Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 7, 2025
That the West and its commerce were always predominant in Fulton's great schemes is proved by words which he addressed in 1803 to James Monroe, American Ambassador to Great Britain: "You have perhaps heard of the success of my experiments for navigating boats by steam engines and you will feel the importance of establishing such boats on the Mississippi and other rivers of the United States as soon as possible."
At the same time an American jeweller and portrait-painter by the name of Robert Fulton was in Paris, trying to convince Napoleon that with the use of his submarine boat, the "Nautilus," and his "steam-boat," the French might be able to destroy the naval supremacy of England. Fulton's idea of a steamboat was not original.
Fulton's steamboat of just a century ago was in a certain true sense the ancestor of the "Lusitania," with its deep keel and screw propellers, of the side-wheel steamship for river and harbor traffic like the "Priscilla," of the stern-wheel flat-bottom boats of the Mississippi, and of the battleship, and the tug boat.
So far as I am concerned, Lucy Fulton's dance was a great success, from the arrival of the first guest. I was the first guest. We had a whole dance to ourselves while Evelyn was busy with the telephone and before the second guest arrived. In all her life Lucy had never looked more animated or more lovely.
His appearance there was certainly quite unexpected, but as I glanced at Ambler I saw a look of triumph in his face. We were sitting at the back of the hall, and I knew that Sir Bernard, being short-sighted, could not recognise us at the distance. "I am here at Doctor Fulton's invitation to meet our great master, Professor Deboutin, of whom for many years I have been a follower."
Fulton's affairs were printed, but even here little could be learned save the mere fact of the letter of instructions, upon which they had acted according to directions, and the other fact that there still remained one more packet understood to be the last will and testament to be opened in two years' time if Mr. Fulton remained unheard from.
The compound engine, which has been so developed that in place of Fulton's seven miles an hour, our ocean steamships are driven now at a speed sometimes closely approaching twenty-five miles an hour, seems already destined to give way to the turbine form of engine which, applied thus far to torpedo-boats only, has made a record of forty-four miles an hour.
A small loan to the State of New York, from surplus funds, might have opened the Erie and Champlain Canals twenty years in advance of their completion. A little aid to men of genius might have placed Fulton's steamers, then navigating the Hudson, on the Lakes. A dozen frigates to cruise in the Gulf of St. Lawrence would have cut off supplies from England.
Like claims to priority in many other inventions, this one is strenuously contested. Two years before Fulton's "Clermont" appeared on the Hudson, John Stevens, of Hoboken, built a steamboat propelled by a screw, the model of which is still in the Stevens Polytechnic Institute.
The first successful steamboat for commerce was, as is well known, Robert Fulton's flat-bottomed side-wheeler Clermont, which in August, 1807, made the 150 miles from New York to Albany in 32 hours. During the war of 1812 Fulton designed for coast defense a heavily timbered, double-ender floating battery, with a single paddle-wheel located inside amidships.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking