Robert Fulton

By Lin Yue

Robert Fulton was born in 1765 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the son of an Irish immigrant farmer, and like Morse he began as a painter — miniature portraits in Philadelphia, then London, where he abandoned art for engineering and fell under the spell of the steam engine. In Paris he built a submarine, the Nautilus, and tried to sell it to Napoleon and then to the British Admiralty; both declined. What he carried back to America in 1806 was a conviction: steam navigation was the future, but only if it paid. John Fitch had built a working steamboat in 1787 and died broke; the graveyard of steamboat inventors was crowded. Fulton partnered with Robert Livingston, the wealthy diplomat who held a New York monopoly on steam navigation, and with Boulton & Watt, who built him a proper engine in Birmingham and shipped it across the Atlantic.

The North River Steamboat — the world would call it the Clermont — made its proving run in August 1807: 150 miles from New York to Albany, up the Hudson, in 32 hours, against wind and current, carrying paying passengers. It was not the first steamboat. It was the first one that worked reliably, on schedule, at a profit — and profit is what spreads a technology. Within five years Fulton and Livingston had a fleet on the Hudson; within a decade, steamboats were running on every navigable river in America. Fulton went on to design steam warships and torpedoes, and died in 1815 in New York at forty-nine, exhausted by lawsuits defending his monopoly.

The steamboat's reign was glorious and brief — the railways would take the passengers, the screw propeller and iron hull the oceans. But for half a century the riverboat was America's highway: it opened the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Missouri to two-way commerce, carrying cotton down and manufactured goods up, and made the continental interior economically part of the nation. Fulton proved that steam belonged on water as well as land, and the proof floated. The Clermont's numbers tell the business: 150 tons, a Boulton & Watt engine of 24 horsepower, paddle wheels fifteen feet across, the New York–Albany run done at a steady five miles an hour upstream. Livingston's monopoly — granted by New York State and defended in court all the way to Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824 — gave Fulton the protected market a new technology needs, and the Supreme Court's eventual demolition of the monopoly opened the rivers to everyone. Fulton never stopped inventing at the edge of the plausible: the Nautilus submarine, steam warships with cannon that could fire underwater, torpedoes he called 'torpedoes' before the word meant what it does. He died of pneumonia at forty-nine, worn out by litigation and work, and New York buried him with the honors of a founder.

Impact on civilization

The commercial steamboat turned America's rivers from one-way streams into two-way highways. Before Fulton, freight floated down the Mississippi on flatboats that were broken up for lumber at New Orleans — the return trip was a walk. After him, steamboats powered upstream against the current, and the interior's grain, cotton, and timber could reach the sea while manufactured goods flowed back up: the river system became a circulatory system for a continental economy. River towns — Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, New Orleans — boomed into cities on steamboat trade; the West was settled and supplied by water. The steamboat also carried the darker freight of the age: it was the engine of the cotton economy's expansion up the Mississippi, binding slavery's geography to steam's schedule. Technologically, Fulton proved marine steam power commercially viable, the necessary rehearsal for the ocean steamship. The riverboat era ended, but it had done its work: it made the American interior one economy.