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 revolve upon its axis, nor move about the sun.  In 1878, when Edison’s phonograph was being exhibited to the eminent scientists of the Institute, one rushed wrathfully down the aisle and seizing by the collar the man who manipulated the instrument, cried out, “Wretch, we are not to be made dupes of by a ventriloquist!” So it is readily understandable that after being referred to the Institute, Fulton and his project disappeared for a long time.