ded financially. He determined
to go to Europe to study--if possible under his fellow Pennsylvanian,
Benjamin West, then rising into fame in London. The West and the Fulton
families had been intimate, and Fulton hoped that West would take him as
a pupil. First buying a farm for his mother with a part of his savings,
he sailed for England in 1786, with forty guineas in his pocket.
West received him not only as a pupil but as a guest in his house and
introduced him to many of his friends. Again Fulton succeeded, and in
1791 two of his portraits were exhibited at the Royal Academy, and the
Royal Society of British Artists hung four paintings by him.

Then came the commission which changed the course of Fulton's life.
His work had attracted the notice of Viscount Courtenay, later Earl
of Devon, and he was invited to Devonshire to paint that nobleman's
portrait. Here he met Francis, third Duke of Bridgewater, the father
of the English canal system, and his hardly less famous engineer, James
Brindley, and also Earl Stanhope, a restless, inquiring spirit. Fulton
the mechanic presently began to dominate Fulton the artist. He studied
canals, invented a means of sawing marble in the quarries, improved
the wheel for spinning flax, invented a machine for making rope, and a
method of raising canal boats by inclined planes instead of locks. What
money he made from these inventions we do not know, but somewhat later
(1796) he speaks hopefully of an improvement in tanning. This same year
he published a pamphlet entitled "A Treatise on the Improvement of
Canal Navigation", copies of which were sent to Napoleon and President
Washington.

Fulton went to France in 1797. To earn money he painted several
portraits and a panorama of the Burning of Moscow. This panorama,
covering the walls of a circular hall built especially for it, became
very popular, and Fulton painted another. In Paris he formed a warm
friendship with that singular American, Joel Barlow, soldier, poet,
speculator, and diplomatist, and his wife, and for seven years lived in
their house.

The long and complicated story of Fulton's sudden interest in torpedoes
and submarine boats, his dealings with the Directory and Napoleon and
with the British Admiralty does not belong here. His experiments and his
negotiations with the two Governments occupied the greater part of his
time for the years between 1797 and 1806. His expressed purpose was
to make an engine of war so terrible