On a warm August day in 1807 a large crowd of people lined the banks of the Hudson River not far from where I am now speaking. They had been told they would see the first trip of a boat without sails. And the skeptics, as usual, were there laughing at the strange looking craft, and ridiculing the idea it could move without sails or oars.

     But presently smoke began to pour from the stack and the catcalls and ridicule changed to cheers as the weird looking boat moved slowly up the river. Robert Fulton, that day, successfully accomplished something that Fate rarely permits an inventor to do - he proved his idea was practical and at the same time opened up a large part of America to pioneers and settlers.

     Robert Fulton did not begin his career as an inventor; very few men ever do. Although in his youth in Lancaster, Pennsylvania he exhibited considerable mechanical ingenuity, his ambition was to become an artist like another Pennsylvanian, Benjamin West. West was the great American painter who later became president of the Royal Academy of England. So, at seventeen, Fulton went to Philadelphia to study painting. Benjamin Franklin helped him and very soon he earned a reputation as a painter of portraits and landscapes. He could also make excellent drawings of machinery, bridges and buildings.