The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream - Couverture rigide

Chapter 1: The North River

Monday, August 17, 1807, was another hot summer day in New York City, and most of the women of fashion on the pier, arms linked to laced and ruffled gentlemen, had their little pastel parasols up against the sun. It was not their custom to parade out in midday on a Monday, certainly not two miles uptown from the stylish promenades of Broadway, but they were here on the Hudson shore just by the little village of Greenwich, almost within the shadow of the imposing stone walls of the new state prison, because so much excitement had been stirred up in the city lately by the prospect of Mr. Fulton's strange and improbable boat today making its planned maiden voyage to Albany.

Interest was particularly high since the thing had successfully and dramatically puffed and roared its way here around the tip of Manhattan the day before, in clouds of smoke and spangles of sparks, its bizarre paddles churning at the sides, on view for the crowds that typically filled the tree-lined walks of the Battery park on a Sunday. Higher still because it was widely held that the whole outlandish contraption was likely to explode in a exhibition that would rival the fireworks of the annual Evacuation Day proceedings -- the grandest of any, since it celebrated the British departure from the city, in a calendar full of pyrotechnics.

No doubt some in that crowd had also been present just a few weeks earlier, on July 20, when the energetic -- and most inventive -- Mr. Fulton had put on something of a show of a different kind for the Battery audience, at least for those willing to stay past that afternoon's dinner hour. On that day he had promised a demonstration of a new device he called a "torpedo" -- the name taken from the torpedo fish, or electric ray -- that, he said, by moving silently along the water's surface would evade detection and then be carried by the tide to hit and explode into the side of any enemy ship, thereby making New York's harbor invincible and rendering naval warfare virtually obsolete. He had not, in truth, had very much success with this invention in Europe, where he had spent years trying to convince first the French and then the British of its utility, but he had recently managed to persuade the similarly inventive Thomas Jefferson, then in the fullness of his second term, to sponsor this experiment in New York harbor and to dispatch some senior naval advisors up to observe it.

Somewhere Fulton had dug up a decrepit old 200-ton brig and caused it to be towed to a point between Governors and Ellis islands, in full view of a shoreline crowd of several thousand. The turnout was so sizable because, as was explained by a young writer named Washington Irving, describing the "blow up" in the occasional magazine Salmagundi he had started in January of that year, "it was the first naval action ever exhibited in our port; and the good people all crowded to see the British navy blown up in effigy."

In the event, however, they were somewhat disappointed. The first two bombs just floated there, harmless, and another pair exploded, but a hundred yards from the ship -- as Irving noted, "the brig most obstinately refused to be decomposed." Long minutes passed as the afternoon waned, and "the dinners grew cold, and the puddings were overboiled, throughout the renowned city of Gotham," where, as throughout the new nation, the main meal of the day was generally eaten around two or three P.M. "All returned home, after having threatened to pull down the flag-staff by way of taking satisfaction for their disappointment."

Not quite all. Fulton and his crew remained, along with some of the more rakish elements who wanted the last laugh, and a third attempt was made, this time with mines directed close enough so that the brig became an easy, not to say charitable, target. At last, on toward seven o'clock, the recalcitrant new invention worked, the ship exploded in a satisfying shower of sparks and flames, and Fulton had his triumph, belated though it may have been. "It was rent in two and went to the bottom in 20 seconds," the inventor reported proudly afterward, thus proving "the practicability of destroying vessels by this means."

Of course, it seemed to have some limitations militarily, as was pointed out by one of Irving's friends, a certain Ichabod Fungus, who had stayed for the whole show: "Observe, sir, all that's necessary is that the ships must come to anchor in a convenient place -- watch must be asleep, or so complacent as not to disturb the boats paddling about them -- fair wind and tide -- no moonlight -- machines well-directed -- mustn't flash in the pan -- bang's the word, and the vessel's blown up in a moment." It did seem to demand, he felt, some measure of cooperation from the enemy ship in order to work.

Fulton was not dismayed. His torpedo project had been dear to his heart for years, and he would continue to press the American government for support, certain that with its success the world would gain the complete freedom of the seas and the benefits of untrammeled commerce. As for New Yorkers, though, the demonstration simply served to suggest that the new breed of inventors springing up around town -- "surely never was a town more subject to mid-summer fancies and dog-day whims," Irving reported, than "this most excellent of cities" -- was not quite as ingenious as it claimed to be. And for some to suggest in fact that Mr. Fulton's other project, his infernal steam-powered machine to ply the Hudson, was likely to prove as ridiculous a failure, and most probably end in the same sort of conflagration.

*

New York City in the year 1807 was a place of some 83,000 people, 1,776 of them slaves, clustered into less than a square mile at the foot of Manhattan Island. Shipping, and the commerce it transmitted, was the city's life -- for, as James Fenimore Cooper was to attest a few years later, "Nature herself intended the isle of Manhattan for the site of one of the greatest commercial towns of the world," giving it "a vast harbour, an unusually extensive natural basin, with two outlets to the sea, and a river that, in itself, might contain all the shipping of the earth." Which is why even then New York was surpassing the long-established ports of Philadelphia and Boston to become the most important entrepôt of the new nation, with exports of $16.4 million, more than five times what they had been just four years earlier.

The wharves themselves (here called "slips"), which stuck out into the harbor like little beckoning fingers all around the tip of the island -- for two miles along the East River, a mile along the Hudson -- were centers of hivelike intensity throughout the day, every day but Sunday. "All was noise and bustle," wrote an English visitor that year. "Everything was in motion; all was life, bustle and activity. The people were scampering in all directions to trade with each other." Bales and barrels, hogsheads and chests, boxes and cases and amorphous packages were piled everywhere on the docks. The sound of axes and hammers, the ringing of blacksmith anvils, the cries of sailors and stevedores, merchants and hawkers, were in the air. "Every thought, word, look, and action of the multitude seemed to be absorbed by commerce; the welkin rang with its busy hum, and all were eager in the pursuit of its riches."

Commerce there was in Baltimore and Boston, in Charleston and Philadelphia, but nowhere was it so much the culture, the oxygen, of the city as it was in New York. Nowhere else was it the prevailing talk of the pubs and taverns (about 1,400 of them in 1807, of which 160 were licensed for "strong drink"), the street corners and promenades, the parties and balls, and nowhere else was there the tumultuous three-story brick building at the corner of Wall Street and Water that housed the Tontine Coffee House, America's stock exchange, where from late morning to dinnertime every weekday, inside the noisy rooms gray with cigar smoke and outside on the capacious railed porch, deals of every kind could be made. Only in New York, "the great mart of the western hemisphere" as young Cooper saw it, a place where "exchanges can be regulated, loans effected, cargoes vended in gross, and all other things connected with trade, transacted on a scale commensurate to the magnitude of the interests involved in its pursuits."

On any given day the city would be surrounded with masts, a bare forest of spikes poking up from the slips, as tall as the roofs of the downtown buildings, and the harbor would be full of schooners and sloops and brigs, sails billowing, freighted down and riding low in the water, back and forth past the harbormaster's offices on Staten Island. Some made good speed -- the faster ships could sail in seven or eight weeks from New York to London, and about fifty hours from New York to Albany if the winds were strong and the weather fair -- but imagine what realms of commerce might be opened if those times could be cut by a half, or more, and with a vessel that would move at a steady pace without regard to the variable elements.

Imagine what might be opened if the powerful engine recently perfected by Mr. Watt, in England, could finally be installed on the right kind of boat, with the right kind of propulsion, with the right kind of technologist to oversee it.

*

It is hard to know where the memorably derisive phrase "Fulton's Folly" originated, but the primary biographers agree that it was in the air in the weeks before the initial launch. Clearly some such sentiment was prevalent in the town, as even Fulton knew, for in a later account he said:

As I had occasion to pass daily to and from the building-yard, while my boat was in progress, I have often loitered unknown near the idle groups of strangers, gathering in little circles, and heard various inquiries as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, or sneer, or ridicule. The loud laugh often rose at my expense; the dry jest; the wise calculation of losses and expenditures; the dull, but endless, repetition of the Fulton folly. Never did a single encouraging remark, a bright hope, or a warm wish, cross my path.

Certainly the appearance of the boat, riding there in the Hudson off Greenwich village, gave no reason for optimism. It was awkwardly long and thin -- 142 feet by 14 feet, capable of fitting very neatly into one of the narrower streets of lower Manhattan from corner to corner and curb to curb -- and looked more like a scow than the stately sailboats that filled the harbor. It was flat-bottomed and square-sided, straight across at the stern and gently rounded at the bow, with a deck only a few feet from the water's surface. In the middle -- nakedly open on this first, experimental craft, but with many parts later decked over -- were a large copper boiler with a fifteen-foot smokestack, a large upright cylinder that was the steam engine itself, and an assemblage of levers and rods and cogs and wheels whose purpose seemed entirely unfathomable. On each side, about three-quarters of the way along the craft, were two fifteen-foot circular wooden paddlewheels, unhoused and liable to splash any passengers nearby, and at each end were large oak masts rigged for sails, as if the inventor was not quite sure his elaborate steam gadgetry would work and had decided to hedge his bets. "She was a queer-looking craft," one eyewitness wrote, in something of an understatement, "and like everything new excited much attention, and not a little ridicule."

And, to be sure, some fear. It is doubtful that any in the fashionable crowd of several hundred gathered to see the launch would have known much about the previous experiments in steam propulsion that had taken place on both sides of the Atlantic for better than thirty years, or would have known that, though all of the boats had eventually failed in one way or another, none of them had been destroyed by explosion. It was enough to watch the black smoke belching steadily from the smokestack when Fulton fired up the boiler about midday, and see the splash of sparks carried in the breeze whenever the fire was stoked, to believe that the whole affair might well burst into flames at any minute.

Of course, the very idea of an engine run by steam was an extraordinary one -- and reasonably frightening -- at this point, for that upheaval known as the Industrial Revolution, with its everyday intrusion of steam power, had yet to descend upon America. A half-dozen steam engines did exist in the new land, some based on James Watt's ingenious machines in Britain, others fashioned to homespun designs with more or less success, and one had been used to raise water in lower Manhattan itself for some years; but to most people the device was both foreign and mysterious, and, as Fulton himself put it, "how true it was that fear frequently arose from ignorance." Americans still did not appreciate the potential of harnessing a source of power essentially independent of the forces of nature -- technology free of the limits of geography or season or weather, of sun or wind or water, of either human or animal labor -- and it would not be until the implications of this actual boat-with-steam-engine were made manifest over the next few years that steam would begin to transform the American economy, and the steamboat usher in the American Industrial Revolution. And so this peculiar floating implementarium tended to cause more consternation than appreciation, and it is not hard to see how one among these early onlookers could describe it as "a monster moving on the waters defying the winds and tide, and breathing flames and smoke."

Even some among the select crowd that Robert Fulton had invited along for the maiden voyage were apparently fearful, as much as they had mustered the nerve to be there, and Fulton felt their anxiety as he moved among them. A striking presence, agile and healthy at forty-one, he was six feet tall (four inches above the average stature of the time), with a handsome face marked by a prominent though shapely nose, piercing dark eyes under heavy brows, and sideburns full to his earlobes in the fashion of the day; he was probably wearing an open dark cutaway coat and trousers, with a loosely tied white cravat, his normal costume. He was mainly preoccupied with directing his small crew -- Davis Hunt, the captain; Andrew Brinck, his assistant; George Jackson and Charles Dyck, the engineers; and presumably a steward or two to serve the wine and brandy he had put aboard -- but he was attentive to the three dozen guests gathered toward the stern, and their mood.

Many of the passengers were relatives and friends of his partner in the steamboat venture, the rich and well-connected Robert R. Livingston, nineteen years Fulton's senior and former chancellor of the New York State equity court (and called "Chancellor" to distinguish him from the rest of the numerous Livingston clan), recently returned from his stint as special minister to France, where he had helped negotiate the amazing windfall treaty that had more than doubled the size of the United States, the Louisiana Purchase. Chancellor Livingston had invited a good many of his family, some quite giddy at the opportunity ("Cousin Chancellor has a wonderful new boat," one cousin had gushed, that "will be something to remember all our lives"), and others convinced the scheme was daffy ("Bob has had many a bee in his bonnet before now," the Chancellor's brother John is reported to have said, "but this steam folly will prove the worst yet").

We know particularly about Fulton's assessment of the assemblage because he later noted, with some asperity, that, "in the moments before the word was to be given ...

None of the spectators who gathered on the Hudson River shore on August 17, 1808, could have known the importance of the object they had come to see and, mostly, deride: Robert Fulton's new steamboat. But as Kirkpatrick Sale shows in this remarkable biography, Fulton's "large, noisy, showy, fast, brash, exciting, powerful, and audacious" machine would -- for better or worse -- irrevocably transform nineteenth-century America.
Set against a brilliant portrait of a dynamic period in history, The Fire of His Genius tells the story of the fiercely driven man whose invention opened up America's interior to waves of settlers, created and sustained industrial and plantation economies in the nation's heartland, and facilitated the destruction of the remaining Indian civilizations. Probing Fulton's genius but also laying bare the darker side of the man -- and the darker side of the American dream -- Kirkpatrick Sale tells an extraordinary tale with deftness, zest, and unflagging verve.