THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL INVENTORS OF ALL TIME

7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

light freight. Problems, however, remained: the mechanical
difficulties, for example, and the jealous sloopboatmen,
who through “inadvertence” would ram the unprotected
paddlewheels of their new rivals. During the first winter
season he stiffened and widened the hull, replaced the cast-
iron crankshaft with a forging, fitted guards over the
wheels, and improved passenger accommodations. These
modifications made it a different boat, which was registered
in 1808 as the North River Steamboat of Clermont, soon
reduced to Clermont by the press.
In 1808 Fulton married his partner’s niece, Harriet
Livingston, by whom he had a son and three daughters.
In 1811 the Fulton-designed, Pittsburgh-built New
Orleans was sent south to validate the Livingston–Fulton
steamboat monopoly of the New Orleans Territory. The
trip was slow and perilous, river conditions being desperate
because of America’s first recorded, and also largest, earth-
quake, which had destroyed New Madrid just below the
confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Fulton’s
low-powered vessel remained at New Orleans, for it could
go no farther upstream than Natchez. He built three boats
for Western rivers that were based at New Orleans, but
none could conquer the passage to Pittsburgh.
Fulton was a member of the 1812 commission that
recommended building the Erie Canal. With the English
blockade the same year, he insisted that a mobile floating
gun platform be built—the world’s first steam warship—to
protect New York Harbor against the British fleet. The
Demologos, or Fulton, as the ship was alternately called,
incorporated new and novel ideas: two parallel hulls, with
paddlewheel between; the steam engine in one hull, and
boilers and stacks in the other. It weighed 2,745 displace-
ment tons and measured 156 feet (48 metres) in length; a
slow vessel, its speed did not exceed 6 knots (6 nautical