The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream [Hardcover]

Kirkpatrick Sale (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 4, 2001

None of the well-dressed crowd that gathered on the Hudson River side of Lower Manhattan on the hot afternoon of August 17, 1808, could have known the importance of the object they had come to see and, mostly, deride: Robert Fulton's new steamboat, the "North River, the boat that is frequently -- and wrongly -- remembered as the "Clermont. But, as Kirkpatrick Sale shows in this remarkable biography of Fulton, the "North River's successful four-day round-trip to Albany proved a technology that would transform nineteenth-century America, open up the interior to huge waves of settlers, create and sustain industrial and plantation economies in the nation's heartland, and destroy the remaining Indian civilizations and most of the wild lands on which they depended. "The North River's four-day trip introduced the machines and culture that marked the birth of the Industrial Revolution in America.

"The Fire of His Genius tells the story of the extraordinarily driven and ambitious inventor who brought all this about, probing into the undoubted genius of his mind but, too, laying bare the darker side of the man -- and the darker side of the American dream that inspired him. It depicts one of America's earliest heroes both at the pinnacle of creativity and success, fame, and fortune and in the depths of solitude, recklessness, and contentiousness that preceded his early death (Fulton spent much of his life defending patents for everything from rope-making machinery to submarines to proto-torpedoes that he attempted to sell, in succession, to the French, the British, and the American navies). All this is set against a brilliant portrait of a dynamic historical period filled with charactersfrom Bonaparte to Jefferson, Cornelius Vanderbilt to Meriwether Lewis, Robert Livingston to Benjamin West, and events from the Lewis and Clark expedition to the War of 1812, the Louisiana Purchase to the bombing of Fort McHenry, the treasontrial of Aaron Burr to the "Great Removal" of American Indians. Here are the "taming" of America's rivers and the building of its great canals, the introduction to every body of water of Fulton's "large, noisy, showy, fast, brash, exciting, powerful, and audacious" machine that was the very embodiment of America. A biography that bears comparison to the best work of David McCullough, Dava Sobel, and Garry Wills, "The Fire of His Genius is a remarkable achievement: an extraordinarily clear window into an extraordinary time told with deftness, zest, and unflagging verve.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Robert Fulton is often enshrined in American history texts as the inventor of the steamship. He did no such thing, as Kirkpatrick Sale is quick to point out, but that does not detract from his genuine accomplishments as an entrepreneur and technician.

Born in 1765 into a poor family on the Pennsylvania frontier, Fulton showed an early aptitude for working with machinery of all kinds, as well as an all-consuming drive to avoid his father's poverty. As a young man he contrived useful inventions at an astonishing rate, a marble-cutting saw here, a canal-digging engine there; he also cultivated friendships and connections with influential men on both sides of the Atlantic, and soon he was doing business with the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon Bonaparte (to whom he sold a prototype submarine, the Nautilus). Fulton's most lasting accomplishment, however, may have been to develop a steamboat fleet that dependably plied the waters in and around New York and eventually extended to rivers in the western interior, providing "a tool by which the dominant commercial interests could extend their reach and power, by which the reigning political forces could communicate and consolidate their influence, by which a restless people could penetrate new lands and develop new industries."

Sale, who has written several books that take modern technology to task, considers Fulton's legacy to be mixed: his steamship line helped enable the settlement of the frontier, but also the destruction of American Indian nations, and it "served to sanction and encourage the domination of technology itself in American society." His critique may not sway all readers, but his well-written life of Robert Fulton will be of interest to students of economic history, transportation history, and early America alike. --Gregory McNamee

From Library Journal

In this superb, beautifully written historiography, Sale (contributing editor, the Nation; Conquest of Paradise) fills in the details of the life of important American inventor Robert Fulton, explaining how his North River steamboat opened up the North American continent to settlement and how it became the key factor that influenced the beginnings of the American industrial revolution. Working with surprisingly few original sources, Sale nevertheless reveals the early days of Fulton's life, his endless creativity, and his numerous patents, including an inclined plane, a rope-maker, panoramas, underwater cannon, and a steam frigate. Few of the sparse crowd who gathered on Monday, August 17, 1807, to witness Fulton launch his "outlandish contraption" realized the historical importance of the event. Sale rightly sees this event not only as realizing commercial steamboat travel in the United States but, more importantly, as opening up the American West and beginning the country's industrial transformation. This is an informative, moving story that personalizes the relatively obscure life of a self-taught tinkerer who had a genius for self-promotion and exploiting the discoveries of others. Highly recommended for larger public libraries and academic libraries. Dale Farris, Groves, TX
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1 edition (September 4, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 068486715X
• ISBN-13: 978-0684867151
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #718,502 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Robert Fulton: A Neglected Subject, October 30, 2001

By 

C. W. Emblom "Bill Emblom" (Ishpeming, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream (Hardcover)

Author Kirkpatrick Sale has provided us with a well researched book about a historical figure that has been neglected and I learned some interesting facts about Robert Fulton I wasn't aware of. His steamboat was technically called the North River Steamboat. The North River was another name for the Hudson River. Clermont, the name we associate with the steamboat, was a large tract of privately owned land about 90 miles up the Hudson River from New York City. Fulton was also interested in designing a submarine with torpedoes to be used in time of war in addition to underwater cannons and floating mines. He also had a rather curious relationship with a couple named Joel and Ruth Barlow which I will let the reader of the book speculate on. Fulton was plagued by weak lungs due to tuberculois and this ultimately led to his death in 1815. I learned a number of interesting tidbits about Robert Fulton I wasn't aware of, but I have to confess there were parts I read through rather quickly.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars American Dream Via Inventiveness, November 2, 2001

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream (Hardcover)

It used to be that every kid could name Robert Fulton as the man who invented the steamboat. In the eighteenth century, he was a figure of considerable esteem, as the new American nation prided itself on its inventiveness and its new ways of doing things. Perhaps few kids or adults could now name this once-exalted inventor, and that is too bad, for his invention shaped the new nation in ways that still affect us. A new biography, _The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream_ (Free Press) by Kirkpatrick Sale, throws light on Fulton and his invention (or inventions, for he was a constant tinkerer). It also shows him to be one of the most peculiar and self-destructive of inventive men.

Brought up in want, Fulton became apprenticed to a jeweler, and learned to paint portraits. He got money somehow, and went to England to improve his painting skills, and did indeed exhibit portraits at the Royal Academy. More importantly, he was fascinated by the British system of canals, and invented a gadgets having to do with them. In France, he tinkered with submarines and naval mines. Back at home on the Hudson, he did the work that made him famous. He made a maiden voyage in 1807 from New York City to Albany, 32 hours in the steamboat _North River_. (It was not the _Clermont_, an error in Fulton's first biography that has been reproduced in countless textbooks.) On the very return trip, he took paying passengers. Though Fulton's boats had a superb record for safety, they caused alarm in those who had never seen anything like them. One spectator wrote that when villagers saw this "strange dark-looking craft... some imagined it to be a sea-monster, whilst others did not hesitate to express their belief that it was a sign of the approaching judgment." Although commercially successful, he spent a great deal of time defending his controversial patent rights and trying to maintain boating monopolies. If he had spent that time improving his products (which were, indeed, superior boats) and arranging for more commercial incursions into such lucrative markets as the Mississippi River (where steamboats forged the most change), he probably would have been richer, happier, and more famous.

Sale has taken such facts as are available and with welcome rhetorical flourishes has built a novelistic and satisfying portrait of an enigmatic man. He places both Fulton and the steamboat in a larger history, and just as he is enlightening about the darker or shallower parts of Fulton's character, he is ready to tell about the casualties of the steamboat, such as the Indians or the forests. It is true that America is vastly different because Fulton came along. Mark Twain, who certainly ought to know, wrote "He made the vacant oceans and idle rivers useful, after the unprejudiced had been wondering for years what they were for."

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A FULL HEAD OF STEAM, March 8, 2004

By 

E. E Pofahl (HUNTINGTON, WV USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream (Paperback)

Today with jet passenger aircraft crisscrossing the country, with nuclear powdered naval craft sailing for months without refueling, and with cruise ships carrying more passengers than the populations of some American Colonial villages, Robert Fulton and the first practical steamboat is largely forgotten. However, the author, Kirkpatrick Sale, states "....the steamboat would be the single most important instrument in the transformation of America in the first half of the nineteenth century: it promoted the penetration and settlement of the American interior...." The text narrates Fulton's life placing him in proper historical context.

Chapter 1 is an account of the very successful August 1807 maiden voyage of the Fulton's steamboat, North River (erroneously called the Claremont in textbooks), from New York to Albany and return. Following this successful trip, Fulton initiated regular steamboat service on the Hudson from New York to Albany which ceased only when the Hudson River froze. While not the inventor of the steamboat, Fulton was successful because he built the North River "on sound engineering principles and scientific techniques."

The text states that little is known about Fulton's early life, He was born on a farm in 1765 in Pennsylvania to Irish immigrant parents. He developed a strong drive to avoid his father's poverty, and in his mid-teens he moved alone to Philadelphia and was apprenticed to a jeweler. In 1787 he arrived in London (source of funds unknown) for further art study under Benjamin West. It was a difficult time for would-be artists and in 1793 he began devolving into engineering concentrating first on canals. He conceived many inventions such as a marble-cutting saw, a canal-digging engine, prefabricated iron bridges, etc. In 1797 he went to France. Sale gives an intriguing account of Fulton's attempt to sell a submarine and mines (Fulton called them torpedoes) first to Napoleon in France; then later to England when he was rejected by France. Amazingly Fulton tried unsuccessfully to blackmail both countries by threatening to reveal his work to their enemies.

In Paris in 1802 Fulton met Robert Livingston who wanted to build and operate a steamboat on the Hudson River. A partnership was formed and Fulton was obligated to build a steamboat to ply the Hudson; however, the author notes "Fulton knew from the outset that it would be on the Mississippi and its major tributaries that the steamboat would have its most consequential impact...." In 1803 he conducted a successful trial run of a prototype steamboat on the Seine, and in December 1806 Fulton returned to America where in 1807 Fulton's commercially successful North River began operations. The book gives a good account of how Fulton and Livingston with state granted monopolies developed steamboat traffic on the Hudson and Mississippi Rivers plus steam ferries to New Jersey. Incredibly, in 1808-09, he lobbied for his torpedoes in Washington.

For the 1808 season, Fulton refurbished the North River "offering accommodations of some taste and luxuriousness" rather than the somewhat spartan 1807 conditions. Later steamboats would continue this luxurious accommodation pattern. By early 1813, he had six steamboats at work and six more ready to launch.
The author notes "Steamboating was too obviously lucrative an enterprise-everyone of Fulton's boats was making money, some robustly so-not to attract any craftsman or entrepreneur who could find a source of modest capital and a machine shop with a few experience hands. By 1814 at least a dozen other men had launched vessels of their own...." Fulton and Livingston would spend the last years of their lives defending their monopolies with Fulton carrying on alone after Livingston's death in 1813. When Fulton died in 1815 his monopolies were essentially ended. Strangely, until the end of his life, his passion was his weapons of war, none of which were successful, rather than the steamboat.

The book's last chapter, titled Legacies, is most interesting as it outlines the history of the steamboat after Fulton's death noting that the steamboat was central to drawing people to middle America. Mark Twain wrote "The 19th Century began the most prolific age of invention, bringing into our daily life the convenience of machines which were recently unknown but in our dreams. At the beginning of that period of material progress stands the name of Robert Fulton." The author notes sadly on page 176 "No lasting monuments, not even a gravestone, were erected [to Robert Fulton] until 1901 when the American Society of Mechanical Engineers put up a bronze plaque on a squat column along the south wall of Trinity churchyard."

The book's closing sentence states "And none who ever rode its throbbing decks, or watched its majestic motility on the water, ever failed to realize that it was this the symbol, as it was for many years the agency, of the American dream."