oughly practical steamboat at Dundee. 'Tis a
vexed question, and perhaps it is well enough to say that Fitch first
scented the commercial possibilities of steam navigation, while Fulton
actually developed them--the one "raised" the fox, while the other was in
at the death.

To trace a great idea to the actual birth is apt to be obstructive to
national pride. It is even said that the Chinese of centuries ago
understood the value of the screw-propeller--for inventing which our
adoptive citizen Ericsson stands in bronze on New York's Battery.

From the time of Robert Fulton, at any rate, dates the commercial usage of
the steamboat. Others had done the pioneering--Fitch on the Delaware,
James Rumsey on the Potomac, William Longstreet on the Savannah, Elijah
Ormsley on the waters of Rhode Island, while Samuel Morey had actually
traveled by steamboat from New Haven to New York. Fulton's craft was not
materially better than any of these, but it happened to be launched on

----that tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

But the flood of that tide did not come to Fulton without long waiting and
painstaking preparation. He was the son of an Irish immigrant, and born in
Pennsylvania in 1765. To inventive genius he added rather unusual gifts
for drawing and painting; for a time followed the calling of a painter of
miniatures and went to London to study under Benjamin West, whom all
America of that day thought a genius scarcely second to Raphael or Titian.
He was not, like poor Fitch, doomed to the narrowest poverty and shut out
from the society of the men of light and learning of the day, for we find
him, after his London experience, a member of the family of Joel Barlow,
then our minister to France. By this time his ambition had forsaken art
for mechanics, and he was deep in plans for diving boats, submarine
torpedoes, and steamboats. Through various channels he succeeded in
getting his plan for moving vessels with steam, before Napoleon--then
First Consul--who ordered the Minister of Marine to treat with the
inventor. The Minister in due time suggested that 10,000 francs be spent
on experiments to be made in the Harbor of Brest. To this Napoleon
assented, and sent Fulton to the Institute of France to be examined as to
his fitness to conduct the tests. Now the Institute is the most learned
body in all France. In 1860 one of its members wrote a book to prove that
the earth does not re