Late great engineers: Robert Fulton - renaissance man of engineering

‘Not everyone admired Robert Fulton’, writes an anonymous obituarist decades, possibly centuries, after his death. Warming to the task, the writer tells us that ‘many considered him, at best, a consummate opportunist’. We’re reminded that, just as Henry Ford did not invent the automobile nor Samuel Morse the telegraph, neither did Fulton invent the steamship: ‘But like Morse and Ford, Fulton used his insight and energy to turn a challenge of engineering into a large-scale commercial success, thereby transforming thew world’. Built in 1807, Fulton’s Clermont (or North River Steamboat) proved the viability of steam propulsion for commercial water transportation. Under the commission of the then First Consul of the French Republic Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1801 the ‘consummate opportunist’ delivered his ‘plunging boat’ Nautilus – the first submarine; testing of which was carried out beneath the surface of the River Seine at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

Robert Fulton was born in 1765 in the township Little Britain, Pennsylvania in 1765 in a house on the site of what is now 1932 Robert Fulton Highway. With its military connections, the Fulton family was relatively prosperous, and at the age of eight young Robert attended the local Quaker school. Following the death of his father in 1774 and the subsequent loss of the family farm due to mortgage foreclosure, he spent the rest of his adolescence under the shadow of the American Revolutionary War (1775-83), during which time he fades from the record. After the war, we know he moved to the culturally and politically reverberant Philadelphia, where he spent several years as a miniature portrait artist (as well as an apprentice in a jewellery shop), which generated enough money to partially restore the family finances and settle his widowed mother on another farm.