Hero Tales from History — Fulton's Folly

“FULTON’S FOLLY” Robert Fulton was a Pennsylvania boy.

His father, a Quaker, died when Robert was a baby.

His mother was a beautiful Irish lady, whose mind was as lovely as her face.

She taught little Robert, and he knew much that was worth while before he began to go to school at the age of eight years.

In those days school teachers were often strict and harsh with young children.

Parents seemed to think their children would not learn fast unless they were whipped or beaten with a ruler.

Though little Robert was not a bad boy in school, he sometimes seemed to be idle because he was thinking of something else.

So his strict Quaker teacher punished him one day by striking his hands with a ferule.

Robert’s boyish sense of fairness rose up within him, and he exclaimed, “I came here, sir, to have something beaten into my _head_--not my _hands_!

” [Illustration: ROBERT FULTON, INVENTOR OF THE STEAMBOAT.

] One of the pupils brought some artist’s brushes and paints to school, and Robert, who already showed real talent for drawing, was allowed to use them.

He made such fine pictures that the other boy gave him the paints.

This was the beginning of young Fulton’s career as a painter.

But Robert was not content with painting pictures.

He was always trying to make things, or to find ways of doing things more easily.

Robert was eleven when the American colonies went into the War for Independence.

During this war, when candles were scarce, people were warned not to waste them in lighting up for the Fourth of July.

It was to be a saving rather than a safe and sane holiday.

The Fulton boy made up his mind to celebrate the day.

So he got some gunpowder and pasteboard and made little tubes with a stick pointing out at one end of each.

The neighbors were astonished on the night of the Fourth of July to see these tubes, one after another, go whizzing up in the sky, leaving a trail of sparks behind them.

They said to one another, “That Fulton boy’s a genius!

” Robert had made the first skyrockets these Americans had ever seen.

Robert Fulton afterward became acquainted with Dr. Benjamin Franklin and learned much from the kind old inventor.

When Fulton was a young man he went to London and studied painting with Benjamin West, the greatest American painter up to that time.

He went also to France to study art.

Meantime he kept on inventing things.

The French were at war with many of the countries of Europe at that time.

Fulton had always been interested in boats; and we have seen that he knew how to use gunpowder.

He planned a new kind of boat, which he thought would help the French in their war.

It was a submarine, and was provided with torpedoes which could be shot under water.

They would have pierced the wooden sides of the best ships built in those days.

Fulton’s diving boat was shown to the French minister of war, but the government experts could not understand its great value in war and refused to make use of it in the war.

Shortly after, a British officer remarked that Napoleon’s loss of Fulton’s diving boat was the most important event of the century.

Napoleon, who was then emperor of the French, wrote to one of his own advisers: “I have just received the project of Citizen Fulton, which you have sent me too late--since it may change the face of the world!

” But, harmful as Fulton’s submarine might have proven to Napoleon’s enemies, the chance which Napoleon missed was not important compared with the results of Robert Fulton’s next invention.

Robert Fulton had, as a lad, gone fishing with some neighbors on a flatboat in the river.

This craft they had to push along with poles, which was very slow, hard work.

Bob began at once to try to fix something which would make the boat go faster and more easily.

He arranged paddles at the stern which worked quite well.

Then he improved this by making paddle wheels.

After that he attached the wheels to an engine.

He went on working with engines and wheels until at last, while he was in Paris, he succeeded in building a boat with a steam-engine to make it go.

He tried it on the River Seine, which flows through Paris.

The boat did go a little; but the engine was too heavy, and the watching crowds saw Fulton’s queer boat sink to the bottom.

After he returned to America, Fulton went on improving his steamboat until he had built one which he thought would run up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany.

He named this odd-looking craft the _Clermont_, and invited a few of his friends to make the trial trip.

A

great crowd came down to the wharf in New York City to have a little fun watching “Fulton’s Folly,” as they called the steamboat.

People laughed at the idea that a heavy iron engine could make a boat go anywhere but to the bottom.

Even Fulton’s friends, waiting on the deck of the queer-looking vessel, felt foolish and looked anxious.

The boat, however, started off, and the people on the shore began to cheer.

Out in the river it stopped like a balky horse, and the cheers were turned to jeers.

Fulton looked hurriedly at the engine, found out what was the trouble, and soon fixed it.

Then the boat went puffing away up the river against the current at the rate of six miles an hour, and the friends on deck thought they were going very fast, as there were no railroads then and this was faster than a sailboat could go.

Fulton kept on improving his boats so that within a few years there were steamboats on other rivers of the country.

Within a century “ocean greyhounds” were racing across the Atlantic, and “superdreadnoughts,” the largest battleships, were being built for the great navies of the world.

Submarines were used by many nations in the World War, but their invention, important as it was, could not well be called the greatest event of the century.

It was the sailing of “Fulton’s Folly” which might have been said to change the face of the world, because it was the first step on the way to the wonderful steamships of to-day.

Just as that ingenious little boy tried to help his friends by making their flatboat run faster so Robert Fulton, as a man, had made the people of the world richer, happier, and better for all the ages to come.

[Illustration: THE “CLERMONT,” FULTON’S FIRST STEAMBOAT.

]