A History of the American People

the famous novelist, on the British frigate Spartan, sank or captured scores of American vessels
in US inshore waters. But what shook the British Admiralty were the successes of American
warships against regular units of the Royal Navy. American frigates were bigger, better
designed, carried more guns, and had twice as many officers as their British equivalents. Marryat
admitted that, ship for ship, the American Navy-manned, he pointed out, largely by British
crews-was superior. George Canning, the British statesman, felt he had to tell the House of
Commons: `It cannot he too deeply felt that the sacred spell of the invincibility of the British
navy has been broken by these unfortunate [American] victories.'
The naval war against Britain was the first in which Americans were able to demonstrate what
was to become an overwhelming passion for high technology. This was the work of Robert
Fulton (1765-1815), a genius of Irish ancestry born in Little Britain (now renamed Fulton
Township) in Pennsylvania. His father died when he was tiny and his needy childhood was
redeemed by an astonishing skill at drawing combined with inventive mechanical gifts-from the
age of thirteen he made his own pencils, brushes, paints, and other materials. He studied under
the leading Philadelphia portraitist, Charles Wilson Peale, who painted his new pupil, a tough,
brooding young man with rage written all over his face. Precise skills in draftsmanship
overlapped with scientific passion in those days-Fulton's younger contemporary, Samuel Morse,
who was to transform telegraphy, also began as a portrait painter. Fulton's interest in propulsion
began as soon as his art studies. In his teens he made a powerful skyrocket, designed a paddle-
wheel, and invented guns.
Fulton had a lifelong hatred of the Royal Navy, which he saw as an enemy not just of
American independence but of the freedom of the seas, to him the high road to human
advancement. In 1798 he went to France in an attempt to sell to General Bonaparte a design for a
submarine for use against the British. Oddly enough, as far back as 1776 a Yankee inventor,
David Bushnell, had been awarded £60 for building a submarine-but it did not work when tried
against British ships. Fulton's U-boat, with a crew of three, could submerge to 25 feet and was
equipped with mines and primitive torpedoes. Like all his marine designs, it imitated the
movements of a fish. The French promised him 400,000 francs if he sank a British frigate. But
when the sub was tried in 1801 it too failed and the French lost interest.' He then had the
audacity to go to London and try to sell submarines to the British Admiralty, promising to blow
up the French invasion fleet then gathering at Boulogne (1803-4). The British too were keen at
first, and one of Fulton's torpedoes actually succeeded in sinking a French pinnace, drowning its
crew of twenty-two. But only the French knew this at the time. When Trafalgar ended the
invasion scare, the Admiralty gave Fulton the brush-off.
Thus the War of 1812 came to Fulton as an emotional and professional godsend-he could now
work for his own government. He was able to buy some powerful steam-engines made by the
leading British maker, Boulton and Watt, and he planned to install them in enormous steam-
driven surface warships. The project-ship, christened Demologus (1813), then Fulton the First
(1814), was a twin-hulled catamaran with 16-foot paddles between the hulls. It was 156 feet
long, 56 wide, and 20 deep and was protected by a 5-foot solid timber belt. With an engine
powered by a cylinder 4 feet in diameter, giving an engine-stroke of 5 feet, this would have been
the first large-scale armored steam-warship. The British were also working on a steam-warship at
Chatham, but it was only a sloop. Fulton's new battleship was planned to carry thirty 32-pound
guns firing red-hot shot, plus l00-pound projectiles below the waterline. With its 120 horsepower
it could move at 5 miles an hour independent of the winds and, in theory at least, outclassed any
British warship afloat. Stories of this monster, launched on the East River June 29, 1814, reached