Books - Robert Fulton Steamboats

None of the well-dressed crowd that gathered on the Hudson River side of Lower Manhattan on the hot afternoon of August 17, 1808, could have known the importance of the object they had come to see and, mostly, deride: Robert Fulton's new steamboat, the North River, the boat that is frequently -- and wrongly -- remembered as the Clermont. But, as Kirkpatrick Sale shows in this remarkable biography of Fulton, the North River's successful four-day round-trip to Albany proved a technology that would transform nineteenth-century America, open up the interior to huge waves of settlers, create and sustain industrial and plantation economies in the nation's heartland, and destroy the remaining Indian civilizations and most of the wild lands on which they depended. The North River's four-day trip introduced the machines and culture that marked the birth of the Industrial Revolution in America.

The Fire of His Genius tells the story of the extraordinarily driven and ambitious inventor who brought all this about, probing into the undoubted genius of his mind but, too, laying bare the darker side of the man -- and the darker side of the American dream that inspired him. It depicts one of America's earliest heroes both at the pinnacle of creativity and success, fame, and fortune and in the depths of solitude, recklessness, and contentiousness that preceded his early death (Fulton spent much of his life defending patents for everything from rope-making machinery to submarines to proto-torpedoes that he attempted to sell, in succession, to the French, the British, and the American navies). All this is set against a brilliant portrait of a dynamic historical period filled with characters from Bonaparte to Jefferson, Cornelius Vanderbilt to Meriwether Lewis, Robert Livingston to Benjamin West, and events from the Lewis and Clark expedition to the War of 1812, the Louisiana Purchase to the bombing of Fort McHenry, the treasontrial of Aaron Burr to the "Great Removal" of American Indians. Here are the "taming" of America's rivers and the building of its great canals, the introduction to every body of water of Fulton's "large, noisy, showy, fast, brash, exciting, powerful, and audacious" machine that was the very embodiment of America. A biography that bears comparison to the best work of David McCullough, Dava Sobel, and Garry Wills, The Fire of His Genius is a remarkable achievement: an extraordinarily clear window into an extraordinary time told with deftness, zest, and unflagging verve.

Amazon.com Review:
Robert Fulton is often enshrined in American history texts as the inventor of the steamship. He did no such thing, as Kirkpatrick Sale is quick to point out, but that does not detract from his genuine accomplishments as an entrepreneur and technician.

Born in 1765 into a poor family on the Pennsylvania frontier, Fulton showed an early aptitude for working with machinery of all kinds, as well as an all-consuming drive to avoid his father's poverty. As a young man he contrived useful inventions at an astonishing rate, a marble-cutting saw here, a canal-digging engine there; he also cultivated friendships and connections with influential men on both sides of the Atlantic, and soon he was doing business with the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon Bonaparte (to whom he sold a prototype submarine, the Nautilus). Fulton's most lasting accomplishment, however, may have been to develop a steamboat fleet that dependably plied the waters in and around New York and eventually extended to rivers in the western interior, providing "a tool by which the dominant commercial interests could extend their reach and power, by which the reigning political forces could communicate and consolidate their influence, by which a restless people could penetrate new lands and develop new industries."

Sale, who has written several books that take modern technology to task, considers Fulton's legacy to be mixed: his steamship line helped enable the settlement of the frontier, but also the destruction of American Indian nations, and it "served to sanction and encourage the domination of technology itself in American society." His critique may not sway all readers, but his well-written life of Robert Fulton will be of interest to students of economic history, transportation history, and early America alike. --Gregory McNamee



Customer Review: Striking a balance:
In the 100 years after Robert Fulton's death in 1815, biographers produced several accounts of his life. All were largely admiring of his far-reaching achievements, mechanical and intellectual, one to the point of obsequiousness (Thurston, 1878). ( See www.history.rochester.edu/steam for two of them, Thurston and Dickinson, 1913.) Then, after a gap of 60 years, Cynthia Philip provided a different picture of Fulton in "Robert Fulton: A Biography" (1985), which dealt in far greater depth and detail with his personal and business life -- and that paints a picture of a promoter who engages in double-dealing, industrial blackmail and even treason. For the thoroughness of its biographical research, Philip's is the essential Fulton biography now extant. It was followed 15 or so years later by Kirkpatrick Sale's shorter and less formal account ("The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream," 2001), which sought to put Fulton's accomplishments in a broader perspective and so shifted the balance back somewhat toward the positive. But not a lot, since the narrative essentially reflects Philip's account.
The evolution of the view of Fulton is understandable: To the 19th Century, his achievements were real and palpable; the use of steam power to move people and goods revolutionized transportation and opened the American West (then comprising the land over the Alleghenies), as Kirkpatrick notes; its impact was as great, if less obviously, in a myriad other applications as well. But to the late 20th Century, all those developments are taken for granted or are long forgotten: Steam locomotives no longer move Americans; airplanes do. So today, there's far more room to examine Fulton's life critically.
But there's a cost to lost context. The weakness of both Philip's and Sale's accounts is that they are biography, not history: They offer too little perspective to evaluate Fulton personal peccadilloes or intellectual contributions. Was his towering drive to enrich himself and benefit mankind an individual trait, or was it a motivation shared by ambitious men of the age? Were his erratic business relationships a personal fault, or did they reflect the conduct of entrepreneurship of the times? Were his calculations of the benefits of canal construction (an early Fulton passion) a sign of his genius or a common device of canal promoters? Without that kind of background, it's hard for the reader to sort out whether Robert Fulton was really the scoundrel he sometimes seems in the modern biographies or the unequivocal benefactor to mankind of an earlier era that 19th Century biographers depict.

Customer Review: Probably the best work on Fulton to date:
It does seem odd that the Secretary of the socialistic and luddite E. F. Schumaker Society would produce the best work to date on one of America's pioneering industrialists, but Kirkpatrick Sale is, first and foremost, and excellent historian. His first work of note, "SDS", was a brilliantly detailed work, and although Sale's sympathies were clearly with the founding members of SDS, he never let that prevent him from telling all the truth as he saw it.

And so it is with "The Fire of His Genius". Sale goes back to original documents to present the real Fulton, a rich and complex character, and to clear up a number of errors that have crept into the popular histories, such as the claim that Fulton's boat was named the "Claremount". (It was in fact called the North River Boat, after the popular name for the stretch of the Hudson it operated on).

Sale goes into some detail on Fulton's finacing, his relationships with friends and backers (some real surprises here) and his various dealings with governments. The picture that emerges is of an egocentric, but talented entrepeneur, less engineer than salesman, who nonetheless was instrumental in creating the technology of riverboat navigation that was instrumental in opening up commerce and trade throughout the expanding United States in the Nineteenth Century. All in all, excellent history and entertaining reading.

Customer Review: Fulton and America:
This slim volume (only 250-odd pages) is perhaps more informative than most biographies of Robert Fulton. Author Kirkpatrick Sale has done a marvelous job, in "The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream", of capturing the brilliance and the importance of Fulton's vision. Robert Fulton did not invent the steamboat but he did know how to perfect and sell it. This young man led an incredibly full and active life, considering how young he was when he died.

But "The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream" also differs from other works on Fulton because of the second half of the subtitle: Fulton's influence on America. Much has been made of the New York City that Fulton lived in, and how his work would be part of that city's transformation from a major city in America to an international cosmopolis. (The creation of the Erie Canal in 1820 would really propel that metamorphosis.) But Sale's book also looks beyond the borders of the East and North (or Hudson) Rivers. It takes a long hard look at the westward spreading nation that needed new forms of transportation and a new navy. How Fulton was inextricably wrapped in both concerns is a major component of this very readable book. It helps complete the picture of an era of American History--and of a great American like Robert Fulton--that sorely needed investigation. We are all indebted to Kirkpatrick Sale for this scholarly examination.

Customer Review: A FULL HEAD OF STEAM:
Today with jet passenger aircraft crisscrossing the country, with nuclear powdered naval craft sailing for months without refueling, and with cruise ships carrying more passengers than the populations of some American Colonial villages, Robert Fulton and the first practical steamboat is largely forgotten. However, the author, Kirkpatrick Sale, states "....the steamboat would be the single most important instrument in the transformation of America in the first half of the nineteenth century: it promoted the penetration and settlement of the American interior...." The text narrates Fulton's life placing him in proper historical context.

Chapter 1 is an account of the very successful August 1807 maiden voyage of the Fulton's steamboat, North River (erroneously called the Claremont in textbooks), from New York to Albany and return. Following this successful trip, Fulton initiated regular steamboat service on the Hudson from New York to Albany which ceased only when the Hudson River froze. While not the inventor of the steamboat, Fulton was successful because he built the North River "on sound engineering principles and scientific techniques."

The text states that little is known about Fulton's early life, He was born on a farm in 1765 in Pennsylvania to Irish immigrant parents. He developed a strong drive to avoid his father's poverty, and in his mid-teens he moved alone to Philadelphia and was apprenticed to a jeweler. In 1787 he arrived in London (source of funds unknown) for further art study under Benjamin West. It was a difficult time for would-be artists and in 1793 he began devolving into engineering concentrating first on canals. He conceived many inventions such as a marble-cutting saw, a canal-digging engine, prefabricated iron bridges, etc. In 1797 he went to France. Sale gives an intriguing account of Fulton's attempt to sell a submarine and mines (Fulton called them torpedoes) first to Napoleon in France; then later to England when he was rejected by France. Amazingly Fulton tried unsuccessfully to blackmail both countries by threatening to reveal his work to their enemies.

In Paris in 1802 Fulton met Robert Livingston who wanted to build and operate a steamboat on the Hudson River. A partnership was formed and Fulton was obligated to build a steamboat to ply the Hudson; however, the author notes "Fulton knew from the outset that it would be on the Mississippi and its major tributaries that the steamboat would have its most consequential impact...." In 1803 he conducted a successful trial run of a prototype steamboat on the Seine, and in December 1806 Fulton returned to America where in 1807 Fulton's commercially successful North River began operations. The book gives a good account of how Fulton and Livingston with state granted monopolies developed steamboat traffic on the Hudson and Mississippi Rivers plus steam ferries to New Jersey. Incredibly, in 1808-09, he lobbied for his torpedoes in Washington.

For the 1808 season, Fulton refurbished the North River "offering accommodations of some taste and luxuriousness" rather than the somewhat spartan 1807 conditions. Later steamboats would continue this luxurious accommodation pattern. By early 1813, he had six steamboats at work and six more ready to launch.
The author notes "Steamboating was too obviously lucrative an enterprise-everyone of Fulton's boats was making money, some robustly so-not to attract any craftsman or entrepreneur who could find a source of modest capital and a machine shop with a few experience hands. By 1814 at least a dozen other men had launched vessels of their own...." Fulton and Livingston would spend the last years of their lives defending their monopolies with Fulton carrying on alone after Livingston's death in 1813. When Fulton died in 1815 his monopolies were essentially ended. Strangely, until the end of his life, his passion was his weapons of war, none of which were successful, rather than the steamboat.

The book's last chapter, titled Legacies, is most interesting as it outlines the history of the steamboat after Fulton's death noting that the steamboat was central to drawing people to middle America. Mark Twain wrote "The 19th Century began the most prolific age of invention, bringing into our daily life the convenience of machines which were recently unknown but in our dreams. At the beginning of that period of material progress stands the name of Robert Fulton." The author notes sadly on page 176 "No lasting monuments, not even a gravestone, were erected [to Robert Fulton] until 1901 when the American Society of Mechanical Engineers put up a bronze plaque on a squat column along the south wall of Trinity churchyard."

The book's closing sentence states "And none who ever rode its throbbing decks, or watched its majestic motility on the water, ever failed to realize that it was this the symbol, as it was for many years the agency, of the American dream."

Customer Review: pre-industrial genius:
What stands out to me in this biography are his early years as a portrait painter in England; the attempts to sell his inventions, the submarine and his mines, to Napoleon and later to the British, for profit; the erotic tryst he had with his friends the Barlows in Paris; his later attempts to maintain his patents on his steamboats on the Hudson and in New Jersey ,which he operated for his own profit, against competition; and the surrounding American history, which included the Lousiana Purchase and the Lewis & Clark expedition. Fulton was a true American entrepreneur who died at a premature age, burned out by his efforts. The final chapter on his legacy to the commerce of the American heartland, the effects of which took place largely after his death, is also very impressive.

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