Robert Fulton: Savant of Steamboats and Submarines

Robert Fulton is widely recognized as the inventor of the first practical steamboat. However, there is much more to the story of one of America's greatest inventors. He was a world-class painter who studied under Benjamin West, known in England as "the American Raphael." He also invented the first practical submarine, one he named the Nautilus, offering it first to Napoleon Bonaparte and subsequently to the British. And Fulton invented the first "torpedo," a term he coined for what was esse...