Robert Fulton, Steamboat Pioneer
Near Intercourse, Pennsylvania
Robert Fulton was born just north of here in seventeen sixty-five, and he spent much of his early life as a painter, not an engineer. He supported himself with portraits in Philadelphia, then moved to Europe where he kept sketching and gradually grew more interested in mechanics. By the early eighteen hundreds, he had designed an early submarine he called the Nautilus for Napoleon's navy, experimented with underwater mines, and proposed canal improvements.
But it was the steamboat that changed everything. In eighteen oh seven, his North River Steamboat, later known as the Clermont, made a one-hundred-fifty-mile run up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany in about thirty-two hours, proving that steam-powered passenger travel on water was commercially viable. It was not the first steamboat ever built, but it was the first to work reliably enough to matter.
Fulton was born a painter and died an inventor who remade American transportation.
