the Clermont.
The Clermont' left New York City for Albany, New York on the Hudson River on August 17, 1807, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world. It stopped for 20 hours at the home of his partner, Mr Livingston 110 miles North of New York City. It then continued on to Albany, New York.
Fulton patented his design for a steamboat on February 11, 1809, built more steamboats and designed the first steam powered warship, to be named the Demologos. The keel was laid in 1814, but he did not live to see it completed. It was christened Fulton the First in his honor.
[edit] Later life
The New York legislature granted Fulton the privilege to be the sole provider of all New York steamboat traffic for thirty years. Competition was forbidden by law. Thomas Gibbons, a steamboat entrepreneur, hired Cornelius Vanderbilt to ferry passengers between New York and New Jersey for a cheaper fare in defiance of the law for about six months. In 1824, in Gibbons v. Ogden, the Supreme Court struck down Fulton's government-granted monopoly ruling that states cannot legally regulate interstate commerce. Steamboat fares almost immediately dropped from seven to three dollars after the decision and traffic increased dramatically. Fulton was unable to successfully compete with the low fares offered by Gibbons and Vanderbilt, which resulted in his bankruptcy.
Fulton is accused by Burton W. Folsom, Jr. in The Myth of the Robber Barons of being what he calls a "political entrepreneur" --a businessperson who seeks to gain profit through subsidies, protectionism, government contracts, or other such favorable arrangements with government(s) through political influence rather than competing fairly in the marketplace. He died of pleurisy at the age of 49. Robert Fulton is interred in the Trinity Churchyard Cemetery in Manhattan, New York.
[edit] Memorialization
In 1889, the state of Pennsylvania donated a marble statue of Fulton to the National Statuary Hall Collection in the US Capitol Building.
A wide number of places are named for Robert Fulton, including (but not limited to):
- Fulton Street in Brooklyn
- Fulton Street in Manhattan
- Fulton Street in Alcoa, Tennessee
- Fulton County, Georgia
- Fulton County, Indiana
- Fulton County, Kentucky
- Fulton County, Ohio
- Fulton County, Pennsylvania
- Fulton County, New York
- Fulton, Oswego County, New York
- Fulton, Schoharie County, New York
- Fultonham, Ohio
[edit] Trivia
- Deceased Major League Baseball player Cory Lidle was a descendant of Fulton. [1]
- The first time Fulton proposed the idea of a steam ship to Napoleon, the general's response was "You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? Excuse me, I have no time to listen to such nonsense."
[edit] External links
- Robert Fulton Birthplace
- An article on Fulton and the War of 1812
- A history of the growth of the steam-engine
- William Symington
- A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation, 1796. From the University of Georgia Libraries in DjVu & layered PDF formats.
- A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation 1796. From Rare Book Room.
- CHAPTER XIII: ROBERT FULTON in Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made (1871), by James D. McCabe, Jr., Illustrated by G. F. and E. B. Bensell, a Project Gutenberg eBook.
