Book Description

Excerpt from Robert Fulton Engineer and Artist, His Life and Works Some excuse ought perhaps to be offered for adding to the number of the biographies of Robert Fulton; I can only plead that, so far as I have observed, not one of them is altogether fair and impartial. Fulton's American biographers have credited him with greater achievements than the facts warrant, while English writers too often have dismissed him contemptuously as a charlatan, a filcher of other men's brains, or even as a traitor. In order to judge between these conflicting views, I have endeavoured by research and by the collation of recently published materials, to get at the really important facts about Fulton and his inventions - facts which the lapse of time has helped to bring into their true perspective - and present them with sympathy, but without bias and without petty national feeling. Indeed the latter should never have existed, for Fulton was, if anything, cosmopolitan; born a British subject in a British colony, the seed-time of his life was spent in England, the fruition took place in France, and the harvest was reaped in his native America. That harvest was the introduction of navigation by steam on a commercial basis in the Western hemisphere. In the present year, when we are celebrating the centenary of its introduction into Europe, it may not be unprofitable to trace the steps which led to these far-reaching results. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.