Home > Industrial Revolution > Robert Fulton Biography

Born November 14, 1765

Little Britain, Pennsylvania

Died February 24, 1815

New York, New York

American engineer, inventor

"What, sir? You would make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I pray you excuse me. I have no time to listen to such nonsense.

—Napoléon Bonaparte, emperor of France, reacting to Fulton's proposal for a steamboat.

Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who developed the first commercially successful steamboat, or a boat powered by steam, thereby transforming the transportation and travel industries and speeding up the Industrial Revolution, a period of fast-paced economic change that began in Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century.

As a child, Fulton enjoyed building mechanical devices, taking on such projects as rockets...