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Robert Fulton died in the service of the United States government; and although engaged for years in devoting time and talents to the best interests of our country, still the public records show that the Government was indebted to his estate upwards of $100,000 for moneys actually expended and services rendered by him, agreeably to contract.
When the legislature, then in session at Albany, heard of the death of Mr. Fulton, they expressed their sentiments of regret by resolving that the members of both houses should wear mourning for six weeks. This is the only instance, According to Colden, up to that time, of such public testimonials of regret, esteem, and respect being offered on the death of a private citizen, who was only distinguished by his virtues, his genius, and his talents.
He was buried February 25, 1815. His funeral was attended by all the officers of the National and State governments then in the city, by the magistracy, the common council, a number of societies, and a greater number of citizens than had ever been collected on any similar occasion. When the procession began to move, and until it arrived at Trinity Church, minute-guns were fired from the steam frigate and the Battery. His body is deposited in a vault belonging to the Livingston family.
Mr. Fulton is described as a tall man, about six feet in height, slender, but well proportioned. "Nature had made him a gentleman, and bestowed upon him ease and gracefulness." He had too much good sense to exhibit affectation, and confidence in his own worth and talents gave him a pleasing deportment in all companies. His features were strong and handsome; he had large dark eyes, a projecting brow, and features expressive of intelligence and thought; his disposition was mild yet lively, and he was fond of society. He conversed with energy, fluency, and correctness; and, owing more to experience and reflection than to books, he was often interesting in his originality.
In all his social relations he was kind, generous, and affectionate. His only use for money was to make it an aid to charity, hospitality, and the promotion of science. He was especially distinguished by constancy, industry, and that union of patience and persistence which overcame every difficulty.
Robert Fulton has never, even yet, received either in kind or degree the credit that is justly his due. Those members of the engineering profession who have become familiar with his work through the ordinary channels of information generally look upon him as a talented artist and fortunate amateur engineer, whose fancies led him into many strange vagaries, and whose enthusiastic advocacy of a new method of transportation - the success of which was already assured by the ingenuity and skill of James Watt, Oliver Evans, and John Fitch, and by the really intelligent methods of those early professional engineers, the Messrs. Stevens - gave him the opportunity of grasping the prize of which Chancellor Livingston had secured the legal control. By such engineers as know only of his work on the Seine and the Hudson in the introduction of the steamboat, he is not considered as an inventor, but simply as one who profited by the inventions of others, and who, taking advantage of circumstances, and gaining credit which was not of right wholly his own, acquired a reputation vastly out of proportion to his real merits.
The layman, judging only from the popular traditions, and the incomplete historical accounts that have come to him, supposes Robert Fulton to have been the inventor of the steamboat, and on that ground regards him as one of the greatest mechanics and engineers that the world has seen.
The truth undoubtedly is, as we have now seen, that Fulton was not "the inventor of the steamboat," and that the reputation acquired by his successful introduction of steam navigation is largely accidental, and is principally due to the possession, in company with Livingston, of a monopoly which drove from this most promising field those original and skillful engineers, Evans and the Stevenses. No one of the essential devices successfully used by Fulton in the "Clermont," his first North River steamboat, was new; and no one of them differed, to any great extent, from devices successfully adopted by earlier experimenters. Fulton's success was a commercial success purely. John Stevens had, in 1804, built a successful screw steam vessels; and his paddle steamer of 1807, the "Phoenix," was very possibly a better piece of engineering than the "Clermont." John Fitch had, still earlier, used both screw and paddle. In England, Miller and Symmington and Lord Dundas had antedated even Fulton's earliest experiments on the Seine. Indeed, it seems not at all unlikely that Papin, a century earlier (in 1707), had he been given a monopoly of steam navigation on the Weser or the Fulda, and had he been joyfully hailed by the Hanoverians as a public benefactor, as was Fulton in the United States, instead of being proscribed and assaulted by the mob who destroyed his earlier "Clermont," might have been equally successful; or it may be that the French inventor, Jouffroy, who experimented on the rivers of France twenty-five years before Fulton, might, with similar encouragement, have gained an equal success.
Yet although Fulton was not in any true sense "the inventor of the steamboat," his services in the work of introducing that miracle of our modern time cannot be overestimated; and, aside from his claim as the first to grasp success among the many who were then bravely struggling to place steam navigation on a permanent and safe basis, he is undeniably entitled to all the praise that has ever been accorded him on such different ground.
Above Work Selected Extracts From:
"Robert Fulton - His Life and Its
Results"
Robert H. Thurston
Dodd, Mead, and Company Publishers
New York
1891
Main
Page on Robert Fulton
American inventor and engineer,
who brought steamboating to commercial success.
