Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Robert Fulton: A Neglected Subject, October 30, 2001
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
American Dream Via Inventiveness, November 2, 2001
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."
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A FULL HEAD OF STEAM, March 8, 2004
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."
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
