Before his famous steamboat, Robert Fulton built a submarine for Napoleon
Robert Fulton is celebrated for the first commercially successful steamboat. Years earlier, working in France, he designed Nautilus, a hand-powered submarine that stayed underwater for 17 minutes in 25 feet of water. When the French declined to fund it, he crossed to Britain and built naval mines for the other side.
Born on 14 November 1765, Fulton grew up on a Pennsylvania farm at Little Britain. At around 12 he visited William Henry of Lancaster, who had learned about James Watt's engine in England, and caught an interest in steamboats. He first earned a living as a painter in Philadelphia. In 1786, ill with symptoms of tuberculosis, he sailed for Europe, where the painter Benjamin West took him in and he spent the next twenty years.
In England he was swept up by canal mania. He patented a system of inclined planes to replace locks in 1794, wrote a treatise on canal building in 1796, and was backed by the cotton manufacturer Robert Owen. He also worked for the Duke of Bridgewater, whose canal was hosting trials of a steam tug. Steamboats were not new: Claude de Jouffroy had run a paddle steamer on the Saône in 1783 and John Fitch had tested one on the Delaware in 1787.
In Paris from 1797, Fulton studied languages and mathematics, exhibited the first panorama painting shown in the city, and met Robert R. Livingston, soon to be U.S. ambassador. The two agreed to build a steamboat together. Fulton switched sides in 1804, when Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger commissioned weapons against a feared French invasion, including early naval mines then called torpedoes.
Back in America, he and Livingston launched the North River Steamboat, later called Clermont, in 1807. Mocked during construction as Fulton's Folly, it carried passengers from New York City to Albany and back, about 300 nautical miles, in 62 hours, transforming river trade. In 1808 Fulton married Livingston's niece Harriet. His last design, Demologos, the world's first steam-driven warship, was built for the War of 1812 but finished only after his death. He died in New York in 1815, having fallen ill after soaking himself rescuing a friend who fell through the ice of the frozen Hudson.
Source: Robert Fulton
