James Baquet

    The next lines of our song read, “They all laughed at Whitney and his cotton gin / They all laughed at Fulton and his steamboat...”

    A little over a year ago we discussed Eli Whitney and his cotton gin’s effect on the American economy. Oddly, he was born the same year as our next “object of ridicule,” Robert Fulton (1765-1815), though Whitney died 10 years after Fulton.

    Before the superhighways, and before the development of railways, the “latest transportation craze” of the early 19th century was man-made waterways. England went through a phase called “canal-mania” just about the time that a young American painter and would-be inventor named Robert Fulton resided there. He drew up a pamphlet on canals, and patented a dredging machine, designed for digging the trenches in which canals ran.

    At the time, boats operating on canals were often powered by human or animal effort, including men and mules walking on “tow-paths” next to the canals themselves, pulling them by ropes. Fulton was far from the first to experiment with replacing this brute labor with steam power. One of the more successful was James Watt, whom we’ve also discussed.

    A Frenchman named Marquis Claude de Jouffroy launched the first fully steam-powered ship, the Pyroscaphe, in 1783. The first time it was demonstrated, the engine failed after 15 minutes. It seems to have been repaired, but the French Revolution came along and hindered technological advances in France for a while.

    Fulton kept a close eye on these advancements, even attending the trials of others’ work. After his own trials in France, Fulton returned to America and had a Watt steam engine shipped there. In 1807 he launched the North River Steamboat (later called the Clermont), and transported passengers between New York City and Albany, New York. This was the first commercially successful steamboat — that is, the first to turn a profit.

    Fulton went on to design other successful vessels, including the first steam-driven warship and a hand-cranked submarine, before his early death from tuberculosis at 49.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. scooping out mud, etc.

    2. popular activity

    3. tests, try-outs

    4. a usually fatal lung disease

    5. gained legal protection for

    6. something that is made fun of

    7. propelled by a person turning a handle

    8. temporary stage

    9. held back

    10. long holes dug in the earth