Robert Fulton was born in 1765 on a farm in Little Britain, Pennsylvania, and first made his living as a portrait painter in Philadelphia, earning enough by 1785 to buy a farm near Pittsburgh for his mother. Tuberculosis in 1786 sent him to England for the sea air, where he studied under Benjamin West and then caught canal mania. He patented a dredging machine, promoted inclined planes to replace locks, and found a backer in Manchester cotton manufacturer Robert Owen. Between 1796 and 1799 he built a steam tug named Bonaparte in the Duke of Bridgewater’s timber yard, but its wake eroded the canal’s clay lining. Moving to Paris in 1797, he funded himself with the city’s first panorama painting and designed the Nautilus, a hand cranked submarine built at Rouen that stayed down 17 minutes at 25 feet in the Seine. With US ambassador Robert R. Livingston he built a 66 foot steamboat in 1803 that broke and sank, then rebuilt it to run upstream at about three knots.

In 1804 he switched sides, building floating contact mines for William Pitt’s Royal Navy, used in the raid on Boulogne, until Trafalgar in 1805 ended the invasion threat and his funding. Back in America in 1806, he and Livingston launched the North River Steamboat, later called the Clermont, mocked as Fulton’s Folly. The 136 foot, 160 ton boat with 15 foot open paddle wheels and backup sails carried passengers 150 nautical miles from New York to Albany in 32 hours in 1807. In 1811 and 1812 he, Livingston, and Nicholas Roosevelt built the New Orleans at Pittsburgh, proving steam could push upstream on the Mississippi. In 1815, at 49, he rescued his friend Thomas Addis Emmet from the broken ice of the Hudson and died of pneumonia soon after.

• Fulton admired Napoleon enough to name his English steam tug Bonaparte.
• Before steam, Ohio Valley farmers broke up their flatboats in New Orleans and walked home.
• He served as an Erie Canal commissioner and designed Demologos, the first steam warship.
• He is buried at Trinity Church in New York, near Alexander Hamilton.
• He appears with Samuel Morse on the 1896 two dollar silver certificate, and five ships were named USS Fulton.