Part 8
The Directory was pleased with the offer, but the government was in so much of a turmoil that it was months before any positive action was taken. At length, on February 28, 1801, Fulton received word from Napoleon, the First Consul, to send his torpedo-boat against the English fleet. He set out; but the English fleet did not come his way, and he spent the summer vainly reconnoitering along the coast. To show the value of his invention he arranged to attack a sloop. This he described in his letter to the French Commission on Submarine Navigation. “To prove this experiment,” he wrote, “the Prefect Maritime and Admiral Villaret ordered a small Sloop of about 40 feet long to be anchored in the Road, on the 23rd of Thermidor. With a bomb containing about 20 pounds of powder I advanced to within 200 Metres, then taking my direction so as to pass near the Sloop, I struck her with the bomb in my passage. The explosion took place and the sloop was torn into atoms, in fact, nothing was left but the buye [buoy] and cable. And the concussion was so great that a column of Water, Smoke and fibres of the Sloop were cast from 80 to 100 feet in Air. This simple Experiment at once proved the effect of the Bomb Submarine to the satisfaction of all the Spectators.”
This exhibition took place in August, 1801, before a crowd of onlookers, and at once established the value of the torpedo. But, as he was unable to attack any English ships, the French government lost interest in his invention, and Napoleon’s scientific advisers reported to him that they regarded the young American as “a visionary.”
At the same time the British government awakened to the great possibilities of Fulton’s device. His old friend, Lord Stanhope, urged that suitable offers be made him. This was ultimately done, and in April, 1804, Fulton left France and returned to London. A contract was drawn up by which he was to put his torpedo at the service of the English government and receive in return two hundred pounds a month and one-half the value of all ships that might be destroyed by his invention.
This arrangement, however, was of short duration. A change of ministry dampened his hopes, and in 1806 the government declined to adopt his invention on his terms. At the same time they tried to suppress this new method of warfare, and to that end made him another offer. Fulton, always an ardent patriot, answered, “At all events, whatever may be your reward, I will never consent to let these inventions lie dormant should my Country at any time have need of them. Were you to grant me an annuity of £20,000 a year, I would sacrifice all to the safety & independence of my Country. But I hope that England and America will understand their mutual Interest too well to War with each other And I have no desire to Introduce my Engines into practice for the benefit of any other Nation.”
He was already eager to return home to work upon his long cherished plans for a steamboat. He continues, “As I am bound in honor to Mr. Livingston to put my steamboat in practice and such engine is of more immediate use to my Country than Submarine Navigation, I wish to devote some years to it and should the British Government allow me an annuity I should not only do justice to my friends but it would enable me to carry my steamboat and other plans into effect for the good of my Country.--It has never been my intention to hide these Inventions from the World on any consideration, on the contrary it has been my intention to make them public as soon as consistent with strict justice to all with whom I am concerned. For myself I have ever considered the interest of America [n] free commerce, the interest of mankind, the magnitude of the object in view and the rational reputation connected with it superior to all calculations of a pecuniary kind.”
Satisfactory terms of agreement were reached, and in 1806 Fulton was free and ready to return to that native land from which he had been away twenty years.
The building of a practicable steamboat had long been in his mind. He had corresponded on the subject with Chancellor Livingston, who had devoted much time and money to new inventions. Fulton, when in Paris, had experimented with models of steamboats, and had studied the records of what had already been done in that line. In 1802 he had started a course of calculations on the resistance of water, and the comparative advantages of the known means of propelling vessels. He had rejected the plan of using paddles or oars, and also of forcing water out of the stern of the vessel, and had retained the idea of the paddle-wheel. This he tried successfully on a small model that he built and used on a river that ran through the village of Plombières. He then built an experimental boat, sixty-six feet long and eight feet wide, and this he exhibited to a large audience of Parisians in August, 1803. His success led him to order certain parts of a steam-engine from the firm of Boulton and Watt in Birmingham, these to be shipped to America. Meantime Chancellor Livingston had obtained for himself and Fulton the exclusive right to navigate the waters of New York state by vessels propelled by fire or steam.
As soon as he reached America in December, 1806, Fulton started work on his boat. He engaged Charles Brownne, a ship-builder on the East River, to lay down the hull. He decided to name the vessel the _Clermont_, the name of Chancellor Livingston’s country-place on the Hudson, where Fulton had been a guest. The engine duly arrived from Birmingham and was carried to the shipyard. As a number of loafers and hangers-on about the docks threatened injury to “Fulton’s Folly,” as the building boat was called, he had to engage watchmen to guard his property. By August the boat was finished, and was moved by her own engine from the yards to the Jersey shore. She was one hundred and fifty feet long, thirteen feet wide, and drew two feet of water. Before she had gone a quarter of a mile both passengers and observers on the shore were satisfied that the steamboat was a thoroughly practicable vessel.
On Sunday, August 9, 1807, Fulton made a short trial trip of the _Clermont_, and wrote an account of it to Livingston. “Yesterday about 12 o’clock I put the steamboat in motion first with a paddle 8 inches broad, 3 feet long, with which I ran about one mile up the East River against a tide of about one mile an hour, it being nearly high water. I then anchored and put on another paddle 8 inches wide, 3 feet long, started again and then, according to my best observations, I went 3 miles an hour, that is two against a tide of one: another board of 8 inches was wanting, which had not been prepared, I therefore turned the boat and ran down with the tide--and turned her round neatly into the berth from which I parted. She answers the helm equal to anything that ever was built, and I turned her twice in three times her own length. Much has been proved by this experiment. First that she will, when in complete order, run up to my full calculations. Second, that my axles, I believe, will be sufficiently strong to run the engine to her full power. Third, that she steers well, and can be turned with ease.”
It was on August 17, 1807, that the _Clermont_ made her first historic trip up the Hudson. At one o’clock she cast off from her dock near the State’s Prison, in what was called Greenwich Village, on the North River. The inventor described the voyage characteristically to a friend. He wrote, “The moment arrived in which the word was to be given for the boat to move. My friends were in groups on the deck. There was anxiety mixed with fear among them. They were silent, sad and weary. I read in their looks nothing but disaster, and almost repented of my efforts. The signal was given and the boat moved on a short distance and then stopped and became immovable. To the silence of the preceding moment, now succeeded murmurs of discontent, and agitations, and whispers and shrugs. I could hear distinctly repeated--‘I told you it was so; it is a foolish scheme: I wish we were well out of it.’
“I elevated myself upon a platform and addressed the assembly. I stated that I knew not what was the matter, but if they would be quiet and indulge me for half an hour, I would either go on or abandon the voyage for that time. This short respite was conceded without objection. I went below and examined the machinery, and discovered that the cause was a slight maladjustment of some of the work. In a short time it was obviated. The boat was again put in motion. She continued to move on. All were still incredulous. None seemed willing to trust the evidence of their own senses. We left the fair city of New York; we passed through the romantic and ever-varying scenery of the Highlands; we descried the clustering houses of Albany; we reached its shores,--and then, even then, when all seemed achieved, I was the victim of disappointment.
“Imagination superseded the influence of fact. It was then doubted if it could be done again, or if done, it was doubted if it could be made of any great value.”
But the _Clermont_, in spite of all prophecies to the contrary, had traveled under her own steam from New York to Albany, and the trip was the crowning event in Fulton’s career as inventor. At the time she made that first voyage the _Clermont_ was a very simple craft, decked for a short distance at bow and stern, the engine open to view, and back of the engine a house like that on a canal-boat to shelter the boiler and provide an apartment for the officers. The rudder was of the pattern used on sailing-vessels, and was moved by a tiller. The boiler was of the same pattern used in Watt’s steam-engines, and was set in masonry. The condenser stood in a large cold-water cistern, and the weight of the masonry and the cistern greatly detracted from the boat’s buoyancy. She was so very unwieldy that the captains of other river boats, realizing the danger of the steamboat’s competition, were able to run into her, and make it appear that the fault was hers; and as a result she several times reached port with only a single wheel.
There were almost as many quaint descriptions of the boat as there were people who saw it. One described it as an “ungainly craft looking precisely like a backwoods sawmill mounted on a scow and set on fire.” Others said the _Clermont_ appeared at night like a “monster moving on the waters defying the winds and tide, and breathing flames and smoke.” Some of the ignorant along the Hudson fell on their knees and prayed to be delivered from the monster. The boat must have been a very strange sight; pine wood was used for fuel, and when the engineer stirred the fire a torrent of sparks went shooting into the sky.
The boat was clumsy beyond question. The exposed machinery creaked and groaned, the unguarded paddle-wheels revolved ponderously and splashed a great deal of water, the tiller was badly placed for steering. Fulton quickly remedied some of the defects, and the _Clermont_ that began to make regular runs from New York to Albany a little later was quite a different boat from that which made her maiden voyage on August 17th.
In spite of Fulton’s gloomy tone in his letter there were many among the men and women who made the first trip with him who were not dubious concerning the invention. As soon as the first difficulties were overcome and the boat was moving on a steady keel, the passengers, most of whom were close friends of Fulton and of Chancellor Livingston, broke into song. As they passed by the Palisades it is said they sang “Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonny Doon.” Fulton himself could not be overlooked. A contemporary described him: “Among a thousand individuals you might readily point out Robert Fulton. He was conspicuous for his gentle, manly bearing and freedom from embarrassment, for his extreme activity, his height, somewhat over six feet,--his slender yet energetic form and well accommodated dress, for his full and curly dark brown hair, carelessly scattered over his forehead and falling around his neck. His complexion was fair, his forehead high, his eyes dark and penetrating and revolving in a capacious orbit of cavernous depths; his brow was thick and evinced strength and determination; his nose was long and prominent, his mouth and lips were beautifully proportioned, giving the impress of eloquent utterance. Trifles were not calculated to impede him or damp his perseverance.”
Fulton was now forty-two years old, and famous on both sides of the Atlantic. He asked Harriet Livingston, a near relation of his friend the Chancellor, to become his wife. She accepted him, and he was warmly welcomed into that rich and influential family.
On September 2, 1807, Fulton advertised regular sailings of the _Clermont_ between New York and Albany. These proved popular, and other routes were soon planned. That winter he made many changes in the vessel and worked out certain devices that he wished to patent. The name of _Clermont_ was changed to the _North River_ the following spring, and the reconstructed steamboat continued in regular service on the Hudson for a number of years. In the succeeding year he built other boats, the _Rariton_, to run from New York to New Brunswick, and _The Car of Neptune_ as a second Hudson River boat. He was very much occupied perfecting new commercial schemes, protecting his patents from a horde of pirates, and planning to introduce his invention into Europe. Before his death in 1815, eight years after the _Clermont’s_ first trip, he had built seventeen boats, among them the first steam war frigate, a torpedo boat, and the first steam ferry-boats with rounded ends to be used for approaching opposite shores.
A century has not dimmed Fulton’s fame, nor set aside his claim to be the practical inventor of the steamboat. He built the first one to be used in American waters, and his model was copied in all other countries. He carried his ideas to completion, and that, with his talent to observe and improve upon other men’s work, gave him his leading place among the world’s pioneers.
VIII
DAVY AND THE SAFETY-LAMP
1778-1829
Humphrey Davy, according to his contemporaries, could have chosen any one of several roads to fame. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said of him, “Had not Davy been the first chemist, he probably would have been the first poet of his age.” Among many activities he invented the safety-lamp, the object of which was to protect miners from the perils of exploding fire-damp. George Stephenson invented a similar device at about the same time, or a little earlier, but Davy’s lamp was the one most generally adopted, and his claim as inventor is commonly recognized, while Stephenson’s fame is secure with the perfection of the steam-locomotive and the railroad.
Davy was born at Penzance in Cornwall December 17, 1778, the eldest son in a family of five children. More alert and imaginative than other boys, and with an uncommonly good memory, he made great headway at Mr. Coryton’s grammar school, where he went when he was six. Coleridge’s opinion of him may have been correct, for history says that he was a fluent writer of English and Latin verses while still a schoolboy, and that he could tell stories well enough to hold an audience of his teachers and neighbors. He liked fine language and the arts of speech, and, according to his brother, Dr. John Davy, he cultivated those arts in his walks. Once when he was taking a bottle of medicine to a sick woman in the country he began to declaim a stirring speech, and at its climax threw the bottle away. He never noticed its loss until he reached the patient, and then wondered what could have become of the vial. The bottle was found next morning in a hay-field adjoining the path Davy had taken.
When he was fourteen he left Mr. Coryton’s school for the Truro Grammar School, where he stayed for a year. Here he was famed for his good-humor and a very original turn of mind. A school friend, reminiscing about Humphrey, told of a walk several of them took one hot day. “Whilst others complained of the heat,” said he, “and whilst I unbuttoned my waistcoat, Humphrey appeared with his great-coat close-buttoned up to his chin, for the purpose, as he declared, of keeping _out_ the heat. This was laughed at at the time, but it struck me then, as it appears to me now, as evincing originality of thought and an indisposition to be led by the example of others.”
This originality of thought and love of experiment for its own sake were to be chief characteristics of the future scientist.
His school education was finished when he was fifteen, and he returned home, where he studied French in a desultory fashion, and devoted most of his time to fishing, of which he was always very fond. His father’s death made him realize that as the eldest of the sons he must shoulder the responsibility for the family’s support, and, all his natural tastes lying in that direction, he decided to become a physician.
A practicing surgeon and apothecary of Penzance, Bingham Borlase, was willing to take Davy as an apprentice, and the youth began work and study in his office. But the boy was no ordinary apprentice. He became almost at once an omnivorous student and writer. He laid out a plan of study that included theology, astronomy, logic, mathematics, Latin, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew, and he wrote essays, remarkably mature and well-phrased, in a series of note-books that he kept in the office. Poetry he wrote also, filled with love of the sea that circled his native Cornwall, and the great cliffs and moorlands that make that part of England one of the most picturesque spots in the world.
His work with Mr. Borlase brought him into the field of chemistry when he was nineteen. It was a field of magic to him. He read two books, Lavoisier’s “Elements of Chemistry,” and Nicholson’s “Dictionary of Chemistry,” and rushed from them to experiment for himself. His bedroom was his laboratory. His tools were old bottles, glasses, tobacco-pipes, teacups, and such odds and ends as he could find. When he needed fire he went to the kitchen. The owner of the house, Mr. Tonkin, was an old friend of the Davy family, and very fond of Humphrey, but the amateur experiments were almost too much for him. Said he, after he had watched some more than usually noisy combustion at the fire, “This boy, Humphrey, is incorrigible. Was there ever so idle a dog? He will blow us all into the air.” But Humphrey minded no arguments nor objections; he was studying the effects of acids and alkalies on vegetable colors, the kind of air that was to be found in the vesicles of common varieties of seaweed, and the solution and precipitation of metals. The work was all-engrossing; it occupied every spare moment of his time and thought.
If any greater stimulus to scientific study had been needed it would have been supplied to young Davy by his acquaintance with Gregory Watt, the son of the inventor James Watt. Gregory came to board at Mrs. Davy’s house when he was twenty-one, and Humphrey nineteen. He was a splendid companion, and possessed of a remarkably brilliant mind. In a short time the two youths had become inseparable friends, experimenting together, and taking walks to the mines and quarries in the neighborhood of Penzance in search of minerals for study. It was an ideal friendship, incomparably valuable for Davy. But Gregory Watt died when he was twenty-eight. “Gregory was a noble fellow,” Davy wrote to a friend, “and would have been a great man.”
In the meantime the young physician’s apprentice had been lured away from Penzance. Dr. Beddoes had established what he styled a Pneumatic Institution at Clifton, the object of which was to try the medicinal effects of different gases on consumptive patients. Davy, only twenty, had been offered the position of director, and had accepted. His old friend Mr. Tonkin, who had thought to see Humphrey become the leading physician of Penzance, was so much put out with this change of plan that he altered his will and revoked a legacy he had intended for Davy.
Filled with the ardor of research Davy went on with his experiments at Clifton. He discovered silica in the epidermis of the stems of weeds, corn, and grasses. He experimented with nitrous oxide (laughing gas) for ten months until he had thoroughly learned its intoxicating effects. Often he jeopardized his life, and once nearly lost it, by breathing carburetted hydrogen. He published the results of his more important experiments. When he was twenty-one he issued his “Essays on Heat and Light.” He experimented with galvanic electricity, and increased the powers of Volta’s Galvanic Pile. Moreover he outlined and partly drafted an epic poem on the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt. The total is a surprising catalogue of industries for the young Clifton Director.
His ardor had worn him out, and he was forced to take a holiday at Penzance. His reputation as a rising scientist had reached the little Cornish town, and he was given a hearty welcome. He loved his own country and never lost his delight in her natural beauties. Nor did he ever forget his own days in the grammar school, and in his will he directed that a certain sum of money should be paid to the master each year “on condition that the boys may have a holiday on his birthday.”
Davy had already made influential friends, and one of them, Dr. Hope, the professor of chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, was to give him his next step forward. Dr. Hope knew Davy’s works on heat, nitrous oxide, and galvanic electricity, and he recommended the young scientist to Count Rumford for the professorship of chemistry in the Royal Philosophical Institution in London, which Count Rumford had been instrumental in founding. Davy wrote to his mother that this was “as honorable as any scientific appointment in the kingdom, with an income of at least five hundred pounds a year.”
He went to London in 1801, and there he had the great satisfaction of meeting many scientific men whose names and work were well known to him. Six weeks after he arrived he began his first course of lectures, taking for his subject the history of galvanism, and the various methods of accumulating galvanic influence. The _Philosophical Magazine_ said of the new lion, “The sensation created by his first course of lectures at the Institution, and the enthusiastic admiration which they obtained, is at this period hardly to be imagined. Men of the first rank and talent,--the literary and the scientific, the practical and the theoretical,--blue-stockings and women of fashion, the old and the young, all crowded, eagerly crowded, the lecture-room. His youth, his simplicity, his natural eloquence, his chemical knowledge, his happy illustrations and well-conducted experiments, excited universal attention and unbounded applause. Compliments, invitations, and presents were showered upon him in abundance from all quarters; his society was courted by all, and all appeared proud of his acquaintance.”