"Robert Fulton: Between Art and Engineering"

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

Robert Fulton went to England in 1786 at the age of twenty-one to study art with Benjamin West, the most famous American artist of the day. After several reasonably successful years with West in London, Fulton went to Devon to paint a series of commissioned portraits, and that marked the beginning of a substantial transformation for Fulton. In six years of traveling through the English midlands, he converted from artist to engineer, a title he claimed in his first publication, A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation (1796). The purpose of this research project is to investigate Fulton's conversion, to understand why he gave up a promising career in art to devote the rest of his life to engineering and invention, culminating in his widespread recognition as the inventor of the steamboat. Fulton has attracted many biographies since his death in 1815, but most fall victim to the nationalism that so often engulfs the stories of "heroic inventors." Americans have been most assiduous and hagiographic in telling Fulton's story, but they have done most of their research in the United States and much less in Europe, where Fulton had spent almost two decades. Europeans have generally neglected Fulton in favor of their own claimants for the title of inventor of the steamboat. The working hypothesis behind this research project is that Fulton's experience in the English midlands in the mid-1790s was the formative period in his professional and personal development, the time when he embraced a view of technology that was flourishing in the British Industrial Revolution and also when his political and ideological views of the world began to develop. These factors and others shaped the rest of Fulton's remarkable career, and only research in local records and artifacts can fully capture what he might have experienced. The results can shed light on the continuing relationship between art and engineering and the motivations that spur creative people to embrace engineering careers. The results of this research will eventually be published as part of a full length biography of Fulton. The biography should have broad appeal well beyond historians of science; it should be of substantial interest to art historians, inventors, engineers, architects, and others.