I recently picked up a “bargain” copy of The Fire of His Genius : Robert Fulton and the American Dream, and I can’t say I’d recommend it — but I did learn a few things:
- Not only did Fulton not invent the steamboat, but a fellow named John Fitch in Philadelphia actually had a working steamboat carrying passengers up and down the Delaware — for a year, before it went out of business. The Delaware river has no difficult turns, so it’s easy to sail, and it’s relatively flat, so stagecoaches have no trouble traveling along the banks either.
- Fulton’s steamboat was not named Clermont. All remaining documents refer to it as the North River steamboat; North River was an old name for the Hudson.
- Fulton was obsessed with selling submarines and “torpedoes” (what we’d call “mines”) to the French and British navies, but he never got them to work.
- While in France, he became part of a ménage à trois with poet Joel Barlow and his wife Ruth. They wrote (creepy) letters to each other in baby talk, with sexual overtones.
- Fulton started as an artist.
- Vanderbilt, later know as “Commodore” Vanderbilt, got his start as a steamboat captain, challenging Fulton’s monopoly.
The author, Kirkpatrick Sale, seems bitter, almost catty, throughout the book, rolling his eyes at Barlow’s poetry, describing Fulton’s portrait work as adequate, making it clear that Fulton’s wife wasn’t very pretty, and painting Fulton’s life as consumed in the “fire for fame and riches” (which Sale obviously does not endorse).
Sale, it turns out, wanted to write a companion piece to his Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age, but, no one wanted to publish a book warning of the dangers of computers. Instead, he had to choose an alternative technology that transformed America, the steamboat.
More about Kirkpatrick Sale: Sale grew up in Ithaca, New York, the son of a Cornell lit professor, and he went on to get his own lit degree from Cornell. He still types his manuscripts on a typewriter. He describes himself as an anarchical communalist. But this is the part I couldn’t make up, from a Booknotes interview:
I’m trying to convince the publishers of this Fulton book [Free Press] to be interested in a book on a somewhat larger theme of where did Homo sapiens go wrong. And I’ve located the time: 40,000 years ago. And I want to write about the Stone Age and how Homo erectus lived for two million years one way and then Homo sapiens evolved and taught us to live a different way.
[...]
And we can tell pretty much how the Homo erectus lived without hunting — probably without hunting, certainly without hunting large animals. The Homo sapien comes out and develops spears and spear throwers and goes after the large animals and exterminates the large animals in a wholly different attitude toward nature than existed for the previous two million years of human life. And this leads, eventually, to the domestication of animals and domestication of plants, which we call agriculture and husbandry. And that creates a whole new attitude to nature and a whole new way of distancing ourselves from nature, so that we can use it. And I would say that this is where we went wrong.