Why had Fulton succeeded where others had failed? There was nothing new in his boat.Every essential feature of the Clermont had been anticipated by one or other of the numerous experimenters before him.The answer seems to be that he was a better engineer than any of them.He had calculated proportions, and his hull and his engine were in relation.Then too, he had one of Watt's engines, undoubtedly the best at the time, and the unwavering support of Robert Livingston.
Fulton's restless mind was never still, but he did not turn capriciously from one idea to another.Though never satisfied, his new ideas were tested scientifically and the results carefully written down.Some of his notebooks read almost like geometrical demonstrations; and his drawings and plans were beautifully executed.Before his death in 1815 he had constructed or planned sixteen or seventeen boats, including boats for the Hudson, Potomac, and Mississippi rivers, for the Neva in Russia, and a steam vessel of war for the United States.He was a member of the commission on the Erie Canal, though he did not live to see that enterprise begun.
The mighty influence of the steamboat in the development of inland America is told elsewhere in this Series.* The steamboat has long since grown to greatness, but it is well to remember that the true ancestor of the magnificent leviathan of our own day is the Clermont of Robert Fulton.
* Archer B.Hulbert, "The Paths of Inland Commerce".
The world today is on the eve of another great development in transportation, quite as revolutionary as any that have preceded.
How soon will it take place? How long before Kipling's vision in "The Night Mail" becomes a full reality? How long before the air craft comes to play a great role in the world's transportation?
We cannot tell.But, after looking at the nearest parallel in the facts of history, each of us may make his own guess.The airship appears now to be much farther advanced than the steamboat was for many years after Robert Fulton died.Already we have seen men ride the wind above the sea from the New World to the Old.
Already United States mails are regularly carried through the air from the Atlantic to the Golden Gate.It was twelve years after the birth of Fulton's Clermont, and four years after the inventor's death, before any vessel tried to cross the Atlantic under steam.This was in 1819, when the sailing packet Savannah, equipped with a ninety horsepower horizontal engine and paddle-wheels, crossed from Savannah to Liverpool in twenty-five days, during eighteen of which she used steam power.The following year, however, the engine was taken out of the craft.And it was not until 1833 that a real steamship crossed the Atlantic.This time it was the Royal William, which made a successful passage from Quebec to London.Four years more passed before the Great Western was launched at Bristol, the first steamship to be especially designed for transatlantic service, and the era of great steam liners began.
If steam could be made to drive a boat on the water, why not a wagon on the land?
History, seeking origins, often has difficulty when it attempts to discover the precise origin of an idea."It frequently happens," said Oliver Evans, "that two persons, reasoning right on a mechanical subject, think alike and invent the same thing without any communication with each other."* It is certain, however, that one of the first, if not the first, protagonist of the locomotive in America was the same Oliver Evans, a truly great inventor for whom the world was not quite ready.The world has forgotten him.But he was the first engine builder in America, and one of the best of his day.He gave to his countrymen the high-pressure steam engine and new machinery for manufacturing flour that was not superseded for a hundred years.
* Coleman Sellers, "Oliver Evans and His Inventions," "Journal of the Franklin Institute", July, 1886: vol.CXXII, p.16.
"Evans was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to a wheelwright.
He was a thoughtful, studious boy, who devoured eagerly the few books to which he had access, even by the light of a fire of shavings, when denied a candle by his parsimonious master.He says that in 1779, when only seventeen years old, he began to contrive some method of propelling land carriages by other means than animal power; and that he thought of a variety of devices, such as using the force of the wind and treadles worked by men;but as they were evidently inadequate, was about to give up the problem as unsolvable for want of a suitable source of power, when he heard that some neighboring blacksmith's boys had stopped up the touch-hole of a gun barrel, put in some water, rammed down a tight wad, and, putting the breech into the smith's fire, the gun had discharged itself with a report like that of gunpowder.
This immediately suggested to his fertile mind a new source of power, and he labored long to apply it, but without success, until there fell into his hands a book describing the old atmospheric steam engine of Newcomen, and he was at once struck with the fact that steam was only used to produce a vacuum while to him it seemed clear that the elastic power of the steam if applied directly to moving the piston, would be far more efficient.He soon satisfied himself that he could make steam wagons, but could convince no one else of this possibility."** Coleman Sellers, "Oliver Evans and His Inventions," "Journal of the Franklin Institute", July, 1886: vol.CXXII, p.3.
