Fulton, Lewis & Crockett, Oh My!

Three great men who made our world.

by Rod D. Martin
August 17, 2014

This is a big weekend for historic births and essential Americans.

On this day in 1807, an American farm boy named Robert Fulton changed the world as thoroughly as the Wright Brothers would a century later by sailing, nay steaming his Clermont (aka North River) from Greenwich Village to Albany and back again. Bystanders were terrified as the ship's great engine belched smoke and fire, but in the words of one of the passengers on the return trip down the Hudson, "From every point on the river whence the boat, announced by the smoke of its chimney, could be seen, we saw the inhabitants collect; they waved their handkerchiefs and hurrahed for Fulton."

Naysayers had derided the ship as "Fulton's Folly."  Earlier, Fulton had proposed steam propulsion to the Emperor Napoleon as a technological leap over his foes.  Napoleon famously replied, "You would make a ship sail by lighting a bonfire under its deck? I have no time for such nonsense."

Fortunately Robert Livi…