Old Steamboat Days on The Hudson River
By: David Lear Buckman, The Grafton Press, 1907

CHAPTER 1

Robert Fulton

A new distinction was added to the noble Hudson, that of being the first river on which a successful demonstration of steam navigation had been made. There had been previous efforts made both in this country and abroad to apply the steam engine, yet in the infancy of its development, to the navigation of boats, but without practical results.

Fulton himself had made a trial on the Seine, France, in 1808, and failed. The boat was too frail to stand the weight of the engine and boilers and they had broken through the bottom of the craft during an overnight storm and sunk in the river. Others had tried before him. James Rumsey in 1784 on the Potomac sought to propel a boat by forcing a jet of water from the stern with pumps worked by steam. Some of his experiments with the boat were witnessed by General Washington and other officers of the Army, but they were failures.

John Fitch had tried his boats on the Delaware at Philadelphia (1790), and on the Collect Pond, N. Y. (1796), and failed. Elijah Ormsbee, with his “goosefoot” paddles, had attempted the same thing at Pawtucket, R. I. (1792), and John Stevens crossed the river from Hoboken to New York (1804) in a boat fitted with a steam engine of his own construction, but all of these efforts were barren of practical results.

It remained for Fulton to inaugurate on the Hudson the system of navigation that was to revolutionize the carrying trade of the world.

Fulton's Early Years
Robert Fulton was born on a farm in Little Britain, Pa., November 14th, 1765. His father was an Irishman, of Scotch ancestry, however, named Robert Fulton, who settled in Philadelphia and there married Mary Smith, a native of that city. Most of his early education was received in a school at Lancaster, Pa., where the family had removed, presided over by a dignified Quaker. Fulton was not an apt pupil. When not busy with his books, for he was not a lazy scholar, he haunted the shops of the town, as he early manifested an interest in all mechanical matters. A gunsmith’s shop in the village seemed to possess an especial attraction for him and some of his suggestions were even adopted by the workmen. While a boy Fulton made sky rockets for his own amusement, and experiments with mercury and bullets gave him the name of “Quicksilver Bob” among his companions.

He early developed an aptitude for making sketches, and at the age of seventeen, having determined to become an artist, left for Philadelphia to study. His father had been dead several years, but he had been an intimate friend of the father of Benjamin West, who had then become a celebrated painter. It is more than likely that this fact fired young Fulton’s ambition to become an artist. Afterward Fulton met West, the artist, in England and they became fast friends.

In Philadelphia young Fulton painted portraits and landscapes, made drawings of houses and machinery and busied himself so industriously during the four years of his stay in the city, he not only supported himself, but was able to contribute something to his widowed mother at home. He must have made considerable money, for in 1785 he bought a farm at Hopewell, Washington County, Pa., paying eighty pounds sterling for it, and in this homestead he installed his mother and the family.

Fulton, while in Philadelphia, met Benjamin Franklin and many who had become prominent during the Revolution, then just brought to a close. It is quite likely that some of these may have suggested the idea, which he put into effect as soon as he was twenty-one, of making a trip to Europe.

Robert Fulton in Europe
This was a great undertaking in those days and especially for one so young. He carried several letters to Americans abroad from his friends in Philadelphia, and he had already made the acquaintance of Benjamin West by correspondence. West was so pleased with his young countryman, he took him into his own family, where he remained several years. This introduction to the English people by West, then at the height of his fame as an artist, did much for Fulton. He industriously painted portraits and landscapes, which gave him a means for support, but he was constantly making mechanical experiments.

He published a pamphlet on canals, patented a dredging machine and several other inventions, some of which were of great utility.

Fulton went to Paris in 1797, having acquired more fame as an inventor than a painter. There he secured accommodations in a hotel occupied by Joel Barlow, an American citizen, also somewhat of a projector and a man of considerable literary ability. Barlow produced among other works “The Columbiad,” a national epic, which he dedicated “to his friend Robert Fulton.” In Paris, Fulton studied French, German, mathematics and chemistry. The practical result of the application of the two latter studies was that his active mind turned to the production of torpedoes, and of submarine boats from which to fire them, at the hulls of an enemy’s warships.

Fulton's Experiements with Torpedoes and Submarines
He achieved some success with both. He gave an exhibition of his plunging boat in the harbor of Brest before commissioners of the French Admiralty, in 1801, using air stored in a copper globe, condensed to 200 atmospheres, from which he took supplies of fresh air as required. He stayed under water over four hours and was highly pleased with the result of his effort, but he failed to secure any aid from the French Government to develop the invention.

The English Government, always alert to what the French were doing in those days, invited Fulton to come to England with his torpedoes and diving boats. It was, of course, as it had to be, a very circuitous, roundabout sort of invitation, and there were many vexatious delays. When Fulton finally reached London in May, 1805, he found the men who had invited him there, retired from office. Finally, through Pitt’s influence, which had been secured, he blew up an old brig. Dorothea, provided by the Government. The boat had been anchored in Walmer Roads near Deal. Walmer Castle, hard by, was the residence of Pitt, the Prime Minister, and he and a large number of officers in the navy witnessed the torpedo experiment, which was in a way a success, for the old brig was blown to splinters and sank.

A Royal Commission, after considering the matter for a long while, offered Fulton a reward for his trouble and expense if his torpedo system was suppressed, as it was deemed inhuman warfare. He declined promptly and said twenty thousand pounds sterling a year would not tempt him to do so, if the safety and independence of his country should have need of his torpedoes.

Failing to convince the English he resorted to America and induced the United States Government to place an old vessel at his disposal for an experiment. The torpedo machinery did not work right this time and the trial was a failure. Fulton knew why, but explanations did not avail and the Government did not adopt the device.

Modern torpedo warfare has developed along the lines Fulton projected and none of the great maritime nations are now without their torpedo stations and torpedo boats in their navies.

Fulton left a record of his efforts in this field of investigation, entitled “Torpedo War and Submarine Explosions, by Robert Fulton, Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and of the United States Military and Philosophical Society.” The imprint is 1810 and it was issued from the shop of William Elliott at 114 Water street, New York City. It was addressed to President Madison and the Members of both Houses of Congress.

The title page bore the inscription “The Liberty of the Seas will be the Happiness of the Earth.” This, it should be borne in mind, was one hundred years before steam, electricity, compressed air or any of the modern methods of propulsion had been developed to the perfection that makes it feasible to apply them to the present-day submarines. Fulton was called a visionary, when in fact he only prophesied in part, that of which the present generation has an everyday realization.

Fulton's Experiements with Steam
Fulton’s busy mind had not alone been occupied with torpedoes. He had conceived the idea of propelling boats by steam as early as 1793. So had others and many were experimenting. Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, of New York, who thought he had solved the problem in 1798, secured the passage of an act by the New York Legislature, giving him the exclusive right to navigate all kinds of boats which might be propelled by the force of fire or steam on all the waters of the State, for twenty years, provided that within a year he would produce a boat whose progress should not be less than four miles an hour.

Livingston built his boat, but it failed, and he went to France as the United States Minister. In Paris he met his fellow countryman, Fulton, and the two were soon deeply interested in the steamboat proposition. A boat was built and equipped with an engine, on the Seine, in 1803, and came to grief as already stated. The engine and boiler were fished out of the river and put in a boat sixty-six feet long and eight feet beam. She had paddle wheels at the sides and though she moved through the water and was considered wonderful by those who saw her, she was a disappointment to both Fulton and Livingston.

They determined to make another effort with a larger boat to be built in America and to be sailed on the Hudson. Livingston was to supply the money and Fulton to do the work, and it was thus the first successful steamboat came to be built, Fulton returning to New York in 1806 for this purpose.

Livingston, who thus became Fulton’s partner in the development of steam navigation, was one of New York’s most famous men in the early Colonial period. He was a member of the Continental Congress, one of the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, one of the framers of the Constitution of the State of New York, its first Chancellor, administered the first Presidential oath at Washington’s inauguration in New York City and while Minister to France and experimenting with Fulton on steamboats, negotiated the purchase of Louisiana from Napoleon.

He and Fulton became fast friends. Fulton married Harriett, daughter of Walter Livingston, a relative of the Chancellor’s, and when he came to die as he did February 24, 1815, he was buried in the Livingston vault in Trinity Churchyard, New York City. He left his wife, one son and three daughters. For years no monument marked the grave of this distinguished man. It was not until thirty-one years after Fulton’s death that Congress voted something like $76,800, without interest, to reimburse him for the contracts he held at the time of his death with the Government for building the Vesuvius and other vessels of war.

He was about six feet tall, well proportioned, had a face marked with strong features and dark curly hair. He was at all times a gentleman and a most engaging and instructive conversationalist. When at work on one of his projects or inventions he labored with indomitable industry and knew no discouragement, even when failure confronted him. His faith in himself and his inventions made him surmount every difficulty. To him, failures were ever “the stepping-stones to success.”