Much has justifiably been made about Jules Verne’s anticipation of future technologies in his imagined submarines, airplanes, and spacecraft that appear in his many novels. But Robert Fulton not only dreamed of future technologies, he implemented them.
Fulton is best known for his steamboat the Clermont, which proved the practicability of steam propulsion for river transportation. Despite several obstacles—including the opposition of many people who were frightened by the “fire-breathing monster with flailing fins” (paddlewheels), and one clergyman who declared it to be the beast from the Bible’s book of Revelation—Fulton’s creation began regular service on the North River, now the Hudson, between New York and Albany in September 1807. That achievement alone assured Fulton a place in the history books, but more was to come.
Before turning his attention to commercial maritime design, Fulton had been interested in naval warfare. Prior to the Clermont, he conducted experiments with a submarine prototype he called a “plunging boat,” and he invented a device that could cut the cables of ships at anchor. When the War of 1812 began, Fulton happily refocused on naval warfare. He worked on a large submarine and a torpedo-firing harpoon gun before ultimately building the Demologos (Greek for “word of the people”), arguably his most innovative design.
Realizing the advantages steam propulsion could give a warship, but recognizing that the paddlewheels—exposed along the sides—would be vulnerable to enemy gunfire, Fulton solved the problem by giving the Demologos two hulls—one containing the boiler and the other the engine—with a large paddlewheel mounted in between. This arrangement protected the paddlewheel, but Fulton did not stop there; he made the outer sides of the hulls nearly five feet thick to protect the ship’s weapons. The end result—at 2,455 tons, 150 feet long, and 65 feet wide, was a heavily armed, well protected mobile fortress, well-suited for harbor defense.
Unfortunately, this innovative ship—delivered to the Navy in June 1816—was not completed in time to participate in the war, and Fulton had died more than a year before. To honor him, the Navy re-named the ship Fulton, but there the honor stopped. With the exception of one day of active service, when she took President James Monroe on a cruise of New York Harbor, the Fulton was relegated to duties as a barracks ship at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. On 4 June 1829, her ignominy ended when part of the gunpowder stores kept on board for firing salutes proved defective and exploded, destroying the ship and killing 24 of her crew.
Despite the inauspicious nature of the ship’s career and her ill-fated end, Fulton’s pioneering invention had ushered in a new mode of warship propulsion, and with its thick wooden hide it also anticipated the coming age of armored warships. His twin-hulled design—a catamaran implementation that at the time seemed bizarre—would later be employed in submarine rescue ships, and newer variations have more recently appeared in some of the Navy’s newest ships, the Independence-class littoral combat ships and the high speed vessel Swift (HSV-2). Fulton’s vision was no less imaginative than Jules Verne’s or that of other writers whose imaginations gave them glimpses of the future; but where they used a crystal ball, Robert Fulton used the drawing board, turning dreams into reality and ultimately changing the world.