Robert Fulton

1765–1815

Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who helped make commercial steam navigation successful. After working as an artist and engineer in Europe, he experimented with canals, weapons and a submarine called Nautilus. In partnership with Robert Livingston, Fulton launched the North River Steamboat in 1807, providing regular service between New York and Albany. He did not invent the steamboat, but his business and engineering system demonstrated its economic viability.

Fulton appears occasionally in historical fiction about the early industrial United States and the transformation of river travel, though no single major novel has defined him as a character. His experiments offer a natural story of invention, finance and repeated failure before commercial success. Fiction should avoid the older heroic claim that one individual created steam navigation from nothing.

In Julian Stockwin’s Invasion, with Napoleon’s army and invasion craft concentrated around Boulogne, Kydd is withdrawn from normal fleet service to work with the American inventor Robert Fulton.

Series

Series featuring Robert Fulton (1 series)

Thomas Kydd in Order

by Julian Stockwin 27 books 4.2

The Thomas Kydd series follows a Guildford wig-maker pressed into the Royal Navy in 1793 and traces his rise from inexperienced landsman to admiral. Across twenty-seven novels, Kydd learns the work of the lower deck, crosses to the quarterdeck and commands increasingly important ships during the French Revolutionary…

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