Dedicated to Preservation the Maritime History of the Hudson River Valley
One Rondout Landing, Kingston, NY 12401
THE FIRE OF HIS GENIUS
Robert Fulton and the American Dream
Introduction
Although the idea of a boat propelled by steam
was suggested in Europe as early as the seventeenth century,
and experimental steamboats had been tried at various times in
Britain, France, Italy, and Germany in the eighteenth century, it
was almost inevitable that the first successful and protracted
steamboat operation should take place in America. Not that the
United States in the early nineteenth century was particularly
well endowed with workshops of mechanical sophistication or
trained artisans to run them, certainly by comparison with
Britain. But unlike Europe, it had the greatest need for, and
clearest benefits from, a system of transportation that would
take advantage of the numerous long rivers of the continent
and overcome the difficulties of too few roads, too many mountains, and great distances to travel—and though necessity is not
always the mother of invention, it is without doubt a forceful
midwife. America was special, too, in having a long tradition,
also stemming from necessity, of practical problem-solving and
technical ingenuity, substituting local and native methods and
materials for foreign ones unavailable or prohibitive.That is why steamboat experiments in Europe, even when they showed considerable promise (as, for example, a steampowered tugboat that pulled two barges on a Scottish canal in 1803), were never capitalized on, never developed into fullfledged activities. And why, for more than twenty years, a good many American inventors and entrepreneurs worked steadily to surmount the considerable obstacles posed by putting a large and heavy steam engine onto a floating wooden frame and figuring out some method of propulsion to allow it to deft the winds and tides. And why eventually, in the summer of 1807, one quintessential American finally assembled a machine that solved these problems and began the first successful commercial steamboat operation in history, establishing a system of transportation that permitted humankind to surmount forces of nature that had impeded it since the dawn of time.
Fittingly, the steamboat became the emblematic image of the American industrial culture that it was launching, as the steam factory was of Britain’s. Not only did it show off the characteristics of what was even then the American stereotype—large, noisy, showy, fast, brash, exciting, powerful, and audacious—and with an impact that made it an icon of American society soon recognizable anywhere in the world. More than that: in its creation as in its operation, first on the Hudson and then throughout most American waterways, it revealed in a remarkable way the American dream itself, as that dream had taken shape in the early settlement and colonization of the vast new continent and as it had burst forth, just eighteen years before, with a new and energetic republic proclaiming its unique status and mission to the world.
Much went into that dream, to be sure, but its basic tenets included these: the pursuit of happiness through material betterment, Yankee know-how in service to technological improvement, a belief in human perfectibility and individual achievement, a national destiny of expansion and conquest, and a government formed to advance industry and promote prosperity. These were the principles embodied in the steamboat from the start, inherent as it were in its very purpose, and they stood behind its improvement and expansion as the dominant mode of transportation in America for more than half a century, the technology that above all produced the thriving and expansive commerce of the Eastern seaboard and the swift and thorough development of the continental interior. And they were, perhaps necessarily, the principles that guided the man responsible for the success of the steamboat, whose life story was in its way the prototypical carrying out of the American rags-to-riches, by-his-bootstraps success story at the heart of that dream.
But there is another, darker side to the American dream, a tragic defect that seems to be woven into its design, that this man’s life also reveals, suggested in a eulogy by one of his friends when he came so suddenly to his end: “Like the selfburning tree of Gambia, he was destroyed by the fire of his own genius and the never-ceasing activity of a vigorous mind? Genius there certainly was, of a singular kind, but it is the selfdestruction that is so striking and poignant here, because it, too, seems all too often to characterize the national dream, the almost inescapable tragedy that befalls those whose devotion to material improvement and individual empowerment is so all-encompassing that even when they achieve the success to which they have devoted their lives, they find themselves, and often those around them, consumed in the task. It is as if a kind of larger retributive force exists to assess the costs that those lives have exacted from the social and natural environments and to pass a judgment that the attainment of selfaggrandizement by exploitation and consumption comes at a considerable price and cannot be sustained.
The story that follows, then, is one act in the drama of the American dream in all its complexity, but one that helps us see clearly the ideas and ideals, the fates and forces, that have shaped this country from the beginning. Steam technology, of course, is largely gone, supplanted by gasoline, and electricity, and the silicon chip. The American dream, however, is still very much alive. It guides the nation still.